Marketing ‘sliding to the side’ of the boardroom. How can CMOs fight back?

Conducted in partnership with the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), the research is based on interviews of 100 CMOs, CEOs and chief financial officers (CFOs) at Fortune 1000 companies. Now in its second year, it found a marked drop in the number of CEOs reporting that marketing is “clearly defined and understood” by the C-suite, from 90% last year to 70% this year.

According to the research, there is one thing CEOs and CMOs agree upon: that marketing departments are underfunded, at 80% and 77% respectively.

From interviews with CEOs, the report concludes damningly that “CEOs still don’t seem to understand the full power of marketing” and that “in many organizations, the remit of marketing has been limited in scope, with CMOs having little or no input on strategy.” One CEO is quoted as saying: “CFOs often view marketing as a cost center, rather than an investment.”

With the boardroom itself getting busier – the average Fortune 100 executive team has grown in number by 50% since 2000, the report finds – there’s a risk that senior marketers will get lost in the jungle. That’s if there is a senior marketer in the room: the report cites research from Spencer Stuart that found a decline in the number of CMOs at Fortune 500 companies, from 71% in 2023 to 66% in 2024.

The report calls for remedial action to put marketing leaders back at the center of the C-suite as “the primary custodian of the customer,” reinstating the marketing department as the “engine of growth.”

Easier said than done, perhaps. The Drum sat down with the report’s co-author, Robert Tas, a veteran marketer himself, for a primer on what top marketers can do to reassert themselves.

1. CMOs should become ‘general managers’

“The CEO’s quest for growth has fractured the four Ps,” Tas says. In that expanded boardroom, product and promotions might sit in their own teams, price might be one of those strategic decisions that marketing’s frozen out from and place might sit with insights teams, for example.

The result is that factors that were once in a marketing leader’s gift are now “fractured across the organization.” It’s a trend that will only continue, Tas says, unless CMOs tackle it now by tooling up to be ‘general managers’ within their organizations, with expertise across these disciplines and access to their dispersed practitioners.

2. ‘Own the customer’

The result of fragmentation, Tas says, is that “companies often don’t know who owns the customer, who’s advocating for the customer or who’s removing friction across the organization… We’re really big advocates that the CMO is best suited to be the custodian of the customer across the enterprise.”

Thus the guiding light of this ‘general manager CMO,’ Tas says, should be organizing all those disparate functions and disciplines in service of building a focal point of customer-centricity in the boardroom.

According to the report, there’s a clear correlation between organizational structures that make room for this kind of customer champion at the higher level and performance. It finds that top companies with a “single customer- or growth-oriented role in an executive committee” (like a CMO) see on average over double the growth rates of those without.

3. Don’t wrap yourself up in a muddle of measurement

A disconnect highlighted by the report is on CMO and CEO opinions on CEOs’ understanding of the present (admittedly complicated) marketing environment. While most (65%) CEOs say they feel comfortable with modern marketing, 70% of their CMOs say that their CEO is not comfortable. That’s a 5% increase since last year.

The disconnect is perhaps unsurprising, Tas says, given how few CEOs have direct experience of marketing – fewer than 10% have any direct experience in a marketing department, so “many CEOs don’t really understand the power of marketing.”

Marketers may also be freer than some of their colleagues to take a long view – one that, of course, incorporates factors such as brand growth beyond the immediacy of sales and revenue. “Every CEO we talk to has what some might call a short-term focus on revenue and margin impact – as they should, their stakeholders want to see how their businesses are moving up into the right. The CMO needs to be able to connect marketing activities to those business outcomes.”

Arguably, the marketing discipline has strayed in this regard in recent years, racking up new and deeper and narrower ways to measure everything they can, rather than boiling down to the measurements that matter. “I think that marketers have this curiosity and want to measure everything, which is fantastic, by the way,” Tas says. “I think that we need to move from ‘what are our marketing measurements and marketing tools that I need to do the job’ to ‘what are the tools that my company needs and systems that I need to make business decisions?’… We’re not saying that there aren’t tons of measurement things the CMO should go do; they absolutely should. But we are saying that the CMO with the CFO, should create a measurement framework that the C-suite buys into and can abide by for strategic business decision making.

“It’s not that the CMOs’ metrics are wrong – click-through rates and return-on-ad-spend and click-through rates: all those things are good and they’re things that you need to do to do the job. But that’s not what your CEO needs to hear. It’s not what the board needs to hear. You need to map marketing to the strategy of the business and show how you’re driving growth.”

4. So keep learning the language of the CFO

The report finds a gap in the metrics that matter to CEOs and those that CMOs spend their time on: 70% of CEOs measure marketing impact based on year-on-year growth and margin, while only 35% of CMOs track that as a top metric.

The report also finds a drop since last year in the portion of marketers who say that they understand how their marketing KPIs align with wider growth KPIs.

“Go partner with your CFO on measurement,” Tas says. “Make sure that you have a systematic way to talk about how marketing drives business impact and that there’s clarity: no ambiguity, no black box… You, as the lead marketing person, must be able to talk in a business language, not about speeds and feeds, not about clicks and ROAS and CPCs, but really understanding how you’re driving new customers, cohorts and customer retention.”

5. Continuing upskilling in digital

Behind the averages, Tas says, there’s a clear gap in digital understanding between even high-performing companies. And with digital ad revenues still taking a greater share of the pie every year, those who don’t continue to deepen their digital understanding will fall behind.

For obvious reasons, tech companies largely lead here. “They’re very product-centric, very digital-centric,” Tas says. “Those are things that radically changed the expectations of the customer. I think some large companies still have not moved as well to be digital-first, mobile-first. And I think they are learning to do that and their CMOs are pulling them closer to that, to try to be competitive. That’s a big part of understanding how to be digital-native and to communicate with your customers that way. If Google were a bank, what would it do? It probably wouldn’t have branches, right?”

6. Remember that marketing is only getting more important

Reclaiming space for the marketing department isn’t a zero-sum game that means losses for other disciplines, Tas says. The remit has expanded, the business is tough and a strong marketing function is good for all involved.

“Marketing is more important than ever,” Tas says. “Especially as AI enters the world and the radical remit of every CMO has AI somewhere in between it. As we think about their roles being pushed to do product, e-commerce, digital transformation, all those things, there’s a huge opportunity for companies to connect the dots and really be able to elevate and drive customer growth with their marketing.”