The CMO role was created when the marketing discipline was coherent enough to be led by a single generalist with broad marketing expertise. The discipline has since fragmented into specialisms that require fundamentally different skill sets and the role has tried to absorb them all without changing its fundamental design.
In 2000, a CMO needed to understand brand, creative, media planning, and PR. The specialisms were related enough that a generalist with strong instincts could lead across them.
In 2026, the CMO needs to understand programmatic advertising, first-party data architecture, marketing mix modelling, incrementality testing, conversion rate optimisation, CRM automation, content strategy, SEO and generative AI citation mechanics, influencer commercial mechanics, retail media, and the product and data infrastructure that connects all of those things.
Those are not extensions of brand and creative expertise. They are distinct technical disciplines that require years of deep specialisation to practise at a senior level. No single CMO has genuine deep expertise across all of them. Every CMO has a specialism they came from and a set of adjacent disciplines they manage through the team rather than understanding operationally.
The role is asking one person to be coherent across a discipline that has become incoherent. The model needs revision, not the person.
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