The Advertising Research Foundation announced Friday that it will absorb the Marketing Science Institute, a Cambridge, Mass.-based nonprofit member organization that conducts marketing research.

ARF is a New York City-based group with 400 members. In a statement, the group said MSI will become a division of ARF effective Jan. 1, 2021.

MSI will retain its legacy mission of bridging knowledge between academia and business, according to the statement. ARF CEO Scott McDonald will sit on the new MSI Board of Trustees, while MSI will have two seats on the ARF Board of Directors.

"The work of the ARF and MSI have always paralleled each other and in recent years increasingly overlapped," McDonald said. "The two organizations also share a core tenet of being relentlessly empirical and using science as our True North. That is what made this integration so appealing. Now we can jointly pursue a common mission and provide both ARF and MSI members with access to a greatly expanded database and expertise network."

The MSI division within the ARF will be headed by an academic executive director and by a managing director who will be named at a later date.

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