Crisis, culture and costs: The new reality of the modern CMO

“We always joke that to be a CMO, you need to be a strategist, a storyteller and an operator today,” said Krista Dalton, chief marketing and digital officer of Tecovas, a shoe brand.

While CMOs balance brand building and brand reputation, silos between marketing, communications, finances and technology are starting to dissolve. However, that new structure can introduce ambiguity in what exactly a CMOs role is, according to the four marketers Digiday spoke with for this piece.

Already, the role is one defined by churn and shifting ground. To put some numbers to it, WARC reports the average CMO tenure is up to 4.3 years in 2024. That figure is up from the 4.2 years reported in 2023, but still lags behind the C-suite average of 4.9 years.

“We are living in an ambiguous time,” said Lauren Danis, Eventbrite CBO and CCO. “The key is to be in front,” she added, referring to impending changes across the marketing landscape. Last November, Danis’ role was expanded to add oversight of Eventbrite’s brand marketing team, and replacing CMO Samantha Wu, according to a spokesperson on behalf of the company.

Brand building becomes brand reputation

Over the past few years, politics has become inherently embedded in culture and marketing therein. Take Target and Bud Light on either side of the spectrum as examples of entering the so-called culture wars only to face backlash and boycotts in response to diversity, equity and inclusivity policies and other tactics deemed “woke.”

This past year was chock full of examples. From American Eagle’s Sydney Sweeney “Great Jeans” campaign and its perceived eugenics-style messaging to Cracker Barrel’s logo redesign which prompted consumer uproar and leadership changes over what some linked to “woke” culture. McDonald’s Netherlands pulled its AI-generated holiday ad spot, which one X user dubbed “the most God-awful ad I’ve seen this year” in reference to the brand’s use of AI.

In today’s polarized climate, CMOs’ work of building and growing the brand has become more about maintaining — and sometimes defending — brand reputation. 

“Every marketing campaign, every activation could quickly become a — let’s just say — charged conversation in a matter of minutes,” she said.

As chief brand and communications officer, Danis has recently stepped into the CMO role at Eventbrite, on top of serving as chief brand and communications officer. Meaning, the comms role and marketing role are now combined in a nod to today’s fraught cultural landscape.

Risk fluency becomes part of the gig as campaigns increasingly find themselves in the cultural zeitgeist, caught up in hot takes and think pieces from everyday social media users and political pundits. As a result, marketing leaders say they’re now operating with a heightened radar, more frequently gut checking creative work with key internal stakeholders before rolling out anything to the public. Ultimately, the stakes are higher, nothing is “just a campaign” and often, silence isn’t an option, said Katie Keil, svp and CMO​ at Peet’s Coffee.

“A big part about today is owning when you make a misstep. It’s not trying to sweep it under the rug,” she said. “It’s actually saying, ’Oh, no, we didn’t mean for this to happen.’”

CMO as the business growth driver

In addition to heightened political climates, marketers’ do-more-with-less conundrum continues. Economic pressure and a quickly changing business landscape has dropped fiduciary duties in the CMOs’ lap.

Marketing economics are harder than ever to navigate in this moment: CPMs continue to creep up, tariffs have laid a walloping on budgets and there’s more scrutiny than ever on marketing spend to prove business growth. (The advent of generative AI isn’t much help given its promise to make marketing faster and cheaper.) That means CMOs must understand everything from budget cycles and financial imperatives supply chains and tariffs to position their marketing investments effectively.

Per WARC, 59% of brand marketers expect business in 2026 to be better than in 2025, but only 19% expect marketing budgets to be higher next year.

“I spend as much, if not more of my time today, focused on the revenue across the channels than I do on the marketing side,” said Doug Sweeny, CMO at Oura, a wellness and fitness tech brand. 

Sweeny’s held marketing leadership roles since 2006, where he served as vp of global brand marketing at Levi’s. He’s held CMO titles at Nest consumer electronics, and One Medical healthcare brand.

Historically, marketing meant campaigns and ads. Now, marketing is a means of driving business goals and revenue, he said. Keil at Peet’s Coffee, similarly now sees her role as CMO as a “growth driving role.”

In addition to the macro-economic factors, a collapsed marketing funnel has marketers navigating a changed way customers discover and shop for products. Thanks to LLMs and chatbots, retail media and social commerce, marketers are more often than not finding themselves stretched across the consumer journey, and having to prove their marketing helped push consumers to buy.

“That aspect of the CMOs’ roles are getting more and more important because budgets are getting tighter, competition is getting stiffer and business cycles are accelerating,” said Justin Thomas-Copeland, CEO at the 4As. “You could always do more, but you’re not just going to get more.”

AI’s impact on the CMO role 

AI has had ripple effects on the industry as a whole. But for CMOs, they’re increasingly inundated with navigating AI-powered tech platforms and building out marketing tech stacks. 

Both Keil and Kimberly Storin, CMO at Zoom, say they’ve been tasked with sorting AI marketing workflows, working more closely with technology parts of the business to set guardrails, map out an AI roadmap for adoption and manage data. 

“There’s more of my job right now as being the steward of change and how technology fits into that versus, trying to be the most technologically advanced CMO on the planet,” Storin said. 

AI has only added to the debate around in-housing. Unilever, Yum! Brands, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Nestle, Diageo, Kimberly Clark and Procter & Gamble have all started exploring how AI can allow them to create more ads for less. 

And that’s what marketing execs have control over. 

There are more threads to AI’s ripple effects beyond the in-housing conversation. Creatively speaking, AI (and so-called AI slop) has emphasized the need for authenticity as platforms like OpenAI’s Sora makes it harder to tell the difference between what’s human-made and what’s AI generated.

Then there are the chatbots, in which shoppers are turning to chatbots to start the shopping journey. Marketers have spent the last year scrambling to revamp SEO strategies to show up in these LLMs and get in front of shoppers. 

There’s less fear that AI will replace the role of marketing — at least, that’s what marketing leaders say — and more concern of the unknowns that come with it. 

“You have to learn how to use it and make it your secret power in order to be relevant in today’s world,” Keil said. 

A role by any other name

It’s not that the CMO role has ever been black and white. There’s always been gray areas. It is, however, going through a fundamental transformation from marketing communications to one of many responsibilities — financial accountability, reputation management and technology. This year will likely put more strains on those areas.

“They’re going to be challenged by all of those things at the same time,” Thomas-Copeland said. “It’s not going to be an easy ride for CMOs.”