The State of the CMO

Introduction

Like it or not, the CMO role is getting rewritten.

Many top marketers are facing new responsibilities and new expectations, all of which are reshaping the job description and, in some cases, the position in the org chart. But that doesn’t mean top marketers are always getting the same timelines or resources as others in the C-suite.

Marketing Brew surveyed a segment of our audience to better understand how marketers are thinking about the future of the CMO role, the biggest pressures practitioners are facing, and how AI is changing the conversation. More than 450 Marketing Brew newsletter readers participated in a custom survey, which was fielded July 13 through July 31.

Our readers believe powerfully in the purpose of marketing: 75% said marketing has a strong voice in shaping overall business strategy, and 6 in 10 said the CMO role is more important today than it was five years ago.

And yet, many said they feel pressure to keep up with new AI responsibilities and changing expectations about what is really possible—and there’s no clear consensus on what the future of the role may bring.

We’ve compiled many of the findings, alongside additional research and perspectives from expert voices across the industry, below.

How can a role be crucial and yet not necessary full-time?

Six in 10 respondents to Marketing Brew’s survey agreed with the statement that the role has become more important than it was five years ago, and 3 in 4 agreed with the statement that marketing “has a strong voice in shaping my company’s overall business strategy.” But just 17% said they believe every company needs a full-time CMO.

Call it the CMO conundrum. The role may be one of the most questioned in the C-suite, with lingering reputational baggage as a cost center that often makes CMOs feel pressure to prove their worth to the rest of the C-suite and beyond.

At the same time, the remit of the role has expanded, with CMOs telling Marketing Brew that they’ve had new responsibilities added to their plate. Two-thirds (65%) said AI strategy and governance duties have been added, while nearly half (48%) said they’re now taking on PR/external communications duties. A similarly high number of respondents (46%) said entertainment/culture/partnership strategies have been added to their purview.

Only 8.47% of our survey respondents said their role’s duties have remained the same.

That could help explain why many CMO roles have gone through a refresh. Titles like chief customer and marketing officer, chief marketing and communications officer, and chief marketing and transformation officer are reflecting the new, expanded reality of the role. Meanwhile, some companies have dropped top marketing titles altogether, opting to have chief growth officers oversee the duties a CMO may have previously handled.

Those title shifts are quite common now, according to Nick Primola, group EVP at the Association of National Advertisers and head of the organization’s Global CMO Growth Council. A clean CMO title, he told us, is becoming increasingly “rare,” and that “even if it is a clean CMO [title], the role underneath it has expanded.”

The top marketer at a company can have one of a handful of new titles now, with many serving as what is essentially a “CMO+,” Primola said. It’s common for top marketers to also have titles including growth, experience, tech, operating, or communication.

A little over half of senior marketers report directly to the CEO, Jay Pattisall, VP and principal analyst at Forrester, told Marketing Brew, citing data from Forrester’s 2023 Q1 CMO Pulse Survey. The other 46% report to others, including the chief growth officer, chief customer officer, and chief digital officer.

“What that suggests is that marketing is much more of a distributed function,” Pattisall said.

All that said, what the role is called, or who CMOs report to, is less important to marketers than making sure there’s true understanding and reflection of the ways that the role has changed—and how those within the role have adapted to the demands of today.

“I think the term [or] label, ‘CMO,’ in some ways, has lagged the job description,” said Linda Boff, the former chief marketing and communications officer for GE who is now CEO of the agency Said Differently. “Marketing way back when was not necessarily recognized as a growth driver, right? And I think that mandate has changed significantly.”

Marketers working more closely with other departments to drive growth for brands and prove how their efforts are contributing to that growth may be more common.

At the dating app Hinge, having both the marketing and communications functions “sit at the same altitude is incredibly important,” according to Chief Marketing and Communications Officer Tamika Young, who told us that the integration in her title reflects “how most brands are thinking about marketing functions today.”

“It shouldn’t feel siloed,” she said. “A lot of the worlds are interconnected, whether it’s growth or brand or communications or creative. It is one cohesive story that we want to be able to tell.”

Young’s experience integrating marketing and communications at Hinge isn’t an anomaly. As the role has shifted and, at times, become more distributed, it may be a positive for the role.

The role has been “elevated” in recent years into “an orchestrator role,” Primola said. “I look at it as an orchestrator of the enterprise-wide brand experience and, obviously, growth, but the term ‘enterprise-wide’ is important there because it’s no longer just a marketing function silo.”

As more responsibilities pile onto a marketer’s plate, leaders say they are feeling weighed down.

According to Marketing Brew’s survey, 79% of respondents agreed with the statement that marketing leaders are held to shorter timelines to prove results than other executives. Sixty-nine percent agreed with the statement that they feel pressure to prioritize short-term performance metrics over long-term brand-building.

Four in 10 respondents agreed with the statement that CMOs find it difficult to prove the value of their marketing work to other executives, which is why marketer tenures are stubbornly short—an average of 4.3 years in 2025, according to the executive search and advisory firm Spencer Stuart.

That mirrors other research highlighting a trust gap in the C-suite. According to a 2026 survey of CEOs and senior business executives conducted by Gartner, only 16% of CEOs said they would choose the CMO to “spearhead new initiatives.”

Many CMOs are under pressure to prove their worth to the rest of the C-suite and beyond, especially considering the expectations of transformation combined with the lingering belief among many executives that marketing is a cost center rather than a profit center.

“Marketing has felt for a really long time that the enterprise just doesn’t get it,” said Ewan McIntyre, VP analyst and chief of research for Gartner for Marketers, who has been conducting the firm’s annual CMO Spend survey for over a decade.

In Marketing Brew’s survey, 4 in 10 respondents said proving marketing’s value or return on investment was a top challenge. While that’s not exactly a new issue in the industry, it’s one that has perhaps gotten more difficult as many marketers are asked to do more with less. The same amount of respondents (40%) said doing more with flat or shrinking budgets was also a major challenge.

Those budgets don’t seem to be budging much. Gartner’s annual CMO Spend survey found that while marketing budgets increased slightly for the first time since 2022, the increase was very slight, just 1.3% higher than budget sizes from 2025.

AI is only intensifying the pressure marketers are feeling. Two-thirds of respondents (66%) agreed with the statement that there is a pressure to appear “AI-first,” even in cases when they don’t believe it is improving their work. And external beliefs about what is possible through AI don’t always match up with the realities of the business. As one respondent noted in our survey, “AI can be helpful, but it isn’t an ‘Easy’ button.”

McIntyre said that when others inside the organization believe “that AI can replace a significant chunk of what marketing does,” it can pose challenges for marketers.

It’s a view shared by the Marketing Brew audience. “Quality, original work takes more time and requires more talent than AI brings,” one respondent said. “A client wants better quality than AI but at the same cost and turnaround as AI, which is just not possible or practical.”

Another noted that “the hardest part of my job today is helping clients understand that while AI can generate content or complete tasks, it can’t replace strategic thinking and industry expertise to achieve long-term growth.”

McIntyre described the numerous challenges—expectations for growth, significant pressure to transform, especially around AI, and largely flat budgets—as a “trilemma” that puts practitioners in a particularly tough spot.

“The vibes are just not good,” McIntyre said. “The vibes make marketers feel like they are underappreciated within the enterprise context.”

As we noted in Chapter 1 of this report, nearly two-thirds of CMOs said that AI strategy and governance have been added to their responsibilities, more than any other new duty coming under marketers’ purview. And as we noted in Chapter 2, two-thirds said there’s a pressure to appear “AI-first,” even when it doesn’t improve the work.

Those changes come with some anxieties.

According to our survey, 7 in 10 respondents agreed with the statement that they are worried about how AI will impact the marketing function. And two-thirds agreed with the statement that AI-generated advertising “does more harm for a brand than good.”

According to Gartner’s 2025 Marketing Transformation survey, 65% of CMOs believe AI will “fundamentally change” the role.

Marketers are using AI—but not always for the flashiest work. More than half of our respondents said they are using AI for admin tasks (57%), for copywriting (54%), and for marketing analytics and insights (51%). Many (46%) are using it for creative and campaign ideation.

Far fewer are deploying the tech in consumer-facing applications, like personalization or recommendation engines (17%), image/video generation (15%), or customer service (7%).

“We’re at this moment where we now have a tool set that was unimaginable just a couple years ago,” Linda Boff, the former chief marketing and communications officer for GE who is now CEO of the agency Said Differently, told us. “I think that many CMOs are seeing that and seeing the opportunity for that. Great CMOs are thinking about precision, not size.”

Despite the roughly two-thirds of CMOs who told us that AI strategy and governance had been added to their purview, it doesn’t necessarily mean that CMOs are leading the AI charge at their organizations. Just 15% of CEOs say they believe their own CMOs are “strongly AI-savvy,” according to Gartner research published last year.

“The CIO is much, much more likely to be leading the cross-functional AI programs, but the guardrails around AI and brand—that is a CMO thing,” said Ewan McIntyre, VP analyst and chief of research for Gartner for Marketers. “So it’s a ‘none of the power but all of the responsibility’ challenge there.”

Some view the rise of AI more optimistically, citing it as transformational for the future of the role and its remit itself.

“The CMO is able to really help drive the future of how the company adopts AI or how the consumers are benefiting from AI,” Nick Primola, group EVP at the Association of National Advertisers and head of the organization’s Global CMO Growth Council, told us. “If you did nothing, it will be a conversation about efficiency and maybe speed, but if you really get the most out of your marketing function, you are looking to create real new value for your consumers that never existed.”

And the rise of AI seems to be making the marketing and brand function more essential than ever.

Fifty-six percent of Marketing Brew survey respondents said maintaining trust and authenticity amid AI content will be the biggest challenge in the upcoming year for marketers.

Considering how much the CMO role may be changing, some wonder if the role will even exist in the near future.

When asked what they expect the role to look like in five years, one respondent to our survey told Marketing Brew that the CMO will be “going, going, gone.” Another said they believe it will become part of sales and product management departments.

Another respondent said it’ll be “nonexistent in all but the largest companies.”

It could be that the role is filled in a fractional capacity rather than a full-time role. Thirty-nine percent of our survey respondents agreed with the statement that fractional or part-time CMOs can be as effective as full-time CMOs.

But nearly the same amount—37%—disagreed with that statement.

Many more respondents see the role remaining—just adapting and expanding to meet the moment. Half of our respondents agreed that the traditional CMO role is being replaced by other executives or distributed across teams.

That tension and question about the importance of the CMO and whether or not the role will remain as it is may be the one true constant when it comes to the future of the position.

Even as job duties have adapted, long-standing concerns remain the same. Marketers have been dealing with the “stigma” of being “seen as a cost center only with very long-term ROI” for years, a history that’s left marketing leaders on their “back foot to prove their value,” even as the role has changed, Dory Ellis Garfinkle, CMO of branding consultancy Siegel+Gale, told us.

That could lead to continued use of fractional talent over full-time marketing hires.

“I think there’s going to be a lot of businesses that are afraid to commit in a major way to hiring somebody,” Ellis Garfinkle said. “But I also think that future-proofing the role is going to be based on emotional intelligence, leadership, teamwork, adding value, spotting opportunities, and that’s something that you need someone embedded in your business to be able to do.”

Ellis Garfinkle isn’t alone in that assessment. Fifty-four percent of survey respondents said companies need a dedicated senior marketing leader, although it wasn’t necessarily designated as CMO. That’s more than double the 24% of respondents who said a dedicated CMO made sense only “past a certain size or stage.” (And as we noted in Chapter 1, 17% of survey respondents said every company needs a dedicated, full-time CMO.)

“I firmly believe the role of the CMO is critical in the organization,” Linda Boff, CEO of agency Said Differently and former chief marketing and communications officer for GE, told us. “To be the keeper of the flame, the consistent voice who is representing what that brand means, and how to grow that brand is nobody’s part-time job.”

As one survey respondent put it, “The marketing landscape may be totally different, but the essential roles and functions will remain the same. Leadership adapts!”

While some expect organizations to lean on fractional hires, the expansion of the role and the hybrid changes that have taken shape already may help the role maintain its stature.

“When you think about the position of the CMO now as that orchestration across the enterprise,” that could make the difference for growth for that company, Nick Primola, group EVP at the Association of National Advertisers and head of the organization’s Global CMO Growth Council, said, noting that a top marketer’s ability to use AI for innovation is essential.

The CMO, Primola added, is “making the company smarter across all the different touchpoints of the company, bringing the company closer to the consumer, and all the ability that the CMO really has to touch the millions of consumers on a daily basis.”