The Association of National Advertisers, amid a record crowd at its current Masters of Marketing Conference, announced plans to get bigger still on Friday by combining with the Business Marketing Association, effective Nov. 30.
The BMA, with more than 2,500 members nationwide in 17 chapters, is the largest business-to-business marketing association in the U.S., the ANA said in a statement. Of the ANA's 630 member companies, representing 30,000 marketers,160 companies are B-to-B marketers.
The move follows the ANA's announcement in May that it would merge with the Brand Activation Association, continuing a bit of consolidation in the well-populated marketing trade organization space.
The ANA is seeing plenty of organic growth too. The Masters of Marketing conference in Orlando this week has drawn a record crowd of 2,800 attendees, according to organizers. That's more than triple what the group drew to the same conference in 2008 just after the onset of the financial crisis, and up more than tenfold from the 250 attendees in 2001, when Mr. Liodice took over.
The ANA's board, as expected, elected Tony Pace, global chief marketing officer at Subway, as its new chairperson. He succeeds Walmart U.S. CMO Stephen Quinn, who's stepping down after two years in the post.
Typically, chairs of the group serve for two years and are succeeded by the vice chair. The board also voted to elect Procter & Gamble Co. Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard as vice chair.
The group's meeting this week in Orlando, while it's had somewhat less lavish giveaways for attendees than in some past years, had arguably the biggest door prize in its history during a Friday breakfast hosted by the U.S. Postal Service and MRM//McCann. One attendee -- Alma Salazar, senior consumer marketing manager of Align Technology -- won $1 million in free direct-mail marketing services from USPS and MRM after finding a winning ticket under her chair. The only condition is that she must come back to report next year on how the campaign worked.
