While the chief marketing officer (CMO) post isn’t about to disappear tomorrow, it’s impossible to ignore the mounting evidence of its steady erosion.
As ADWEEK reported in August, the average CMO tenure slipped from 4.1 years in 2024 to 3.9 years in 2025. Last year, 63% of Fortune 500 companies had CMOs—but in 2025, that figure had dropped by 5%.
It gets worse. A McKinsey paper released in June noted that “CFOs often view marketing as a cost center rather than an investment.” And 2025 data gathered by marketing firm Boathouse reveals that 14% of CEOs admit to having thought about eliminating the CMO’s position.
Scary? Very much so. But despite the numbers, CMOs themselves are not as fatalistic about their futures.
During a roundtable discussion at ADWEEK House: Advertising HQ on Thursday, ADWEEK chief brand and community officer Jenny Rooney invited three leading CMOs to challenge the notion that marketers are an endangered species in the C-suite—and support that counter-narrative with reasons why CMOs still matter.
Alison Hiatt of Vera Bradley, Uzma Rawn Dowler of Major League Baseball, and Christie Sclater of Clinique suggested ways CMOs can convey their relevance to CEOs under pressure to cut costs and increasingly looking to AI as a panacea. Here are a few of them.
Be more than a marketer
Today, a CMO’s job responsibilities stretch far beyond the traditional boundaries of advertising and promotion, but CFOs and CEOs often do not fully appreciate that. So it falls to the chief marketer not just to advocate for what they do, but also to translate it.
“The CMO role, in my mind, is like a get-shit-done officer,” Dowler said. “The ‘C’ and the ‘O’ are there, and then in the middle you should just put whatever you need to put in there, because our roles are not just marketing.”
Market to your customers, not yourself
Results-obsessed and increasingly skeptical chief executives may be more likely to question the thinking behind, or validity of, an advertising campaign or marketing strategy. It’s probably a good idea to remind other corporate chiefs that they don’t need to get the idea.
“If they have [skeptical] opinions about certain things, it’s okay—you have to remind them, ‘Hey, this actually isn’t meant for you,’” Dowler said. “But we have all this data and research to show that it will resonate for the people that it is meant for.”
Get ahead of AI
As generative AI gets more advanced, the C-suite will be even more likely to question roles like the CMO and creative director, or even the marketing department overall. Rightly or not, it will fall to the CMO to explain AI’s place, and marketing’s place above it.
“AI is a tool, not a strategy,” said Hiatt, who added that CEOs should remember that CMOs aren’t selling a clever idea, they’re delivering what a brand needs most—consumers. “At the end of the day, with marketing, you’re buying a customer,” she said. “We’re not talking about that enough.”
Explain why leadership is critical
Sclater pointed out that while AI may be able to generate content, that’s no replacement for a marketing leader that can serve as coach, interlocutor, decision maker, and innovator.
“In the absence of a CMO, we’re just running a relay race, and business becomes the handoff to another handoff—by the time you get to the end, where is the customer?” Sclater said. “There will always be a need to bring things together, to bring ideas together around a central mission of serving a customer.”
Maintain consistency where algorithms can’t
As AI is able to generate endless permutations of a brand AI, the CMO ultimately becomes the last guarantor of tradition, recognizability, and solidity.
“The CMO holds tight to the brand,” Sclater said. “If there isn’t a place where the purity or the essence is distilled and strong, inherently the algorithm will move to create different versions of it. The CMO at its best is also kind of keeping that purity, keeping that consistency.”
