Prior to this pandemic marketing  communications should have been about 8% of the marketing function’s duties. 

However, it increasingly seemed to take up almost all of it along with a sizable budget spend - something that also got 50%-75% ad fraud built in.

As such marketers were becoming more and more responsible for the communication aspects of the marketing mix – with 'paid' social media, PR, CRM and ecommerce all increasingly under their control as the other tactical and strategic challenges dissipate.

If this is the environment that today's CMO and marketing teams have 'earned their craft' then how do they fit into today's world?

In a post Covid advertising budget scarce world just how do they and their teams stay in the role, and relevant to the company?

Today's Senior Marketing CV's are littered with descriptions of 'paid media' digital communications expertise and the awesome results they've delivered - seems very few have ever had shit results BTW!.

This is as a result of years of internal promotions of junior marketing executives into senior marketing people who today know very little about brand marketing other than deploying  'paid media' bullhorn campaigns.

Worse still is the board believing that this is 'marketing' - when in reality is its an echo chamber of what they have always done, and simply stifles growth and innovation. 

It certainly seems like business has lost sight of the wider role of the CMO's ability and expertise in leveraging research and data to identify changes in consumer behaviour, organic growth opportunities, untapped consumers, along with opening up new product opportunities in different sectors and markets. 

Findings suggest that CMOs will have to significantly adapt to hold onto their positions which is now opening up opportunities for the CMOs of yesterday to embrace the role of "CGO" (Chief Growth Officer) and look beyond typical brand advertising and digital communications.

Prior to this crisis the role of the CMO was already seen as a relatively short term tenure.

Losing their jobs every eighteen months

seems to me to be a case of a CMO being employed, given six months to get their feet under the desk and then they try and 'do what they've always done' having told the board how great they were in their previous role.

Then within a year or so, the board decides to fire them for poor performance and the company needs to hire again. 

"The other scenario is that the board keep changing the goal posts because of poor performance and the dutiful CMO does as they're told and get fired anyway because they didn't speak up, simply because they're not going to tell their paymasters they're wrong or they don't know any better and just did as they were told"

Companies who thought they had years to transform have just had a very nasty wake up call.

The seemingly mismatch between a board simply needing execution of an existing strategy (more of the same please) yet hiring for growth tends to be at the heart of the CMO turnstile.

Pre Covid (hopefully not post) companies would run the recruitment and interview process, a process that was/is significantly biased towards the paid media digital communication expertise a Marketing Director/CMO or marketing lead could bring - just check out any job role description for a marketing head on LinkedIn and you will see the absurdity of the incremental bias. 

Is this really the extent of what businesses need from it's marketing leaders, and from those future leaders who are coming through today's marketing departments?

The demands and expectations of CMOs and marketing teams will continue to evolve, but this time it's at Covid speed - not corporate!.