Having traversed many goal posts in its relatively short life, MMA has been successful in building relevance, resilience, and readiness in the local Indonesian market. It has done so while keeping pace with the global marketing transformation and also actively helping define it. The industry body has established itself as the most definitive mouthpiece for the marketing fraternity in the bustling Indonesian consumer landscape, under the leadership of its dynamic country head, Shanti Tolani.
In this interview with Amit Bapna, Ms Tolani holds forth on many things: her journey at MMA, the key highlights of her tenure, the logic behind the industry body’s newly minted brand identity and how it makes business sense for the new age marketing community. She also gives a preview of what to look out for in 2026 under the aegis of MMA Indonesia.
Let us start with the recently unveiled global repositioning of MMA – how does it benefit the marketing community?
In October 2025, the MMA formally decided to reposition itself. The journey started in 2003 as the ‘Mobile Marketing Association’, then became ‘MMA Global’ (in 2018), and recently it was rebranded to ‘Marketing + Media Alliance’ in 2025. This change also marks its evolution into a full-spectrum marketing leadership body.
This rebranding was driven by the need to reflect the industry body’s current positioning – as a global alliance of marketers, media leaders, agencies, and technology partners focused on advancing marketers’ ability to create greater value.
Unboxing the new identity: The rebranded identity aligns with the organisation’s name, branding, and purpose, along with its core mission of integrating innovation, technology, data, creativity, and business growth to empower modern marketers.
It also helps move the organisational positioning from one of mere advocacy to making it into an action-oriented alliance that delivers collaborative applied models, actionable frameworks, and research-based insights, all leading to measurable business outcomes.
Collaborative approach: It is becoming increasingly clear that success in today’s dynamic world is a function of a broader ecosystem — comprising media owners, agencies, data scientists, and technology partners. The repositioning brings to the fore the collaborative approach, which is the need of the hour. This collaborative approach reinforces MMA’s long-standing commitment to solution-oriented progress.
Future Readiness: The newly coined platform ‘Marketing + Media Alliance’ is future-ready and is aimed at helping marketers also become ready for the future by helping them anticipate change, apply data and AI responsibly, and turn innovation into sustainable growth.
By representing the full marketing value chain, with applied learning, peer collaboration, and leadership development as key pillars, MMA aims to be the beacon of the future.
How does the newly coined MMA agenda simplify the role of the CMO?
MMA’s job is to help CMOs, CEOs, Directors, and Industry Leaders by making the complexity of data, innovation and digital disruption more manageable – by turning it into structured, measurable programmes aligned with business growth. MMA also ensures that its role becomes more about orchestrating growth with clarity, helping “make marketing matter more”. The idea is to enable marketers to drive innovation, enduring business value and stronger consumer engagement in an increasingly dynamic and digitally connected world.
MMA features top-tier thought leaders, industry experts, and domain specialists spanning diverse sectors, including brands, marketers, agencies, media firms, publishers, telecommunications, advertising, and marketing technology companies.
Let us look at your journey with MMA since 2018. When you look back, what have been some of the milestones in this journey of making MMA Indonesia a representative powerhouse of the local marketing community?
My journey with MMA started about 7 years ago with a clear mandate: “to build a credible industry leadership platform that would anchor the global MMA agenda within the local market.”
A key task was establishing the Indonesia Local Council to bring together CEOs, CMOs, Chairpersons, and Directors from across sectors and help define the direction of marketing and advertising, collectively, in one of the world’s fastest-growing digital economies.
From the outset, the focus was on translating global standards into locally relevant ones, so that the frameworks, research, and insights shared globally by the MMA network could be applied meaningfully to local market realities.
Today, MMA Indonesia has established itself as a trusted and well-represented industry body, with strong partnerships across brands, agencies, publishers, and technology leaders.
<Link: mmaglobal.com/local-councils/Indonesia>
Building flagship properties: The last few years have also been spent building marquee MMA properties like MMA IMPACT Indonesia, SMARTIES Awards, Ramadan Insights Conference, Modern Marketing Talks, and Executive Dialogue Roundtables. These initiatives have been bringing together senior industry leaders on a common industry platform to exchange ideas, share data, and co-create solutions on key marketing challenges such as AI adoption, consumer data intelligence, media measurement, and marketing effectiveness.
Empowering local marketers: Helping the collective evolution of Indonesia’s marketing leadership. This journey has evolved from awareness-building to measurable impact and from convening thought leadership to driving enterprise-level capability.
Under the MMA’s philosophy of ‘lean into the future and lead the marketing industry’, we have kept a razor-sharp focus on empowering Indonesian marketers to think boldly, act collaboratively, and deliver sustainable growth in a data-driven, AI-enabled future.
Indonesia is one of the strong global markets with a thriving consumer base, and yet it is also steeped in local culture and complexity. What key skill sets would you attribute to MMA Indonesia’s (and your) success in building it as the most powerful industry collaboration of marketers in the country?
Versatility and Credibility: Having operated in multiple sectors enhances my ability to speak the language of brand, agency, tech and even regulatory stakeholders, which is essential when convening the broad ecosystem of MMA.
Cultural Fluency: My India-Indonesia cross-cultural exposure and MMA being part of a USA based organization, provides the required sensitivity to local market dynamics and at the same time, being able to link them to global perspectives.
Localising the Global Standards: The familiarity with the local culture and people enables me with the unique ability to bridge global marketing standards with local market realities. This, in turn, helps make MMA’s international agenda credible for Indonesian practitioners.
Stakeholder Management: From global projects to stakeholder management, my experiences align well with MMA’s whole-ecosystem approach. In effect, this mosaic of experiences means my leadership standards of trust and sincerity are positioned to lead MMA Indonesia’s agenda.
Agnostic Insights: Working across cross-cultural forums helps me layer a broad perspective on business challenges, consumer behaviour and communications strategy, thus enabling creative ideas to frame MMA programmes that resonate across categories.
Flagship events of MMA in Indonesia & what to look out for in 2026
- Impact Forum: https://mmaglobal.com/event/mma-impact-indonesia-2025
- SMARTIES Awards: https://mmaglobal.com/smarties/awards/programs/indonesia/jury
- Ramadan Insights Conference: 2024 Agenda | 2023 Agenda
What to look out for in 2026
Elevated collaboration between local Indonesian marketers, global MMA research and other APAC markets, turning Indonesia into a regional hub.
Deeper emphasis on key themes that are relevant to the marketing universe – AI and analytics, Customer relationships based on brand value and brand love, Data intelligence, Creativity and storytelling, Localising marketing growth frameworks.
Increased emphasis on capability building via education, frameworks, and technology adoption – to keep pace with the massive future digital growth in Indonesia (projected at ~ US$360 Billion by 2030)
Stronger collaboration and integration of global MMA think-tanks with Indonesian market applicability, giving Indonesian CMOs frameworks they can also deploy.
Expansion of the SMARTIES recognition programme in Indonesia, driving not just creativity but measurable business impact via data/ROI-driven judging.
