The CMO Paradox: Why You're More Crucial (and Vulnerable) Than Ever
This Is Potentially A Reality Check For Marketing Leaders Navigating The AI Evolution
Dear Executives,
Picture this: It's 1930, and you're a marketer with a 10-minute radio slot. Ten whole minutes to tell your story, build your brand, and convince listeners to choose your product. No skip buttons, no second screens, no competing notifications. Just you, your message, and a captive audience gathered around the radio.
Fast forward to today: You have under 1 second to capture attention on TikTok or Reels before someone swipes away forever.
This journey: from 10 minutes to 1 second, tells the story of why your job has become impossible.
And why it's about to get interesting again.
From Radio Royalty to Digital Refugees
Let's be honest about where we've been. When Coca-Cola appointed the first official Chief Marketing Officer, Sergio Zyman in 1993, Marketing was still a relatively straightforward game. You controlled the message, owned the channels, and dictated the timing. Television and radio were your kingdoms, and consumers could be your loyal subjects.
Those early CMOs were brand royalty. They commissioned agencies to create big cultural moments, launched campaigns that could run for years, and measured success in broader strokes, brand awareness, recall, and preference.
The "Mad Men" era wasn't just about creative genius; it was about operating in a world where interruption was not only accepted but welcomed.
Then came the internet, and everything changed overnight.
The Dot-Com Disruption:
When Everything Was Shaken Up
Do you remember the late 1990s? Email marketing felt revolutionary. Banner ads seemed like the future. E-commerce was going to change everything (spoiler alert: it did, just not how we expected).
The dot-com era wasn't just a set of new channels; it was the first time consumers could talk back.
Suddenly, marketing became a conversation instead of a monologue.
Message boards, early social platforms, and email gave people a voice. Your carefully crafted brand narrative could be challenged, contradicted, or completely ignored.
This was the first great disruption, and it caught most marketers completely off guard. The playbook that worked for decades, broadcast, repeat, measure reach, suddenly felt antiquated.
CMOs who had built careers on controlling the narrative found themselves scrambling to participate in conversations they couldn't control.
Many called it a revolution. Looking back, it was just the beginning of an ongoing and constant evolution.
The Evolution Continues:
Search, Social, and Smartphones
What followed wasn't a series of revolutions, but a continuous evolution of the same fundamental shift that began with the internet: the transfer of power from brands to consumers.
Search engines made consumers researchers.
Social media made them publishers.
Smartphones created the anytime, anywhere generation.
Each wave didn't replace the previous one; it accelerated the underlying trend toward consumer empowerment.
As someone coming up or a maturing CMO, you adapted. You learned SEO, leaned into social listening, optimised for mobile, and became almost fluent in analytics.
Your role expanded from brand steward to data scientist, from creative director to technology integrator, from campaign manager to experience orchestrator.
With each evolution, the job got more complex, the expectations grew higher, and the margin for error shrank. No wonder CMO tenure dropped to 3.5 years, you weren't just Marketing products anymore; you were managing a constant state of adaptation.
The Growth Imperative:
When Creative Wasn't Enough
By the 2010s, something else was happening. CEOs weren't just asking for memorable campaigns anymore; they demanded maturity
Measurable growth
Revenue attribution
Customer lifetime value
Market share expansion
Executive Expectations
Enter the Chief Growth Officer…The funnel starts to transform into loops and engines.
Suddenly, you weren't just competing with other CMOs for budget and attention. You were competing with a new breed of executive who spoke fluent “spreadsheet” and promised direct lines from Marketing spend to business outcomes.
CGOs focused on growth metrics, funnel optimisation, and revenue generation, everything that traditional Brand Marketing struggled to measure.
This wasn't just a new role; it was for many a wake-up call.
The market was telling CMOs that creativity without accountability was not enough anymore.
Brand awareness without business impact was then seen as a luxury few companies could afford to overinvest in.
Smart CMOs adapted. They learned.
Performance Marketing embraced attribution modelling and started speaking the language of growth.
They proved that brand building and business building weren't opposing forces; they were complementary engines of the same machine.
Those who didn't adapt found their roles either absorbed by CGOs or eliminated entirely.
Today's Impossible Job Description
Here's what your role actually entails in 2025:
You're a brand guardian, protecting equity built over decades while staying culturally relevant in real-time
You're a growth driver, proving direct connections between marketing activities and business outcomes
You're a performance marketer, optimising conversion funnels and attribution models that would make a mathematician weep
You're a technology evangelist, implementing AI tools that didn't exist six months ago
You're a data analyst, finding signals in noise that grows exponentially every day
You're an organisational psychologist, aligning teams around customer experiences that span dozens of touchpoints
And somehow, you're expected to deliver quarterly growth that satisfies investors or Wall Street while building long-term brand value that satisfies Main Street, all while proving that every pound or dollar spent drives measurable business impact.
Familiar right: You're living through the continuation of that same evolution that started when the first consumer clicked "reply" on a Marketing email.
The AI Moment:
Evolution Again, Not Revolution
Now everyone's talking about AI as the next revolution. But here's what the big headlines miss: AI isn't disrupting Marketing, it's accelerating the same sort of evolution that's been happening since 1993.
Think about it: AI is doing what every previous technology has done, shifting more power to consumers while making Marketing more complex for you.
AI-powered search gives consumers “better answers”.
AI recommendation engines give consumers more personalised choices.
AI content tools give consumers the ability to answer, plan and create competing narratives without brand interruptions.
At the same time, AI is trying to automate the tactical work that's been consuming 70% of your teams time. Programmatic advertising, email personalisation, content creation and optimisation, creative testing, machines are doing it faster and sometimes better than the team can...
This is starting to terrify some CMOs. It should excite the best CMOs and CGOs.
Because for the first time since 1993, a new technology is taking work off your plate instead of adding to it.
The Return of Strategic Marketing
Remember why Coca-Cola created the CMO role in the first place? They needed someone to think strategically about the brand, to see the big picture, release Diet Coke, and to connect Marketing efforts to business outcomes.
Someone who could rise above the tactical chaos and provide a true connective vision.
Somewhere along the way, many have seemed to lose this or never were trusted with it.
Many became so busy optimising campaigns, analysing funnels, and managing vendors that we forgot what strategic leadership actually looks like.
Over time, AI should give us that back.
When machines handle some of the execution, you get to do what you were hired to do: think, plan, create, connect, and lead.
When AI optimises your media buying, you can focus on defining what messages matter. When algorithms personalise (almost) everything at scale, you can concentrate on understanding what makes your brand authentically different.
Marketing to Machines: The “New Frontier”
But here's the twist that makes this evolution unique: you're not just marketing to humans anymore. AI agents, recommendation algorithms, and search engines are increasingly making decisions on behalf of consumers (whether they are aware or not).
Your content needs to be discoverable by machines, understandable by algorithms, and recommendable by AI systems. This isn't about gaming the system; it's about understanding how intelligent systems discover, evaluate, and recommend partners and, importantly brands.
Think of it as the natural progression from optimising for search engines to optimising for decision engines (LLMs).
It's not a revolution; it's the next logical step in the consumer empowerment trend that started three decades ago.
Here’s what keeps coming up in CMO coaching sessions:
The Next Breed Of CMO
So what does the modern CMO do? You become what you always should have been: the conductor.
Instead of managing campaigns, you conduct experiences.
Instead of the team overanalysing data, you can engineer actionable insights.
Instead of creating content, you build connective narratives that flow seamlessly across human and machine touchpoints.
This isn't about becoming a technologist; it's about becoming a better Marketer and, importantly, a strategist again.
CMOs who understand how to blend human intuition with machine intelligence, how to scale creativity without losing “authenticity”, and how to build systems that get smarter over time.
Five Moves for the Evolved CMO
Embrace Continuous Learning: The evolution won't stop. Build learning agility into your personal and team operating system. Curiosity beats expertise when the rules keep changing. Teaching becomes critical, as does team cohesion.
Invest in Intelligence Infrastructure: Your internal data, technology, and talent need to work together as an intelligent system, not just a collection of people with tools. This is about building organisational capability, not just buying software and expecting results.
Champion Ethical Evolution: As AI becomes more powerful, the stakes for getting it wrong get higher. Lead the conversation about responsible innovation. Your brand's future depends on it.
Bridge Human and Machine Intelligence: Your unique value lies in understanding what machines can't replicate, emotional intelligence, cultural intuition, and the ability to see connections that pure data can't reveal.
Think in Systems: The future of Marketing is about creating intelligent systems that learn, adapt, flag patterns to the team and optimise continuously.
Think less about individual campaigns and more about building Marketing engines that evolve.
The Constant in All This Change
Through thirty years of evolution from 10-minute radio spots to 1-second TikToks to AI-generated everything, one thing remains unchanged: people want to feel understood, valued, and connected to something larger than themselves.
Your job has always been to create those connections. The tools evolve, the channels multiply, the complexity increases, but the core mission lasts: help people discover brands that improve their lives in meaningful ways.
The most successful CMOs of the next decade won't be the ones who master every new technology. They'll be the ones who use technology to create more human, more relevant, more valuable experiences.
Your Evolutionary Advantage
While your peers are either paralysed by the pace of change or chasing every new trend, you have an opportunity to see the bigger picture. To understand that what feels like constant disruption is in truth a consistent evolution toward the same goal: putting consumers in control of their own experiences.
Every CMO since 1993 has faced a series of technology challenges and evolutions.
The successful leaders learned to surf the wave instead of fighting it.
They used each new technology to become closer to customers, not further away.
They saw change as an opportunity, not a real threat.
This is your moment to do the same.
