The FT recently ran a piece on the future of the CMO role. Every source was an agency, holdco, or trade body executive. Not one brand-side CMO.
What follows in that piece is a consensus view of the job written by the people who have a commercial stake in the complexity they describe. The verbs are telling. CMOs are described as "operating," "connecting," "integrating" systems. Not building them, not owning them.
That framing is not accidental. When the people defining what the CMO role should be are the same people selling the systems those CMOs depend on, the definition will always favour dependency over capability. The incentive is structural, not malicious.
The distinction matters because it shapes what gets prioritised. A CMO who is "integrating systems" is managing vendor relationships. A CMO who is "building systems" is accumulating institutional capability. One of those positions compounds. The other resets every contract cycle.
The diagnostic question is simple. At the end of your current agency and platform relationships, what does your brand own that it did not own at the start? If the honest answer is "access to good reporting," the framing in that FT piece describes your situation accurately.
If you are a brand looking for an independent view of where your marketing intelligence is accumulating and what it would take to own it, book a conversation.
#OwnYourIntelligence
