The CMO is dead. Long live the CMO.

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Every few months, someone declares the CMO extinct. The headlines write themselves: shrinking tenures, budget cuts, the role carved up and redistributed to an alphabet soup of newer, shinier titles. CGO. CXO. CRO. The conference circuit loves this narrative. LinkedIn absolutely feasts on it.

And yet.

Speak to actual CMOs (not on stage, not for attribution, but properly off the record) and a different picture emerges. A species doing what species have always done when the environment turns hostile: adapting.

This is the premise behind "Confessions of a CMO," a new piece of research from Worldwide Partners and Jon Evans of the Uncensored CMO podcast. The methodology matters here. Thirty CMOs across industries and continents, speaking under Chatham House rules, encouraged to reflect on moments of swagger, adversity and risk. No surveys. No sanitised quotes for the press release. Just confession.

What they heard was a masterclass in corporate evolution.

Consider the CMO who, faced with a sceptical board, didn't ask permission for an unconventional sponsorship. They just put the logos on the wall and waited. By the time anyone thought to object, there was already data. "Now everyone is like, yeah, that's so obvious," they said. "At the time, they thought it was crazy."

Or the marketing leader who reframed a controversial spend as acquisition efficiency rather than brand building. The CFO had resisted backing a niche sport, dismissing it as frivolous. So the CMO translated: this will bring awareness at one-third the cost of paid media. Suddenly it looked irresponsible not to spend the money.

Or (and this one's particularly good) the CMO who watched a finance executive dismiss their entire function as "the colouring-in department." Rather than defending or retaliating, they made a quip about how expensive the crayons were. Everyone laughed, including the CFO. The tension dissolved. A few minutes later, that same exec was asking for marketing's input on a pricing brief.

These are tales of quiet reinvention. Of trading authority for influence. Of learning to read the room rather than command it.

The report frames all this through an evolutionary lens: taxonomy, species, adaptive traits. A bit cute, but it works. The old-school CMO was a dominant force: charismatic, creative, culturally influential. That archetype has splintered into specialist variants. The Chief Mutiny Officer, who thrives on productive disruption. The Chief Missing Officer, who operates through strategic invisibility. The Chief Mood Officer, who controls the emotional temperature of decision-making.

What's striking is how this inverts the traditional model of creative leadership. The old CMO commanded attention. These new variants redirect it. The report calls it "emotional alchemy": the ability to transform negative energy into forward motion. For leaders who advance agendas through influence rather than authority, humour may be their last real form of control.

A genuinely useful reframe. Most marketing leaders have been taught that the path to credibility runs through measurement, business cases, speaking the language of finance. And that's true, as far as it goes. But the CMOs in this research have developed something subtler: the affective and rhetorical cues that make financial fluency believable when it comes out of a creative's mouth. Having the numbers is table stakes. You have to deliver them like someone who runs things, not someone trying to sell something.

What unites the survivors is a shared understanding that the game has changed. You don't sell ideas to the board anymore. You create conditions for alignment. You win arguments by stating things so obvious that everyone's too embarrassed to disagree.

One CMO put it beautifully: "Half my job is saying out loud what everyone's pretending isn't true."

Another described hours of meetings debating customer lifetime value through frameworks and KPIs, until someone finally observed that they'd simply stopped saying thank you to customers. That was the breakthrough. Remembering their manners.

There's something almost subversive about this research. The marketing industry spends enormous energy worrying about its seat at the table, its credibility with the CFO, its measurability credentials. And here are thirty senior marketers essentially saying: yes, the pressure is real, but the ones who survive aren't fighting it. They're flowing around it.

The Momentum Officer who calls everything a pilot, because when it's framed as a test, debate ends and data decides. The Meaning Officer who brings the same segmentation tools to HR that they'd use for customers, and suddenly finds common language across silos. The leader who absorbs the irrational opinions everyone has about logos and colours and what their wife thinks. Fielding absurdity as the work itself.

"Marketing is the lightning rod for every irrational thing a company does," one confessed. "So you learn that your job isn't to avoid the absurdity. It's to field it."

So is the CMO dying? The data suggests otherwise. McKinsey research cited in the report finds that companies see 1.4x higher top-line performance when CMOs lead customer-centric growth. When that leadership is fully integrated, growth doubles again.

What's dying is a particular version of the role. The lone wolf creative. The grand presenter. The leader whose authority derived from the sheer quality of their ideas rather than their ability to navigate the political reality of making those ideas survive.

What's emerging is a cohort of marketing leaders who've developed, as the report puts it, "new organs of survival": built for sensing, interpreting and metabolising change. They don't command the organism. They act as its nervous system.

The next time someone declares the CMO obsolete, remember that the role has always been a strange hybrid: part artist, part translator, part lightning rod. The leaders who thrive now have learned to make good ideas look inevitable, and to disappear just enough that nobody thinks to kill them.

The full report is worth the read: Confessions of a CMO

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Amar Chohan, Founder and CEO - Department of Creative Affairs.