After a long week of assignments, you wanted to do something different. Instead of just going through the motions, you decided that it was time to do something to move your career forward. Whether you work in marketing – or not yet, you studied, took courses to upskill and passionately analyzed commercials to see if you can figure out who the target market is. Your friends quiz you and while you don't always get it right, you're confident that you can pinpoint the target audience much better than they can.
That's when you tapped on your email icon and saw a message about CMA Marketing Week 2026. At first, you thought, I can't afford to attend this, but after you started going through the email – you realized you were wrong.
You click through to the agenda. The first session catches your eye: a thought leadership panel on Tuesday called The Creative Autopsy. That one seems interesting because it had all these marketing leaders discussing why great creative didn't work. How could it hurt to learn how to recognize that an idea wasn't going to work?
This learning session features guest speakers from four of the CMA’s councils, including the Creativity Council, the Brand Council, the PR Council and the Media Council. The CMA Councils actively produce content such as blogs, videos and more to provide thought leadership and insights to help marketers prepare as the profession continues to evolve.
Free LearningAs you browsed through the website, you saw learning sessions on shaping influencer marketing, using generative AI and more. You signed up immediately. You noticed that all these events were virtual, which meant you could attend. But they were also all free. Strange. In this economy, nothing's free – and yet, the learning sessions during CMA Marketing Week are. When's the last time you saw something you wanted that you could get for free? As you review the topics, you think about how the knowledge and wisdom shared by these prominent marketing leaders could help you on your journey. You have a moment of clarity – you realize that there's more you could be doing and it all starts with how you see yourself and what you want to accomplish.
You take a moment, sitting there staring at your phone while your friends continue talking and laughing about things you can't focus on right now. You start to imagine yourself as one of the speakers at a sold-out event. You're just standing there in front of all these well-dressed people and everyone's waiting for you to speak. You're about to tell the audience how you built your company from the ground up. Just before you do, you snap out of it and come back to reality. That moment was so vivid and although the thought of speaking in front of hundreds of marketers was overwhelming, you imagined yourself as a successful entrepreneur – your own boss. You just needed to get your foot in the door and start working at a company that would allow you to grow into the professional you wanted to be.
The more you thought about it, you had to be part of the event. After all, this was the business you wanted to grow and evolve with. The only way to do that was to get involved, sign up for some free learning sessions, volunteer or buy a ticket to an event and see it in person. Jenny Han once wrote, in her book The Summer I Turned Pretty, "Moments, when lost, can't be found again. They're just gone."
CMA Marketing Week 2026 runs May 4-8. The learning sessions are free. Don't let this be a moment that gets away.
To sign up for CMA Marketing Week 2026 events, be sure to create a free CMA account. If your school or business is a member, sign up with that email address to access member benefits.
Want more marketing career tips? Engage with us LinkedIn or sign-up at CMA NXT to unlock free access to our exclusive video platform and subscribe to our biweekly e-newsletter.
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