Your CMO is the most senior marketing person in the business. There is therefore nobody inside the organisation above them in the function who can provide a genuinely independent read of whether the commercial system they are operating is working as well as it should.
This is the structural blind spot that sits at the top of every marketing function in every digital business and that nobody names directly because naming it implies a criticism of the individual in the role rather than the design of the role itself.
The CMO is inside the system they are evaluating. They built parts of it. They approved parts of it. They are accountable for its performance and that accountability shapes, in ways that are subtle and largely unconscious, the read they are able to produce of a system in which they have a professional stake.
This is not a character flaw. It is the structural consequence of asking the person accountable for a system's performance to also provide the most critical read of that system. Surgeons do not operate on themselves. Barristers do not represent themselves. The CMO cannot be both the operator of the commercial system and the independent examiner of it.
The independent read requires someone outside the system. That is a structural requirement, not a personal one.
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