Marketing has a habit of looking backwards. Ask most marketers when the industry was at its best and they’ll point to the 1960s through to the 1980s. Big budgets, big creative, long lunches.
Look forwards not back
It’s a comfortable story. It’s also, as Mark Given pointed out in his first speech as President of ISBA last week, not a true one. That era worked if you were a man. It didn’t if you were a woman, or if you went to a state school. Measurement took six weeks. Now it’s instant.
Mark’s point wasn’t nostalgia. It was the opposite. He argued there’s never been a better time to work in marketing, not despite the disruption but because of it. The tools are better, the feedback is faster, and the range of people now shaping the profession is wider than it’s ever been. The industry’s problem isn’t the moment we’re in. It’s the confidence to claim it.
I’ve been making a similar case since Cannes this year: that marketing is heading towards a new golden age, one built not on budgets and lunches but on growth, trust and business impact. The question worth asking is how that actually gets built. And the honest answer is: not by any one organisation alone.
Stronger together
That’s the part of Mark’s speech that stuck with us most. ISBA is now led by two Fellows of The Marketing Society, Mark as President and Simon Michaelides as Director General. That’s not a coincidence worth glossing over. It’s a sign of something we believe strongly at The Marketing Society:
"The future of our profession gets built faster, and better, when organisations with shared ambitions choose to work together rather than compete for the same territory."
Sophie Devonshire
The Marketing Society is for marketers who mean business. Our ambition has always been to showcase the power of marketing to the wider business world, not just to marketers themselves. That ambition doesn’t shrink when other bodies pursue something similar. It grows. Every time ISBA pushes for marketing’s voice in the boardroom, every time another trade body makes the commercial case for brand and trust, that’s the same argument landing from a different direction. The more places it lands, the harder it is to ignore.
This matters because the stakes have changed. Marketing’s influence in the boardroom has been shrinking, not growing, even as the tools available to marketers have multiplied. CMOs are often left owning the technology stack while being excluded from the decisions that actually shape how customers experience a brand. That’s not a marketing problem to solve quietly from within the function. It’s a business problem, and business problems get solved by building coalitions, not by one organisation making the case in isolation.
Building marketing's next golden age
There’s also a sharper, more urgent reason for marketers to pay attention now. As more customers turn to AI for recommendations and advice, the brands that win are the ones with strong, consistent, trusted reputations. Trust isn’t a soft metric anymore. It’s a growth lever, arguably the growth lever. Building that trust, at scale, across an economy, is not a job for any single company or any single professional body. It’s a job for an industry that has decided to pull in the same direction.
So here’s what we’re asking of our members. Don’t look to a recent history that was never as golden as it felt for the people telling the story. Look to a future where marketing drives growth because it’s trusted, backed by evidence, and represented in the room where the decisions get made. That future is more likely to arrive if The Marketing Society, ISBA and organisations like them keep choosing partnership over competition.
We’re glad to see that choice being made. We intend to keep making it too.
