From the desk of Mike Gardner, AMADC President

That’s the Spirits! Major AMA Updates You Don’t Want to Miss!

Whiskey Tasting… Chocolate Tasting… a Rooftop View of DC… That’s how AMADC plans to welcome the summer with our largest networking event yet. Mark your calendar for Tuesday, June 14th and join us for our Sweet Spirits of Summer Soiree! We’ll see you on the rooftop of Jack Rose as the sun goes down and we taste a series of special whiskeys, sample chocolates from area chocolatiers, enjoy great food, and walk away with free raffle items (yes, giveaways on us!) including baskets of bourbons from local liquor purveyors, a vacation week at the beach, and lots of other prizes!

In other news…
This past weekend, Regan Lamb (our President-Elect), Brent Hayhurst (our VP of Sponsorship), and I took a trip to Chicago to join up with about 400 other AMA Chapter leaders representing nearly all of the 79 chapters that make up the American Marketing Association (AMA). This annual event is known as the AMA Leadership Summit, and this year’s theme was “Converge.” It’s normally a lively event, (imagine the decibel level of being in a room with over 400 type A marketers representing virtually every industry in the country) but this year was even more exciting, as Russ Klein — AMA’s CEO, and Jill Herriott — AMA’s Chief Experience Officer revealed significant plans for the wider organization, which I would like to share with you.

That’s the Spirits! Major AMA Updates You Don’t Want to Miss!

For the last 18 months, The AMA has embarked on a journey of transformation and has been busy turning answers into actions. For example, and for the first time in its history, Russ and the team created an intellectual agenda identifying the topics that would be most relevant to marketers at any level of their professional experience. The seven topics are discussed in The 7 Big Problems Facing Marketers Today (featured in the April issue of Marketing News). As a result of this effort, conferences, articles, publications, and marketing studies will all be streamlined to put a greater focus on the things that impact marketers the most within these topics. While this seems like a standard practice for most organizations, it hadn’t been our association’s policy.

Secondly, Russ and team implemented an overall reorganization of its staff to enable the Association to operationalize around one important idea: Making the Marketer of today the Association’s core focus. They changed the name of what was previously called the AMA International Headquarters, to the AMA Support Center. It is the home base of the Association’s leadership, and they even moved their physical address to a new location outfitted with 25 temporary offices that are available to use for chapters visiting Chicago and needing a place to call home for a bit. They introduced a Chief Alliance Officer whose core responsibility will be to maximize partnerships and sponsorship opportunities for chapters and are working with selected chapters to pilot new programs. A newly formed community outreach program is being piloted with The United Way, so that marketers will have the chance to give back to the community. That program is expected to roll out in North America in the upcoming months. Last month, AMADC participated in a new partnership pilot and due to its success; AMA will launch it in several of the country’s major markets.

Third, with the addition of Jill Herriott as Chief Experience Officer, Jill has the responsibility of making improvements to anything that touches you — the marketer. Launching quickly is an effort to rethink and rebuild our current membership packages. In the upcoming membership drive, 5 Chapters were picked to test new membership pricing packages. Each market will report the results of the tests and by the end of the year the AMA Support Center will roll out better membership tiers based on this effort likely before the end of 2016.

Fourth, Jill and her team, at the direction of Russ Klein, began a rebranding effort to modernize the look, feel, and voice of the New AMA. On Friday evening, they revealed a new brand identity. In the upcoming weeks, you will receive a communication about this important effort discussing how AMA plans to stay ahead of the curve and position our Association as the most relevant voice shaping marketing around the world. In our current structure, AMA has 79 Professional Chapters each one using a unique identity. In the next 18 months, every chapter will rebrand itself under one AMA identity. On May 16th, AMA will officially sunset it’s current logo, and will introduce our new brand publicly. Currently, 10 Chapters have elected to be early adopters of the new brand. Our neighboring chapter- Baltimore is one of those early adopters. AMADC will adopt the new “one” AMA brand in time, but at this point, we will likely continue to move ahead with our new local branding and cut over once we better understand how the national rollout of the new “one” AMA establishes itself and we garner the best practices of how to do that from the early adopter chapters.

In conclusion, I’m pleased to let you know that as of this month AMADC is now the third largest chapter of the AMA! Our retention numbers have increased significantly, and the fiscal state of the Chapter is in very good health. With all the positives we are well poised to support this exciting national rebranding effort, and take a leadership role in helping to shape the tomorrow of the leading marketing organization in the world.

Thanks for being a part of this incredibly exciting time. Hope to see you on the roof of Jack’s in June having a sip of somethin’.

Happy Marketing!

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That’s the Spirits! Major AMA Updates You Don’t Want to Miss!

That’s the Spirits! Major AMA Updates You Don’t Want to Miss!

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