2027 MSI Forum Call for Content
MSI Forum 2027 will bring together leading marketing academics and industry practitioners to examine the emerging issues reshaping marketing and the evidence marketers need to navigate them.
This year’s theme is “The Future of Marketing” and will encompass both the impact of AI and the role of established tools and frameworks as our marketing environment evolves. How will AI agents change how consumers discover and choose brands, how marketing decisions are made, and how insights and creative are produced. What is the role of customer relationships and traditional marketing tactics? How important is branding in an environment mediated and personalized by AI? The 2027 Forum will explore what the latest evidence tells us about these shifts and the questions they raise for the future of marketing. The 2027 Forum will explore these developments across five areas:
Topics
- From Generative to Agentic AI: The New Marketing Operating Model
AI is moving from assisting individual tasks to increasingly coordinating workflows and making decisions across analytics, research, media, creative, and customer experience. Where are these systems actually improving outcomes? Which decisions can be delegated to AI, and where is human judgment still essential? What new capabilities, processes, and governance will marketing organizations need?
- The Consumer Journey: Search, Discovery, and Decision-Making
The customer journey is well established and understood by all marketers. However, AI is becoming an intermediary in how consumers discover, evaluate, and choose brands. As search shifts toward generated answers and AI assistants take a greater role in research and decision-making, how will the customer journey change? How do brands earn visibility and recommendation in AI environments, and what will influence consumer trust and choice?
- Measuring Marketing in an Increasingly Automated World
As platforms automate more decisions around targeting, creative, optimization, and customer interactions, understanding what actually drives performance becomes more difficult and more important. How should experimentation, CLV, MMM, and other approaches evolve? How can marketers distinguish improvements in long-term customer value from incremental impact?
- Synthetic Data and AI-Generated Insight: What Can We Trust?
Synthetic respondents, AI-generated data, and AI-assisted research are moving rapidly into practice, shifting the question from what is possible to what is reliable. Where have these approaches demonstrated validity, and where do they fall short? How should marketers establish ground truth, detect bias, and determine when human respondents and researchers remain essential?
- Brand Building and Creativity
Companies have invested substantially in their brands through advertising, social media presence, and creative designs. Generative AI has made it possible to create and personalize content at unprecedented speed and scale. But what does that mean for effectiveness and long-term brand building? How do consumers respond to AI-generated creative, and what happens to differentiation when everyone
Across these areas, the Forum will pair rigorous academic research with practitioner perspectives and interactive discussion, with an emphasis on evidence over speculation. Conversations throughout the event will also help inform MSI’s Research Priorities for the coming year, identifying the questions where new research can have the greatest impact on marketing practice.
Methods and Disciplines Welcome
- Empirical modeling and causal inference
- Machine learning and simulation
- Experimental and qualitative research
- Field studies and industry applications
- And contributions from marketing, behavioral science, economics, data science, information systems, and related fields.
We welcome all rigorous approaches.
Who Should Submit
We invite submissions from:
- Academic researchers with theoretical, empirical, or methodological contributions
- Industry leaders with strategic insights, use cases, or lessons from the field
- Collaborative teams combining research and practice
Submissions should focus on front-edge developments, not just established practices—highlighting what’s emerging, evolving, or under debate.
Submission Details
Submit a 2–4 page abstract or proposal by December 16, 2026. Include:
- The central idea or question
- Method or approach
- Key findings or implications for marketing theory or practice
Each accepted submission will be featured in an interactive session with time for audience discussion and Q&A. The Forum is built to spark real-time knowledge exchange and shape future research and strategy.
Submissions open: November 4, 2026
Deadline: December 16, 2026
Decisions announced: mid-February 2027
For any questions, please contact sara@thearf.org.