☕ Status update
How the CMO role is being rewritten.
Marketing Brew <[email protected]>
Morning Brew presents a status update, discussing the role of the Chief Marketing Officer. The brand shares findings from a recent survey, highlighting the importance and pressures of the CMO position. It also touches on the expanded responsibilities of CMOs, including AI strategy and PR duties.
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593 words · about 2 min to read
September 30, 2026
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Sponsor Logo: Elevate from monday.com
It’s Wednesday. Winter Olympics darling Alysa Liu recently joined Sephora as SVP of Gen Z strategy. It’s only a fictional position in the brand’s episodic social series, but we’re hoping we can get her real take on whether bringing an iced coffee at a job interview is appropriate.
In today’s edition:
The state of the CMO, part one 💻
Marketing, uncorked 🍷
You’ve got a friend in me 🎙️
—Kristina Monllos, Alyssa Meyers
BRAND STRATEGY
The CMO conundrum
Collage of a team collaborating around laptops, a blurred woman in motion, and icons for a target, megaphone, and sparkle, on a teal background.
Morning Brew Inc.
How can a role be crucial and yet not necessary full-time?
Six in 10 respondents to a recent Marketing Brew survey agreed with the statement that the role has become more important than it was five years ago, and 3 in 4 agreed with the statement that marketing “has a strong voice in shaping my company’s overall business strategy.” But just 17% said they believe every company needs a full-time CMO.
For the survey, we asked a segment of our audience about the future of the CMO role, the biggest pressures practitioners are facing, and how AI is changing the conversation. More than 450 Marketing Brew newsletter readers participated in a custom survey, which was fielded July 13 through July 31.
Call these first findings the CMO conundrum. The role may be one of the most questioned in the C-suite, with lingering reputational baggage as a cost center that often makes CMOs feel pressure to prove their worth to the rest of the C-suite and beyond.
At the same time, the remit of the role has expanded, with CMOs telling Marketing Brew that they’ve had new responsibilities added to their plate. Two-thirds (65%) said AI strategy and governance duties have been added, while nearly half (48%) said they’re now taking on PR/external communications duties. A similarly high number of respondents (46%) said entertainment/culture/partnership strategies have been added to their purview.
That could help explain why many CMO roles have gone through a refresh. Titles like chief customer and marketing officer, chief marketing and communications officer, and chief marketing and transformation officer are reflecting the new, expanded reality of the role. Meanwhile, some companies have dropped top marketing titles altogether, opting to have chief growth officers oversee the duties a CMO may have previously handled.
Those title shifts are quite common now, according to Nick Primola, group EVP at the Association of National Advertisers and head of the organization’s Global CMO Growth Council. A clean CMO title, he told us, is becoming increasingly “rare,” and that “even if it is a clean CMO [title], the role underneath it has expanded.”
Read more from our State of the CMO report here.—KM
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Sponsored By Elevate from monday.com
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Sponsor: Elevate from monday.com
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Sessions will cover:
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