I’ve worked closely with CMOs for over 15 years and I’ve seen the rise and fall of great CMOs in different stages of the digital evolution.
And it’s true that disempowerment has been notable, especially around 2018-2023, with the massive influx of VC capital, startups burning deep with freemium models that don’t pan out.
(By the way, the tokenomics right now will bite us similarly – it’s just that very few companies are so token-gracious, unlike tens of thousands of SaaS and cloud businesses in the past years).
My friend Steve Patti has been ringing the bell for years, too – CMOs controlling just 1 to 2 of the 4Ps in marketing, and outside of product and pricing teams.
But the rise of private equity acquisitions within the lower mid-market (and even $10M – $25M businesses under) has enabled CMOs to elevate through agentic systems, especially when exposed to entirely new audiences – via roll-ups or synergies. This gives them an unfair advantage that we see daily, working with several PE portfolio CMOs every week, delivering with miraculous velocity.
“In a new Boston Consulting Group survey published last week, 90% of CMOs said generative AI is already reshaping how consumers discover and evaluate brands, making visibility in AI-powered recommendation and discovery systems a new competitive battleground,” per Fortune’s piece.
Conquering new mediums (like AI SEO), monitoring reddit threads and Facebook group conversations, providing industry reports and building tools faster with LLMs for Slack industry groups or on-site events. There’s much going on today – bundled with traffic deanonymization and traditional SEM/PPC or quality ABM enrichment.
Welcome back to the stage to my all friends and industry peers who have been benched or on the sidelines during the peak of B2B SaaS or VC NFT/crypto days, and now making traditional industries great again.
