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Episode 125

Where Did All the CMOs Go?

Only 40% of Fortune 500 marketing leaders actually hold the title Chief Marketing Officer. But average CMO tenure is now 4.3 years, up from last year. So is the CMO role really disappearing?

New research from Spencer Stuart challenges the "CMO decline" narrative everyone loves to share. This week, Elena and Angela explore why this story gained traction, what effective marketing leadership looks like today, and how first-time CMOs can stay relevant. Plus, they share which brands they'd love to lead for one year.

Topics Covered

• [01:00] Spencer Stuart's 2025 Fortune 500 CMO research findings

• [07:00] Only 40% of marketing leaders use the CMO title

• [10:00] Should CMOs handle roles beyond traditional marketing?

• [12:00] What effective marketing leadership looks like today

• [17:00] Biggest challenge facing first-time CMOs

• [22:00] How companies should treat the CMO role differently

Resources:

2025 Spencer Stuart Report

Today's Hosts

Elena Jasper

Chief Marketing Officer

Angela Voss

Chief Executive Officer

Transcript

Elena: I don't wanna be too harsh, but sometimes it does feel like marketing teams, we're not actually oriented to what's gonna drive the business. And if you're not, how are you gonna be a part of finance conversations?

Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research first podcast, dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions.

I'm Elena Jasper. I run the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co-host Angela Voss, the CEO of Marketing Architects.

Angela: Hello.

Elena: Hello. We're back with our thoughts on some recent marketing news, always trying to root our opinions and data research and what drives business results. Today we're talking about the state of the CMO role. We've all probably heard the narrative that the CMO role is in decline. Headlines talk about short tenures, disappearing seats at the leadership table, and companies eliminating the role altogether. It's easy to assume that maybe marketing's influence in the C-suite is fading. But is that really the full story? This week we're gonna talk about some new data that challenges that perception. So I'll kick us off like I always do with some research.

And this is from Spencer Stuart's 2025 report on Fortune 500 CMOs. It's titled CMOs Onward and Upward, and it's authored by Greg Welch, Richard Sanderson, and Al Dixon. Their latest research on Fortune 500 CMOs reveals that the role is evolving, not disappearing, and here's what the numbers say. Average CMO tenure is now 4.3 years. That's up slightly from last year, although it's still shorter than other C-suite roles, albeit it's not the shortest. 65% of CMOs who leave their roles go on to similar or more senior positions, 10% become CEOs. In fact, 37% of Fortune 500 CEOs actually have marketing experience in their career paths. 66% of Fortune 500 companies still have an enterprise wide CMO. That's down from 2023, but it's up from 2022. The drop often reflects company-wide strategies rather than marketing's declining relevance. CMO titles are evolving. Only 40% actually hold the title Chief Marketing Officer, which is kind of crazy. Others include titles like Chief Growth Officer, Chief Customer Officer, or combining roles like CMO plus communications. 58% of CMOs were promoted from within. 68% are in their first CMO role. So that shows some strong, you know, internal mobility as well as growth paths. So the takeaway from this is while the CMO title might be shifting or disappearing at some companies, the function itself is still there. It's increasingly strategic, and it's often the stepping stone to larger roles.

So let's start here: saying the CMO role is dying is not really being challenged. It's actually something that I used to say. I'm pretty sure we've in the past, written an article on it, even as an agency 'cause you just hear it so much, you just assume it must be true. So why do we think this narrative of the declining CMO has gained so much traction?

Angela: Yeah, I'm interested in your thoughts on this too. The way I view this, CMOs are often seen as directly responsible for things like brand perception, customer acquisition, revenue growth. You mentioned the multitude of titles that are forming, you know, these are high visibility areas, and so underperformance can quickly become a point of scrutiny. Marketing often requires time to build momentum. If we think about brand awareness, we think about loyalty. The shorter average tenure can create a perception that CMOs are maybe not given enough time to demonstrate value. And I think additionally marketing is an externally facing role, and CMOs are directly impacted by a lot of things, including external market shifts. Things like consumer preferences, economic fluctuations, let's all fix the economy. It should be easy enough, tech disruptions such as the rise of AI. And I think as a result, CMOs are often at the center of business transformation and media trends that leads to higher visibility and higher scrutiny. And short term results are sometimes the metric by which a CMO's success or failure is judged. Failure or not, it feels like that's sort of a reality that that role deals with.

Elena: Yeah, agreed. I think all those things are realities of the CMO role. I also think that maybe the narrative has gained traction because one, marketers, we're kind of known for sometimes believing in stories over data. So it's not super surprising that this got told at one point and then people catch on and keep sharing it. I know we had Dale Harrison on the podcast a couple weeks ago, and he was talking about where the term demand creation came from. And how essentially it was made up by someone who didn't wanna say brand. So they said demand creation. And now all of a sudden it's become a very common term used in marketing. It's been misapplied. So part of me thinks, well, you know, sometimes marketers, we do this, we love stories, so we grab onto a story and hang on. But I also think maybe it could be happening because I've noticed that marketing is really looked at differently in a lot of companies and looked at more negatively. And I don't know, this is me throwing out something without a lot of data, but it sometimes feels like marketing doesn't get a lot of respect, or they're not responsible for a lot within most companies, especially small businesses. Sometimes it can feel like marketing's, they really are the make it pretty department. They're not entirely accountable for revenue. So I think part of this too might just be that marketing in certain businesses truly drives revenue. It drives the business, but in others, it's harder to connect yourself to business impact. There needs to be more work done there. So I thought that also could be a reason why.

Angela: Agreed. Yeah, I think there's a lot to it. I should have the source for this and I don't, but I had read at one point that 3% of boards have marketing representation. If you just think about where the industry has been and how marketing has evolved over time, perhaps it was the make it pretty when we didn't have this surge of the data economy and all things digital and last touch attribution, and then it went into, let's measure everything to a level that was not healthy and drove a lot of short-termism. So there's been a swing of focus. I think that's been hard for marketers to get their hands around. And a lot of, I know we'll probably talk about this more later, but a lot of bias in this space as well, depending upon where you came from, how you grew up, how you think about marketing and its job. So it's tough. It's tough. Yeah.

Elena: Speaking of how we think about marketing, one thing that really surprised me from this report was only 40% of Fortune 500 marketing leaders are actually called the chief marketing officer.

Angela: Mm-hmm.

Elena: Speaking of rebranding things like brand into demand creation, it seems like at times we're rebranding marketing into growth or customer or communications. And do you think that this is an issue? Like does it say something about the credibility of the domain of marketing in general, or do you think it's not that big of a concern?

Angela: I think it's a symptom of broader confusion about marketing's role. Marketing is still often reduced to those performance driven tactics when in fact it should be kind of the cornerstone of that long-term brand growth. Titles are, I think, less important than whether the role is focused on driving distinctive brand assets and mental availability. We should probably be looking at the impact of marketing more than the title. Businesses all need growth, right? So I would say most are solving for that in some capacity of a role like the chief marketing Officer, chief growth, head of growth. I think it can get tricky though, is where you start to see things like head of customer acquisition or head of digital. And then head of brand, you know, they're all peers to some degree then all laddering into a CEO. To me, that seems harder to align a strategy around and not be caught in siloed thinking. And really orient your brand and ensure that from a marketing perspective you're doing right by the brand when you've got kind of those siloed activities happening in that capacity.

Elena: Especially we know from stuff like the multiplier effect that it really matters how these roles come together in marketing. It's not best practice to silo something like performance from brand. You're right when you have those separate titles. I wasn't even thinking about that, but I agree that's also, it could be challenging within a business. When your teams, I know that we've talked to some brands where they truly have completely separate teams that don't hardly interact with each other like they have the brand team. And they have the performance team. You can see how when they're supposed to work together to have the maximum impact, that might not be great. Yeah. I think the lack of the chief marketing officer title is a big issue because I think it does say something about how we think of marketing and chief marketing officer. That should mean Chief Growth Officer. It should mean Chief Communications officer. It should mean that they're focused on the customer. And I think when you're not, I don't wanna say not respecting the title. But when it's not used, it makes me wonder how much respect does marketing have within that company? And it might have come from the best of intentions, but I think that's a job we have to do as marketers instead of just blaming the companies or the boards or the CEOs. I think it's also marketing's job to make sure that we have the type of respect within companies where they wanna have a chief marketing officer and they can see what marketing represents.

But it seems like, 'cause you don't see that happening to Chief operating officers or chief technology officers. I mean maybe now we're adding in things like chief AI officer, but they haven't had that same issue of, again, it comes back to like brand versus demand creation. Literally having to rebrand what marketing means is kind of sad, a bummer. And it's become sort of a trend. I mean, when only 40% of the marketers actually are called CMOs, that's less than half. Doesn't seem positive. I know. Let's go a step further into that. And typically when we have these different titles, sometimes it is because they're handling more than the quote unquote marketing, like they might be handling product, comms, customer experience, sales. Do you think that combining general marketing with other roles, do you think that can help CMOs be more effective? Or is it diluting the impact that they can have?

Angela: Gosh, that's such a hard question 'cause I think it could be both. Benefit and a challenge, and I hate that answer. I hate the both answer, but I think depending on how it's executed, you know, on the positive side, integration I think can help align messaging across the company and ensure that your brand strategy, your product development, your customer communications are all moving in the same direction, which is super important. When done well, it leads to a more cohesive customer experience and ensures that brand message is unified across all touchpoints. But I would say too, there's a risk that combining those functions can dilute the CMO's focus. Marketing's strategic role in building that brand salience and that distinctiveness might get overshadowed if the CMO is getting bogged down in operational tasks related to product development or internal communications. Brand building requires long-term consistent focus while things like product and comms might be more short term, they might be more tactical. So it can lead to confusion, I think, or shift away from the true value of marketing.

Elena: I was also thinking with this one, it's a little bit of both, where it could be a positive thing or a negative thing. I think that if it's diluting marketing's focus on what marketing should truly be doing, like driving communications and building your brand, then it could be a problem, but I could also see it helping because sometimes marketing does become overly fixated on the promotion P, and they're not getting into product enough and they're not talking to customers and they don't have any sort of input on the rest of the brand. And that can be hard too, because we know that nothing kills a bad product faster than great advertising. So if you're only in charge of advertising and communications, I think that's also a struggle 'cause your wings are clipped a little bit. So it just depends if you still have that respect for the core marketing function while you're adding these different roles. It seems like it could go either way. I'm with you there. This is probably a hard question, but what do we think? What does an effective marketing leader look like today then? What do we think their focus should really be on?

Angela: Yeah. North Star question I think is probably good for all of us to reflect on a little bit. We get so busy in our day-to-day roles. The way I think about it, I guess we need to be oriented to growth. Full stop. So how do we do that? I think an effective marketing leader should really focus on number one, there's no one else in the business that needs to understand your market like you do, with as broad appeal as possible. So a deep understanding of your audience, but with a focus on creating that broad appeal. I think moving beyond narrow segments, finding ways to make the brand resonate with a wide range of customers, identifying category entry points, et cetera. This is how we're ultimately going to grow is to appeal to as many people as possible. Second, I would say building that brand equity, that long-term brand equity. Focus on those distinctive brand assets, things like logos, messaging, visuals that make that brand easy to recognize and very memorable. Building that mental availability, I think is just gonna support that strong brand equity. And then third, we do need to drive demand. That's probably how to become a data point on the wrong side of this CMO topic and how long their tenure exists. To accelerate growth, we gotta focus on driving demand for the brand. That might mean that we need to raise awareness, but it also means that we need to create urgency. We potentially need to incentivize in some cases, looking at things like personalization, targeted campaigns, promotions, et cetera, during key times a year just to stimulate that interest and convert it into action. Ultimately, I think it's about how do you stay focused on the long, but also not ignore the short?

Elena: I think all that's super important and I was thinking a little bit about this question and if I had to distill it into a simple short thing, I would say marketers or CMOs, they need to understand how marketing grows the business. And then do what they can with what they have, where they are to execute on that. Because sometimes marketers might have a very clear idea and understand the principles, but there are things happening at their companies with their situation where they have to sort of balance the principles and apply them. But I think if every CMO could understand where growth is coming from. That sounds simple, but I don't think we always do. I don't think as a business we always understand. I think CMOs, like a lot of them they do know, but have they communicated that to the business? I don't know. I've just, I think talking to some of these marketing effectiveness leaders has changed my perspective a little bit on the job of marketing and what can marketing do? And listen, marketing can do a lot. So there are things with brand perception and customer communication, and there's a lot of different things the marketing role can do. But when it comes to growing your business and being top of mind, you need to make sure your brand is top of mind when a consumer is ready to buy your category, you need to reach a broad audience with a consistent message, consistent, distinctive assets, and link yourself to a buying situation. And it sounds simple, but when I look at marketing plans and some of these stories coming out of Cannes and what people are focused on, I'm not sure how many brands are really applying that. And I feel it sometimes talking to marketers where there seems to be a misunderstanding. They're very focused on loyalty. B2B marketers tend to be super focused on who is my exact ideal purchaser. They're not thinking about influencers, not thinking about broadening their audiences. So I don't wanna be too harsh, but sometimes it does feel like marketing teams, we're not actually oriented to what's gonna drive the business. And if you're not, how are you gonna be a part of finance conversations? Because I think everything comes back to understanding how marketing for you in your category, I know it's different, my category's special, whatever it is, how is that gonna grow your business? And then everything shoots off from that. Like how do I communicate with finance? What type of customers are gonna be ideal for me? What type of creative do I need? What channels should I be on? That's why I love marketing effectiveness and the research behind what can marketing actually do. Like marketing's not magic, but it can help with memory structures for when someone's gonna buy your product. So then how do you go about and do that? And I wonder how many marketing plans are really starting there with that understanding. Because sometimes talking to people, it seems like there are different belief systems floating around about how marketing actually works, and I think that can be a dangerous place to start from.

Angela: Super dangerous. Agreed.

Elena: All right. How about this? What do we think is the biggest challenge that a first time CMO might face, and then how could they overcome it quickly? This article talked about there's a lot of people that are becoming first time CMOs, they're being promoted from within. A lot of them are in their first ever role. So what do we think? What could be the biggest challenge and how are we gonna face it?

Angela: I was trying to think like, is it different than a CMO that's been in the role for 2, 3, 4 years? I don't know that it is. When I think about the biggest challenge, I still think it's the balance between short term and long term. And perhaps as a first time CMO maybe that's more important. You're trying to prove yourself in a very strategic role within the organization. But I think first time CMOs should really be focused on if their leadership team is not educated on marketing effectiveness, like first and foremost, your job's gonna be really hard. If you don't have a peer group that supports the belief system that you abide by, and ultimately what you think you're gonna grow the brand by is gonna be really hard. I think just prioritizing the foundation, the brand's audience, the brand's positioning, the brand's identity is super important. I think as a first time CMO and then I think setting those clear, quick, achievable, short-term goals that ladder into that long-term strategy, whether that's related to customer engagement, whether it's related to your digital marketing, data insights, like putting out some clear focus areas for the organization to see that there can be quick wins that ultimately are going to ladder into a long-term growth strategy.

Elena: Yeah, we're super aligned. I was thinking something really similar. I think their biggest challenge is just time. What's the expectation of how quickly marketing should be working and what should it be doing? And one way to overcome that is by telling a clear story about here's where marketing's at, here's where we think it could go. Grounding that all in marketing effectiveness. I think that's part of the storytelling. And then how do we set up proxies or check-ins? Where you're not telling them at the same time, you're gonna need to wait 18 months and then knock on my door and ask me how marketing's going. That's just not gonna work anywhere. So how can you create some metrics, things like, we're gonna track our share of search and we've got a brand study coming up on this date and focus yourself on some of your customer acquisition targets and making sure that you do have some of those short term goals in place to keep people engaged. So it's like the biggest challenge is time. And then how do you overcome it? You have to figure out a way to keep people along with you, because the longer, greater term impacts of marketing aren't gonna happen overnight. Yep. All right, so say we're coaching a first time CMO, what's one thing we tell 'em to focus on, to stay relevant and effective?

Angela: I would say we gotta aim for fame in a world saturated with so much marketing noise. I think the most effective brands are the ones that stand out and are remembered. And fame doesn't come from incremental wins. And I think this is a big role, a CMO role, right? So fame's gonna come from creating memorable, distinctive brand moments that really capture the attention of as many people as possible. If we're gonna go down, let's go down in flames. That's my position, like bold marketing that is gonna cut through, I think. And maybe when you're in a first time CMO role, you're trying to play it safe. Maybe there's a little bit of imposter syndrome going on, like that's all expected, that's fine. But I think if you're operating from a belief system framework that you know, is rooted in empirical evidence, then you gotta lean into that. And that would say, don't be incremental.

Elena: I love that. And that's backed up by the research of how many campaigns are dull. Like most brands, a vast majority of brands are putting out dull work for one reason or another. And you're right, it's gonna be, and it's not just the type of creative, right. It's also the type of channels you invest in. How you execute your marketing to doing that are gonna make you famous. I had something similar, which is my favorite phrase, first to mind, easy to buy. Like if you could walk in and that's your billboard within your company, what we're focused on. We're gonna be first to mind and it's gonna be easy for people to buy us. I think that could get people started. Marketing within a good place to start too. All right, if we had a magic wand and we could fix one thing about how companies treat the CMO role, what would it be?

Angela: I think two things, number one, I would say when hiring a CMO never hire a CMO that isn't educated in this empirical marketing effectiveness. If they don't know who Byron Sharp is, they never heard of Aaron Berg or Bass, then we're essentially taking another brand's playbook and executing it by hiring a CMO. If you just have someone that has grown up and experience matters, I'm not saying it doesn't, but I think we need to be operating from a framework that's proven and then give them the rope to do their job. I think a CEO or a CFO, maybe I don't wanna throw shade at the banker necessarily, but might have a hard time imagining not having something like features and benefits listed or read off in a 30 second spot for a B2B SaaS company, because that's what they've always done. But the CMO might wanna put a blue monster on screen and tell a story like let them then, right? They know that emotion and storytelling are far more effective than transactional pitches to your consumer audience. So empower that CMO to take risks and innovate, because that's how brands create that distinction and that long-term growth.

Elena: I agree with you. Start by hiring CMOs that understand how to build your brand and your category. And then I was thinking something similar, then give them scope to actually build a brand. And that might include having a say in the customer experience, having a say in product development. Letting them have the type of budget they need to grow in their category. That's another thing that I think is misunderstood is just how hard it is to grow. And how hard it is to build market share. We know that you can build market share through an increased amount of share of voice. I think for a lot of companies, if they looked at their category, it's a little spooky how much you need to spend if you're trying to steal market share from bigger companies. If you're one of the smaller players, marketing can help you grow, but you're going to need some cash and some belief. Give the, bring in the right CMO and then give them the freedom to really make a difference. All right to wrap us up here, kind of a fun question. If you could lead marketing for any brand for just one year, just for the joy and challenge of it, which one would you choose?

Angela: I know this was so hard. I think I would choose a brand like the Khan Academy. It's personal to me a little bit, education, mass education, democratize it for all. I think there's a lot of opportunity with obviously tutoring younger kids, but also education for adults. The AI world obviously makes this really appealing and really exciting and I think to do something really bold and, not to throw shade at what Khan is doing today, but I think could be a really fun challenge. Just how do you make that accessible to everyone and make it the top of mind choice for learners, parents, educators, ensuring it just remains a leader in that education tech space.

Elena: Yeah, you're right. Khan probably too, has more freedom than a traditional school to teach people about AI and to make big changes. And they could probably move a lot quicker. And I agree, that's a cool category. I was also thinking something personal would be fun if I was just doing it for a year. So I chose Ironman because I love triathlons. And I will say this, I think they do an incredible job at marketing already. It could be fun too, like just getting into a ship that's already sailing in the right direction. And yeah, it'd be nice to pick something that's a personal passion and they're doing a lot of cool things. They're trying to figure out right now how do they bring triathlon more into the mainstream. And so I think that would be a fun challenge too. How do we turn it into something that anyone could tune into and wanna watch. And how do you broadcast it? It's challenging because you're out and about, so it's hard to even film different parts of the race and then an ironman lasts eight hours. How do you keep people entertained watching something for eight hours? But I think there's hope because the Tour de France is so big. And yeah, that would be a fun challenge for a year to work with Ironman.

Angela: Absolutely.

Elena: And a big audience. Anybody could do it.

Angela: Anybody could. Yeah. I mean that, you're trying to sell a belief of kind of a different life. Iron Man is not a 5K, so you'd be great at it.

Elena: I think they need something, you know, that, you know, Nike's got "if you have a body, you're an athlete." Like Ironman needs something like that because there could be a lot of buyers for Ironman. Anyone if you can get through a swim, bike and a run, you're in.

Angela: Right. And the brand itself, Iron Man doesn't necessarily say that, right? Like, anybody can do it.

Elena: No, you're right. That might be an issue, but I'm not rebranding it. I will not be doing that my first year as the ironman CMO. I'm not going there.

Angela: "Anyone can do it." It'll be fine. All right. I think we did pretty well without Rob here.

Elena: Got through it. It's not as many jokes and less chance of getting messed up. Less re-edits.