We killed the CMO.

Marketing spent years trying to prove its value. Now it’s being judged by the very rules it created.

Every piece I’ve read this year about the death of the CMO seems to have the same list of villains.

The CFO who won’t fund brand.

The CEO who doesn’t get marketing.

The board that wants growth this quarter.

AI, obviously.

Maybe all of that is true.

But it also lets marketers off far too easily.

Because nobody wants to say the obvious thing.

We did this.

Not someone else.

Us.

The people with “marketing” still written somewhere on the business card.

I write about brand, marketing and leadership for people trying to think a little more clearly about how businesses grow.

Spencer Stuart says 31% of S&P 500 companies now operate without an enterprise CMO. In some businesses, it has been absorbed into commercial. In others, it sits under growth, revenue, customer, brand, or operations. Pick the title. The pattern is the same: marketing lost clarity, then lost territory.

And the CEO relationship is not exactly glowing either. In Boathouse’s latest CEO study, only 15% of CEOs gave their CMO an A grade, down from 24% the year before. That does not mean every CMO is failing. But it does suggest something more uncomfortable: the role is visible, expensive, and increasingly hard to defend.

The easy explanation is that CEOs have become short-term. CFOs have become too powerful. Boards have lost patience. AI has changed the game.

The harder explanation is that marketing trained the business to see it this way.

For the last fifteen years, marketing has been asking to be taken seriously. And the pitch was always the same.

Give us the seat.

Give us the budget.

Give us the data.

And we will prove the return.

So we built the dashboards. We bought the attribution tools. We learned to talk in CAC, ROAS, pipeline, conversion paths, revenue influence and payback periods.

It worked for a while.

We got the seat.

We got the budget.

Then we got found out.

Because the moment you reduce marketing to a number, finance owns the number. And once finance owns the number, the marketer becomes easier to remove.

That is the trap.

Marketing wanted to prove it was commercial. Fair enough. It had to. Too much bad marketing had hidden behind vague words for too long.

But somewhere along the way, we made a bad trade.

We stopped using numbers to support judgement.

And started using numbers instead of judgement.

That is not the same thing.

I have seen this play out in real life.

A marketing leader walks into a quarterly review with a deck full of last-click conversion paths, channel performance, paid media efficiency and a ROAS chart that goes up and to the right.

The CFO nods.

The CEO nods.

Everyone feels sensible.

Then six months later, the same marketing leader asks for £200k for a brand campaign. No clean attribution. No direct return. No neat number at the bottom of the page.

The same CFO and CEO now ask the obvious question.

“What do we get back?”

And the marketer starts talking about brand equity. Long-term demand. Mental availability. Salience. Future preference.

All valid.

All important.

But it is already too late.

Because for two years, that same marketer trained the business to value marketing through short-term numbers. Now, when the work actually requires belief, judgement and patience, the business quite reasonably asks where the spreadsheet has gone.

That is not a CFO problem.

That is a marketing leader writing their own job description and then being surprised when someone reads it back to them.

AI did not start this.

It just removed the hiding places.

Forrester’s view is that AI is not ending the CMO role. It is forcing it to move up. Less day-to-day orchestration. Less campaign management. More enterprise-level decisions about growth, investment, automation, brand trust and where human judgement still matters.

That is the bit a lot of marketers should be worried about.

Because if your value is that you run the funnel, coordinate agencies, review campaigns, manage reporting and optimise spend, then yes, parts of your job are going to get eaten.

Not because AI understands marketing better than you.

Because you defined marketing as a set of repeatable tasks.

And repeatable tasks are exactly what technology comes for.

The CMOs who keep their seat will be the ones completely focused on leadership.

They will be able to sit in a boardroom and say:

No, we should not put more money into performance this quarter.

No, the cheaper creative route is not the better commercial decision.

No, not every valuable thing will show up in the dashboard by Friday.

No, brand is not a mood board. It is how the market remembers, trusts and chooses us.

But they will not say it in fluffy language.

They will be able to connect brand to pricing power, margin, recruitment, retention, category entry points, sales efficiency, customer confidence and long-term growth.

That is the job.

Not making marketing sound creative.

Not making marketing sound accountable.

Making marketing matter to the business before the business has to ask why it exists.

That is much harder than running a dashboard.

It takes taste. Judgement. Commercial understanding. Patience. A point of view. The credibility to defend that point of view when the spreadsheet is incomplete.

And, yes, a CEO who trusts you enough to let you be wrong sometimes.

But that trust does not come from reports.

It comes from being useful at the level where the real decisions are made.

The CMO is not dying.

The weak version of the role is.

The version that became too tactical to be strategic, too obsessed with proof to build belief, too close to performance marketing to own the market.

That version probably should disappear.

If you are coming up in marketing now, take the warning.

Your job is not to prove marketing works.

Your job is to do marketing that works.

The last generation got those two things confused.

And the chair they are losing is the one they spent fifteen years optimising themselves out of.

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