#BizTrends2026 | Tom Kaneshige on how CMOs seized strategy in an age of chaos
Every few years, talking heads lament the chief marketing officer role as too tactical, too soft, too replaceable. Yet marketing leadership keeps reappearing, albeit under more pressure and more scrutiny. The truth is that the CMO role is being rewritten in real time to match a world that no longer behaves predictably.
22 Jan 2026
The CMO Council’s chief content officer Tom Kaneshige says the CMO role is being rewritten in real time to match a world that no longer behaves predictably (Image supplied)
As digital platforms multiplied, data exploded, and trust became harder to earn and easier to lose, marketing was pulled closer to the centre of the enterprise.
What once looked like creative leadership became a high-stakes exercise in judgment, coordination, and accountability. This is the context in which the modern CMO emerged.
Shock to the system
In the early 2000s, marketing faced digital chaos. Brands lost control of the narrative as customers gained voice over multiple platforms.
Trust shifted away from corporate messaging toward peer validation. Marketing moved from broadcasting to listening.
The CMO title spread quickly during this period, but the role lagged behind reality.
Many CMOs were still measured on visibility and creative output while being asked to manage a system they didn’t fully own. Marketing grew in scope before it grew in authority.
Further, economic shocks, collapsing tech optimism and immature digital infrastructure made it clear that marketing was becoming more central at exactly the moment its operating model was least prepared.
Growth became the job
By the 2010s, marketing came face-to-face with data disruption and an expanded mandate.
CMOs were no longer expected to simply build brands. They had to apply insights to business problems, validate decisions with data, orchestrate seamless customer experiences, and embed customer centricity across the enterprise.
In other words, data stopped being optional; personalisation was no longer theoretical; customer experience became measurable.
Marketing’s work could now be traced—sometimes uncomfortably—back to business outcomes.
This is when the CMO role truly changed.
Marketing leaders were no longer judged solely on creativity or brand health. They were expected to show growth, justify investment and coordinate across product, sales, technology and operations.
But maturity brought fragmentation.
Instead of clarifying the role, organisations responded by slicing it into pieces and fueling experimentation with new titles, such as chief customer officer, chief customer experience officer, and chief growth officer.
The explosion of adjacent titles was less a power grab than a coping mechanism for growing complexity.
Where we are today
Fast forward to today, and the marketing landscape is unrecognisable.
Global marketing spend is projected to hit $1.14tr this year, with roughly 75% going to digital advertising.
Social media users have surged to 5.25 billion globally. Platforms and content creators have skyrocketed. Consumer attention is algorithmic.
Yes, fewer organisations are hiring CMOs in the traditional sense. But the responsibilities have expanded and fused with core business leadership.
Marketing accountability now shows up inside roles that combine growth, analytics, customer value and commercial strategy.
What matters now is a leader who can integrate insight, technology, narrative and economics into a coherent growth system.
Modern marketing leadership is about managing complexity. This means making tradeoffs between speed and trust, translating data into decisions, and orchestrating human judgment alongside automation.
The AI inflection point
What makes this moment different from previous cycles of change is not the pace of innovation but the nature of it.
AI is not another channel or platform layered onto marketing. Rather, it’s a force that accelerates marketing execution and insight at scale, reshapes marketing workflows, exposes inefficiencies and weak strategies, blurs functional boundaries, etc.
For CMOs, this creates a new mandate. The challenge is no longer whether teams can produce more content, launch more campaigns or optimise faster.
The challenge is determining where automation adds value and where human judgment must remain firmly in control.
Decisions about data use, personalisation, transparency, and customer trust are no longer abstract principles.
An uncomfortable truth
Marketing didn’t lose power as it became more accountable—it lost cover. I
In an environment shaped by the emergence of AI, rise of platforms and shifting consumer behaviour, there is far less room to hide.
This is marketing’s uncomfortable truth.
Marketing leadership is now judged by its ability to align promise with performance, balance automation with judgment, and translate customer understanding into sustained business value.
(The CMO Council’s free online self-assessment benchmarks how your MarTech investments are translating into stronger campaigns, greater market competitiveness, and measurable business growth.)
While tools, channels and expectations have changed dramatically since 2001, the strategic importance of marketing has only increased.
Marketing leadership has become structural to enterprise success, and those prepared to own that reality will shape the next 25 years rather than be shaped by them.
(As the CMO Council marks its 25th anniversary, [[https://www.cmocouncil.org/expert-views/pov expert views on how the CMO role has evolved and what it now demands.)
About Tom Kaneshige
Chief Content Officer at CMO Council. He creates all forms of digital thought leadership content that helps chief marketers, line of business leaders, and growth and revenue officers succeed in their rapidly evolving roles. As a content marketing strategist, he helps vendors shape and influence demand for their products and services.
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