Future of Marketing Briefing: In the age of AI, the CMO role gets a corporate makeover
This Future of Marketing Briefing covers the latest in marketing for Digiday+ members and is distributed over email every Friday at 10 a.m. ET. More from the series →
The Digiday+ Future of Marketing Briefing will be your guide to what it actually means to be in this business today. Sometimes that’ll mean talking to CMOs. Other times, it’ll mean exploring ad tech, agencies, creators, streaming, AI – whatever’s shaping the marketing class and those who operate in and around it. This is the first edition of the briefing that will publish Fridays.
Not long ago, we caught up with Nic Brandengerger, the CMO at Swiss outdoor brand Mammut. Like most marketing conversations these days, it didn’t take long for AI to come up.
He was asked how the tech is reshaping his job. His response? A pause, a sigh, and then: “That’s a loaded question”.
His second: a thesis.
“The role of a marketer in general, it doesn’t matter which level, has always been to roll with the punches.”
It sounds like something out of a Monday morning LinkedIn post. But in Brandengerger’s case, the line hits because it’s true. For all the TED-talk theatrics about transformation and innovation, the CMO gig has, for the past 15 years, been one long exercise in reactive survival: adapting to a carousel of new platforms, cultural shifts, tech cycles and executive shakeups.
AI is just the latest gut punch to dodge.
”It [the CMO role] has always been stressful,” said Brandenberger. ”It has always been only partially informed — that’s the world of marketing.”
We know, the “CMO is in flux” story has become its own cliche — but cliches usually start with something true, and this one just got truer.
“It’s an interesting time right now because our CMO clients are having a lot more business conversations than marketing ones now,” said Mark Singer, CMO of Deloitte Digital in the U.S. “That requires a mindset shift.”
Once again, the top marketer is under pressure. This time, though, the threat isn’t only about media fragmentation or data gaps. It’s about relevance. Power.
Just ask Sarah VanHeirseele.
As chief growth officer at brand commerce agency Blue Chip, she spends her days in the trenches with CMOs. And the view from there isn’t pretty. In two recent cases, her CMO clients were replaced by executives with finance pedigrees. Not growth strategists. Not storytellers. Accountants.
“It’s only been for a handful of clients but we’ve seen instances where heads of marketing have been put in place who have a financial background rather than a marketing one,” said VanHeirseele.
To be fair, the CMO role has never been especially stable. The job tends to mutate for a medley of reasons, from the politics of the day to what the board wants to see on the next earnings call. One year it’s about brand storytelling. The next, data fluency. Then came customer experience. Then personalization. Then AI. Today’s version? A kind of internal COO with KPIs and a target on their back.
Call it what it is: the CMO is the corporate world’s most reliable shape-shifter. Always evolving. Rarely secure.
We spoke to a CMO at a major CPG brand who put it bluntly. When asked about the headlines dogging media agencies — DEI scandals at Horizon political landmines at Stagwell — they didn’t flinch. If they were a client, they wouldn’t be pulling spend.
Why? Because that’s not their job. Performance is.
The moral stance that defined the post-2020 marketer — pulling ad dollars from platforms, denouncing Elon Musk, touting brand safety and purpose — is losing steam. The new posture is cooler. Sharper. Maybe cynical. Perhaps just realistic.
The CMO today isn’t trying to be a conscience. They’re trying to keep their job.
“Having sat in a lot of forums where CMOs are sharing their wisdom with one another, the thing that many link their success to is an awareness of all their stakeholders,” said Donna Sharp, MediaLink’s managing director and partner at UTA.
In other words, fluency in TikTok trends and brand strategy won’t cut it if you can’t speak EBIDTA. It’s not enough to the audience, CMOs have to manage the boardroom, soothe the CFO and still make it all look effortless onstage at Cannes. As Sharp explained: “A successful CMO understands that – they have to represent the entire company, from customers to owners.”
And companies are responding in kind.
KFC recently appointed a CMO and a chief growth officer at the same time, essentially splitting the traditional chief marketer role down the middle. Celsius Holdings created a chief brand officer and a chief creative officer to flank their new CMO. Meanwhile, in a growing number of cases the CMO role is being merged with comms outright. Hewlett Packard, Simon & Schuster and T-Mobile have made the move over the last year. Different industries, same instinct: reframe the mandate, rebalance the risk and chase growth.
Ledger certainly didn’t.
Less than four months after hiring Ariel Wengroff as editor-in-chief in 2021, her role evolved into svp of marketing and comms. If it didn’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.
“When you see some of these CMO and CCO roles coming together now, it’s because your corporate story and the story for the customer can’t be separate anymore,” said Wengroff.
That alignment shows up in the day-to-day. Wengroff’s 30-person team starts each morning with a 15-minute newsroom-style standup. In the room are leads from product marketing, brand, comms, creative and paid media. Some come from publishers, others from agencies, gaming, even documentary film. What connects them all is a shared feel for the story, said Wengroff.
If this all sounds familiar — or personal — you’re not wrong. That’s the idea.
The titles may change. The pressure doesn’t.
Marketers brace for the looming AI-driven in-housing wave
Earlier this week, we reported that Dell is working chunks of its media buying (search and social) in-house. The reasons are familiar: control, transparency and, inevitably, cost.
What’s new, however, is just how central AI has become to Dell’s longer term in-housing roadmap.
As a source close to the advertiser explained: “They’re [Dell] is already thinking about the role of AI in media buying might impact the next phase of their in-housing efforts.”
And Dell is far from alone.
Unilever, Yum! Brands, PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Nestle, Diageo, Kimberly Clark and Procter & Gamble are among an ever growing list of companies exploring how AI can allow them to create more ads for less. The more they do this, the more they can pass those savings over to media. Once that machine starts humming, there’s only one direction this goes.
“AI is certainly an active part of the in-house conversations that dwell on teams being able to create and execute more,” said Fred Schuster, CEO at in-house marketing specialists InnerGroup.
That doesn’t mean there’s an AI-fueled in-housing scramble happening tomorrow – or even in the near future for that matter. The tools are still nascent, the operators still learning. But Dell’s posture is instructive.
“We’re starting to receive more briefs from clients who want us to experiment with using production for content.” said Kate Tancred, CEO and founder of Untold Fable, a tech-powered production company that works with in-house agencies.
The real turning point — what Tancred Schuster and Dell are all quietly preparing for — is the arrival of agentic AI. When that hits, the whole value chain gets rewritten. For marketers that moment will be in a media review. When they have the space, leverage and fresh perspective to ask: is there a better way to do this?
“AI has definitely made marketers question the role of in-housing with the barrier to entry fluctuating depending on the capability (media, content, production) in question,” said Ryan Kangisser, chief strategy officer of MediaSense. ”While content may seem the more obvious capability, the shift towards AI-driven media platforms could see an uptick in performance media moving in-house.”
At the same time, Kangisser said “orchestration — rather than execution — of these different capabilities (via agencies and platforms) could actually prove to be the version of in-housing that brands begin to prioritize.”
Hot take of the week: Agencies to agents
Sir Martin Sorrell dropped what might be the hot take of the week on S4 Capital’s earnings call: “agencies to agents”. His team even put a number to it — they estimate that 65% of the tasks agencies get paid for today could be done by AI agents using existing tech.
It’s classic Sorrell — part provocation, part strategy memo — and conveniently timed as his agency group trims staff and restructures. The pitch is clear: a leaner, AI-native model, plugged into the infrastructure of Google, Amazon et al. But the calculus isn’t so simple. CMOs aren’t buying code. They’re buying judgment, taste and someone to blame when the world doesn’t land right side up. And the more an agency is built atop platform APIs and cloud infrastructure, the easier it becomes to disintermediate.
What we’ve heard
“Dentsu might be exploring the sale of its international business but what I’ve heard is they’re actually trying to get private equity partners for cash. They want to raise funds to invest in AI. A break up isn’t really what they want to do.”
— A consultant on the tea behind Dentsu’s future
Numbers to know
74% of ad execs cited at least one campaign function being AI-powered, according to the IAB Europe’s survey of 95 respondents.
Nearly eight in 10 (78%) of senior execs believe generative AI will never replace human imagination, according to Dentsu Creative’s survey of 1,950 respondents.
80% of CPG leaders admit commerce complexity has overwhelmed their organizational capabilities, according to 40 respondents surveyed by IPG.
55% of ad ops teams are still managing ad budgets manually, according to Fluency’s study of more than 75 agencies.
41% of marketers say adapting to AI tools is their biggest pain point, outweighing content volume and resource challenges, according to Contentful’s study of 425 senior marketers.
Half of executives (51%) say skepticism about AI or synthetic data is their biggest barrier to increasing investment, according to 700 senior marketers surveyed by Qualtrics.
What we’re reading
The company rolled out an agentic AI tool that stitches together all of its image, video and audio generation capabilities into a single creative assistant inside its ad platform. Think of it as a free chatbot that not only brainstorms campaign concepts and pulls research, but also executes directly within Amazon’s suite of production tools.
ABC has pulled late night talk show Jimmy Kimmel Live indefinitely after comments Kimmel made during a recent monologue about President Donald’ Trump’s reaction to Charlie Kirk’s death. Nexstar – owner of hundreds of local stations – reportedly objected strongly and followed it with a refusal to carry the show. In today’s climate of outrage and polarization, being loud comes with amplified risk, especially when your distribution depends on someone else’s call.
MrBeast faces backlash over kids’ data
CARU, the children’s ad watchdog, has accused YouTube’s megastar MrBeast (Jimmy Donaldson) of violating kids privacy rules: collecting personal info from minors without age-gating or parental consent, failing to clearly mark promos, and making misleading product claims in relation to a Feastables sweepstakes. Per the report. Donaldson has agreed to update practices, label ad content more explicitly and overhaul how his websites collect data.
The headlines say there’s finally a deal in the works for TikTok to address U.S. regulation demands. But The Information peels back the onion. A lot more is unknown than what’s been press-released. Key questions still linger – what happens with data access, who really holds the reins of moderation and whether regulatory compliance will be permanent or just cosmetic.
