New MASB CEO Determined to Elevate Role of Marketing

Joanna Seddon
Newly appointed MASB CEO

Joanna Seddon's vision is marketing elevated to its rightful position. "We are the people responsible for the demand chain, which is growth. So why aren't marketers more respected in the boardroom? It's because of the lack of marketing accountability." Newly appointed as CEO of MASB, the Marketing Accountability Standards Board, Seddon shares its mission of redefining the role of the CMO by linking brand and marketing to financial and business impact and outcomes.

"We are delighted that Joanna Seddon has agreed to lead MASB," said David W. Stewart, MASB Chair. "She is a proven leader whose creativity, energy and passion for linking marketing, finance and analytics have substantially influenced marketing and the business practices of numerous organizations. We look forward to Joanna's expanding the work and influence of MASB and the role of marketing in business success."

MASB is the official organization for standards, best practices, and everything to do with measurement of brand and marketing and their financial impact. It offers marketing metric certification and represents the U.S. in developing ISO global brand evaluation standards. It produces the Common Language Marketing Dictionary and the multimedia Finance in Marketing Library and recently published The Financial Value of Brands Imperative.

To Seddon, marketing accountability produces two results. "You get the right decisions made which gets companies growing faster, and it elevates the role of the marketing professional. MASB is about linking marketing to hard data and being able to demonstrate ROI so that it gets invested in - enabling marketing to promote growth, which is its job. That's why I'm committed to MASB and I believe in it. MASB is an organization all companies should be part of."

Seddon will continue as Managing Partner of Presciant, the brand consultancy she founded in 2020. With a doctorate from Oxford University, she is well known as a speaker and writer on brand strategy, brand valuation and marketing ROI issues. Her paper, "The Brand in the Boardroom," won the WPP top Atticus prize. A board member of the American Marketing Association, she revived and reinvented the Marketing Hall of Fame, chairing it for the past nine years. In 2021, she was awarded MASB's Margaret H. Blair Award for Marketing Accountability.

Her illustrious career in brand consulting includes co-founding Worldwide Strategy Consulting at FutureBrand in 2000 and creating the brand consulting practice of Millward Brown/Kantar. She then founded the global brand strategy consulting practice for Ogilvy, built it up and ran it for nearly 11 years before founding Presciant. She has conducted hundreds of brand valuations in just about every industry, including sports teams.

For more information on the Marketing Accountability Standards Board, visit themasb.org or contact [email protected].