The CMO-CCO split is becoming a corporate fiction

Hewlett Packard merged the CMO and CCO roles together last year. Simon & Schuster followed. Geisinger did it in January. Six months later, T-Mobile did the same. 

Different sectors, same impulse. Unify the brand, centralize the risk. The reasons aren’t complicated. Communications is no longer reactive. Brand building is no longer just about splashy creativity. Both functions now operate in a politicized environment where a press release, tweet or ad can move markets or spark backlash. Add in a world where the lines between brand and performance are more blurred than ever, and alignment between the two isn’t optional. It’s operational. 

“Today’s CEO knows that many constituents matter for business success,” said MediaLink’s managing director and partner at UTA Donna Sharp. “Consumer-centric thinking is table stakes, but how does that same message translate for shareholders, partners, suppliers, employees, governments, and media and vice versa? Leaders who can stitch insights, stories and positioning together across  constituents make it easier to link business and brand. This requires significant collaboration, if not unified accountability into a single role.”

On paper, it makes sense. In practice, it’s messy. CMOs are wired for growth — channels, metrics, revenue. Comms leads are built for control — narratives, stakeholders, reputational risk. One is expansive, the other protective. Doing both well isn’t common. But it’s where the job is going. 

Smartly’s leadership saw this coming in 2023. They restructured to bring marketing and communications under one executive reporting to the CEO. They eventually tapped Brianna Gay, who had run communications at TripleLift and before that led B2B comms at Hulu. Both roles pushed her to tie storytelling to revenue and retention, which made her a logical choice for a blended remit. Since joining Smartly, she’s built a 30-person team spanning brand, growth, product marketing and comms.

“We’re in a dynamic world where you need to be agile,” said Gay. “Doing that is very difficult when you have two teams, two separate functions, having to work toward the same goal.” 

For years, this sort of thinking was more hypothetical than reality. Sure, there were execs with combined briefs but they were anomalies not bellwethers. Then the pandemic happened. The reverberations it had across society and culture quickly closed the gap between what a brand said and how it behaved. Since then, that pressure hasn’t let up. If anything, it’s intensified. 

“We’re living in a time of radical transformation, where brands, business leaders, and marketers need to innovate across the board just to survive, let alone thrive,” said Diageo’s former head of culture and entertainment Leila Fataar, a marketing consultant who runs her own boutique agency Platform13, as well as being the author of “Culture Led Brands”. “The competition for attention is vast, and beyond that, with ever higher consumer demands of transparency and authenticity, things are changing at pace.”

In some cases that pressure is such that they’re doing more than merging communications with marketing. They’re giving it precedence. The reporting lines reflect that. According to Korn Ferry, just 8% of chief communications officers reported to CMOs last year, down from 12% in 2021. It’s a modest but meaningful shift, a sign that communications is moving out from under marketing and establishing itself as a strategic function with its own center of gravity. 

Still, don’t take this as a sign that CMOs are on the way out. Far from it. The work just looks different now. Brands still need someone responsible for holding the center and that need has only intensified. What’s changing is the mix of capabilities required to do it. The rise of combined marketing-comms roles makes the point. As more companies move in this direction, the profile of people stepping into these roles will stretch. The path won’t be defined by a single background or credentials anymore. Instead, there will be more hires like Ariel Wengroff, the former Vice publisher who joined Ledger as editor-in-chief in 2021. Six months in she was promoted to svp of marketing and comms. If it hadn’t, she never would have been able to do what she was hired to do: reposition Ledger from a company selling crypto storage to a brand grounded in digital control.

“Every single decision needs to be made after understanding what we are actually seeing in the communication every single day across all these different platforms,” said Wengroff. “You take a much more micro approach and assume that it will swell up.”