ANZMAC are proud to partner with the Australian Marketing Institute (AMI) for ongoing strategic engagement with the marketing industry and beyond. ANZMAC and AMI also proudly sponsor the Applied Research Grants scheme since 2023 and endeavour to continue identifying and addressing research questions that matters to the industry.

Applications open: Monday 5 October 2026

Applications close: Monday 2 November 2026

Assessment and notification of outcomes: end of November 2026

Winners announced by AMI’s CEO: ANZMAC conference gala dinner, Wednesday 2 December 2026

To submit your application, please email: amianzmacgrants@ami.org.au

2026-2027 Priority Themes

• Marketing in an agent-mediated market: AI assistants now sit between the customer and the brand, running the search, doing the comparison and in some categories completing the purchase. Practitioners need evidence on how brands get found and recommended inside generated answers, what happens to price promotion and loyalty when the buyer is software, and how to measure visibility that never produces a click.
• Trust, authenticity and brand safety in a synthetic media environment: Synthetic images, voices and personas are cheap enough now to be everywhere, including in fraud that borrows real brands. Work is needed on how audiences detect and respond to AI-generated content, what disclosure actually does to trust, and how a brand protects itself when the impersonation is convincing.
• Marketing claims under regulatory scrutiny: Environmental claims, discount and pricing representations, influencer disclosure and manipulative interface design have all moved from guidance to enforcement. Useful research would show what a substantiated claim looks like in practice, and whether careful compliance costs a brand anything in persuasion.
• Marketing under sustained affordability pressure: Cost-of-living strain has lasted long enough to change habits rather than just budgets. Questions worth answering include how households now trade down and trade off, what discount dependence does to a brand over the longer term, and whether value messaging can be done without eroding price integrity.
• Inclusive and accessible markets: Inclusive and accessible markets: Ageing consumers, people with disability, culturally and linguistically diverse communities and Māori and First Nations customers remain poorly served by mainstream marketing. Proposals might address accessible design and communication, the commercial case for inclusion, or how organisations move past representation into service that works.
• Proving marketing’s contribution: Signal loss, retail media and AI search have broken the measurement chain many teams relied on. We welcome work connecting marketing activity to financial and social outcomes, separating short-term response from long-term brand effects, and building the evidence marketers need to hold their ground in the boardroom.

2026 AMI ANZMAC Research Priorities 2026-27

For further details and information on the scheme (eligibility, process, funding rules), 2026-AMI-ANZMAC-Research-Priorities-2026-27