Article first published in Campaign on May 27, 2026. Read the original article here.
When Worldwide Partners, a global network of more than 95 independent agencies in 50 countries, launched its intriguing, absorbing Confessions of a CMO report earlier this year in partnership with brand experience specialists and Worldwide Partners agency Monigle, the authors were keen to stress that they weren’t pronouncing the death of the chief marketing officer. Far from it.
What the report, based on anonymous conversations with CMOs around the world, highlighted instead was how the most successful marketing leaders have been able to take on various different identities and species. They can be cheerleaders or disruptors, invisible or very noticeably leading the way, all adaptable and changeable according to circumstances and needs, sometimes even all in the same meeting.
John Harris, president and chief executive officer of Worldwide Partners, says that one key way in which this idea of a hybrid marketer is being expressed within an organisation is a subtle change in the analysis and appreciation of traditional metrics and how notions of success are defined and evaluated. Harris believes that CMOs are now held more commercially accountable than ever before, but are increasingly looking for ways to measure longer-term, less immediate achievements.
“Brand metrics such as trust, cultural relevance, pricing power, customer preference and even employee belief can absolutely show up in business performance, but often over longer cycles than quarterly reporting allows for,” he says.
“The strongest CMOs today aren’t rejecting metrics. They’re using metrics intelligently while also defending the space required to build durable brands and sustainable growth.”
Gabriel Cohen, CMO at Monigle, agrees that a CMO’s work is rarely immediately quantifiable and that their work in other, less recognisable but certainly no less important, areas remain under the radar. “That is the bit the job description misses,” he says. “The formal job description says the CMO owns brand, growth, customer, comms, pipeline, demand, reputation and whatever else the CEO forgot to assign to someone else.
“But the hidden job is different. It is about influence. Timing. Reading the room. Knowing when to push, when to disappear, when to translate, when to provoke, when to let someone else take credit because that is how the idea survives.
“One of the best lines from the interviews was: ‘You’re creating the conditions for the organisation to buy an idea. You’re not selling an idea.’ That is not unmeasurable fluff. That is how work gets through an organisation.”
Cohen adds that brand work in particular can often involve rather fluid timescales, ones that look far further ahead for tangible results than is often the case elsewhere within a C-suite. “This is not a permission slip for marketers to avoid ROI,” he warns. “Measure what can be measured, understand what cannot be reduced to last-click nonsense and never confuse a partial metric with the whole truth.”
Tech developments invariably mean increased fragmentation within an organisation. The next significant shift in a CMO’s role will be towards one of translation. Harris explains: “What emerged in the report is that CMOs increasingly survive through connective intelligence, translating technology into human relevance, organisational action and customer value. AI will accelerate that dynamic dramatically. Companies won’t struggle because they lack technology, they’ll struggle because they’re wrestling with aligning people, systems and meaning around it. That’s where the modern CMO becomes incredibly important.
“AI is changing expectations around personalisation, responsiveness and customer interaction. That has implications for workflows, talent structures, agency relationships, product development and customer experience design. The danger is viewing AI purely as an efficiency exercise. The bigger opportunity is organisational adaptability, and marketing has a major role to play in helping companies evolve around that.”
As Harris explains, talking (indeed, marketing) to machines is becoming just as critical an art as communicating with humans, meaning that strategic assets like consistency and trust have become absolutely vital. “In some ways, this elevates the importance of brand rather than diminishing it,” he says. “So the CMO now has to think in dual layers simultaneously: emotional resonance for humans and informational clarity for machines.”
Cohen stresses that marketing leaders have to put themselves in a central role when it comes to organisations being restructured by developments in AI: “The CMO should be the person asking: what does this change do to the customer, to trust, to meaning, to the brand promise, to the employee experience, and to the company’s ability to create demand? That is not turf-grabbing. That is customer stewardship.”
AI transformation also needs the various CMO species on hand to guide and protect an organisation, both internally and externally. “It needs a chief mutiny officer because someone has to challenge the old assumptions,” says Cohen. “It needs a chief meaning officer because someone has to explain why this change matters to customers, employees and the business beyond ‘the tool is shiny’.
“It needs a chief momentum officer because someone has to get the thing out of the keynote deck and into the operating rhythm. And it needs a chief missing officer because the only way a transformation works is by building coalitions across IT, finance, product, legal, HR and commercial teams – often without standing in the middle of the room shouting, ‘Behold, marketing has arrived’.”
Far beyond being a simple tool, a handy shortcut or prompt for creative thought, AI is playing a major role in how companies make decisions, how teams work and, ultimately, how trust is built. Along with automation, data infrastructure and customer platforms, tech is changing completely how organisations operate. “The CMO’s survival intelligence has to evolve from ‘being good at marketing’ to being good at organisational mutation,” Cohen adds.
That means the most successful marketing leaders will possess the ability to think across financial, technological, operational and organisational boundaries. And it’s not just the marketing department that’s going through changes; chief financial officers are increasingly being growth strategists, while chief technology officer roles dovetail with customer experience and HR leaders have a responsibility for culture and organisational adaptability, as much as managing talent.
It’s all part of a larger shift that encompasses the whole C-suite and has paved the way for a more fluid organisational structure and approach. “The executives who thrive will be the ones who can connect silos and translate complexity across the organisation,” Harris says.
Cohen points out that it’s invariably the marketing suite that is expected to embrace such transformation and provide guidelines and resources for others to follow: “Culture changes. Customers change. Channels change. Technology changes. Expectations change. And then marketing gets blamed for not predicting all of it by Tuesday. So the CMO has had to evolve earlier than some of the other functions.”
And just to underline again that none of this means the end of the CMO as we know and love it: “I don’t think any role is dead, but I do think the era of purely command-and-control leadership is fading,” says Harris. “What the report really suggests is that influence is replacing hierarchy as the defining leadership capability.
“The leaders who thrive won’t necessarily be the ones with the most authority, but rather the ones best able to interpret change, connect disciplines and help organisations adapt in real time. In that sense, the future CEO may actually look more like the modern CMO than people expect.”
An online tool allows users to determine their individual marketing species. Find out your CMO type here. Download the Confessions of a CMO report here.