CMO 2.0

The fact that the average tenure of a big-company CMO continues to hover around a measly two years is well documented in repeated Spencer Stuart studies. It has been suggested that part of the reason for this rapid turnover is the tremendous pressure now exerted on CMOs to quickly demonstrate tangible, high-return results for their marketing expenditures and efforts. While I think that pressure is real and causative to the CMO revolving door, I think there is a deeper reason behind the volatility of this position: namely, there are a lot of CMO 1.0 executives in what has rapidly become a CMO 2.0 world.

Marketing has changed more in the last five years than it did in the previous 50. Many CMOs today have a professional pedigree rooted in the 1.0 world of top-down, mass-media advertising, not the rapidly evolved world of contemporary marketing ushered in by social media and other changes associated with the Web 2.0 concept. In the previous CMO 1.0 era, long-cycle campaigns were orchestrated from a top-down perspective. In addition, results were measured over a long time frame and those numbers were seldom current enough to provide insight into new marketing strategies in all but a peripheral way.

Today, not only must companies attempt to find CMOs that have sufficient knowledge and experience with new marketing methodologies, but they also need people in that position that can lead their teams to rapidly collect and process marketing data and distill that data into insights that can be used in the next marketing cycle. In other words, the game has changed and people that were once well-suited to the CMO position based on a long heritage of traditional marketing prowess, are often overwhelmed by the rapidity and complexity of change brought about by the substantial shift to online marketing. And, even though traditional media remains a big part of many companies’ marketing efforts, increasingly offline components are now being relegated to auxiliary or feeder efforts to online programs.

I suspect the CMO position will continue to be a trouble spot for many companies until the changing of the guard in marketing replaces CMO 1.0 thinking and capabilities with enlightened CMO 2.0 leaders that are eager to utilize their knowledge and experience to harness incredibly powerful news tools to do what is expected: get results.