Magda Paslaru

expert panel

Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose; the same is true of brand authority. It can't be purchased with a bigger ad budget or manufactured through a clever campaign. The brands that earn it do so by being consistently useful, credible and clear about what they stand for. Buyers today are flooded with claims for their attention, and they’re savvy. They’ll simply tune out generic, promotional brand messaging that shows no understanding of their real needs. Conversely, a coherent narrative backed by genuine expertise and validated by real outcomes becomes something customers actively seek out. A brand that masters that kind of messaging shifts from just another seller to a trusted resource and, eventually, to the obvious choice.So what questions do businesses need to ask and answer about themselves, and how can they build brand authority systematically rather than accidentally? And how do the pieces—narrative clarity, a distinctive value proposition, subject matter expertise and proof points—fit together into a winning strategy that compounds over time? Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank discuss what this kind of disciplined approach to brand building looks like in practice, sharing their expertise in establishing the kind of authority that customers trust and actively seek out.

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A CFO scanning a marketing report sees it through a completely different lens than a CIO or a CCO. And if a CMO doesn’t address each C-suite member’s priorities and perspective when reporting results, it’s unlikely they’ll effectively pitch their vision for ongoing marketing strategy. For a CMO, building trust across C-suite relationships isn’t just a soft skill; it’s a core competency that separates leaders who drive brand momentum and bottom-line growth from those who simply draft and schedule routine marketing content. A CMO who falls back on industry jargon and data points instead of learning the language of finance, technology or customer operations undercuts and undersells their team’s impact. Marketing comes to be seen as a cost center rather than a strategic driver: perpetually on defense, justifying spend instead of shaping decisions. But CMOs who learn to translate their work into terms that resonate with their C-suite peers don’t just earn goodwill; they earn a seat at the table when it matters most. That balancing act is especially important in a digital age, when CMOs need input from peers and cross-functional collaboration to optimize customer experience and trust. So what does effective C-suite relationship management actually look like in practice, and where do well-intentioned CMOs most often get it wrong? Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank weigh in. With deep expertise spanning brand strategy, digital marketing, customer engagement and executive leadership, these industry leaders offer hard-won perspective on how CMOs can translate marketing’s business value in terms the whole C-suite understands and build the cross-functional trust that turns alignment from aspiration into advantage.

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Automation has a way of making marketing systems look busy—and therefore, healthy. Dashboards fill up, campaigns launch on schedule and follow-up happens at machine speed, creating the impression that marketing teams are becoming more efficient and effective.  But activity isn’t the same as results. For a growing number of marketing organizations, automation has become a way to run faster in the wrong direction. Automation doesn’t fix fuzzy underlying strategies, scattered data or poorly defined handoffs between marketing, sales and product teams. It just moves them out of sight. A workflow that runs smoothly isn’t necessarily a workflow that works. Further, tool sprawl can leave teams struggling to manage and achieve ROI from an ever-growing, unchecked tech stack.  That’s the uncomfortable reality many CMOs are grappling with right now. The proliferation of martech tools has made it easier than ever to automate nearly every touchpoint in the customer journey, yet in too many cases, revenue stalls, churn climbs and teams struggle to explain how—or if—automation is making a positive difference. The real job, then, isn’t just adopting better tools. It’s figuring out what the underlying problem is and whether technology will merely simply help a flawed process fail more elegantly. Members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank—a curated group of marketing leaders with deep expertise in digital advertising and technology’s growing role in marketing—have been at the forefront of the AI revolution. Here, they break down the process flaws automation most commonly conceals and share practical diagnostics to help CMOs build on solid ground before adding more speed.

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Many marketing campaigns are built to grab attention—the scroll-stopper, the headline, the viral hit—with little planning for what comes after. Global ad spending is expected to reach unprecedented levels in 2026—topping $1 trillion—but a viral video, clever headline or packed webinar won’t translate to revenue if follow-through is an afterthought. The problem isn’t the creative; it’s the system.  Marketing campaigns designed as moments in time rather than journeys can’t sustain buyers’ interest, achieve conversions or build customer loyalty on their own. Keeping customers engaged throughout every stage of the buyer journey is essential. Yet, in too many organizations, marketing hands off a lead, sales chases it down, and somewhere in the middle, the momentum built by that clever creative quietly dies.  Marketing teams who focus solely on maximizing clicks, impressions and traffic often celebrate winning before the game is actually over. Tackling the harder work of conversion and retention requires rethinking how campaigns are planned, how teams are structured, and how success gets defined. The question, “Will this get their attention?” must be followed by, “Do we have a plan for what comes next?” Members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank—a curated group of marketing leaders with expertise in brand storytelling, digital advertising, customer engagement and the rise of AI in marketing—have seen this challenge from every angle. Below, several of them share how to design marketing campaigns that are just as intentional about follow-through as they are about reach.

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Customers rarely announce their intention to break ties with a business or abandon a product. Companies must learn to spot and interpret both loyalty and churn signals. Subtle behavioral changes in areas like logins, usage, support interactions and payment activity often show up weeks or months before a customer cancels, but only if teams know where to look and how to interpret what they’re seeing.  As services are increasingly digitized, the problem isn’t a lack of data. It’s knowing which data points actually reveal customer stickiness and which ones are just noise. AI-driven predictive models can help businesses pinpoint and better understand subtle churn signals. But even when leaders know what to look at and where, raw observations don’t move the needle on their own. Turning behavioral cues into measurable retention gains requires discipline, context and a willingness to design proactive interventions that center on real human emotions and reactions. Here, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank tap into their experience and expertise in customer engagement to explain how to separate meaningful loyalty and churn signals from metric clutter, as well as how to translate those insights into action. Their practical strategies can help leaders identify churn risk early, prioritize the right data sources, and build initiatives that don’t just gauge loyalty but actively create it.

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Marketing teams track clicks, conversions, sentiment scores and customer journeys with precision, yet many brands still struggle to convey their unique value. Standard marketing metrics reveal whether a message is being seen and heard by audiences, but not why it is (or isn’t) inspiring customers to take the next step. Marketing teams must learn to surface not just quantitative data but also qualitative insights—that is, they must go beyond vanity marketing metrics to understand and measure persuasion. But that’s just the first challenge. At the November 2025 MarTech conference, Eric Mayhew stressed that a competitive edge comes from combining unique data with a compelling narrative. That observation builds on an insight recognized across disciplines, from education to sales: A well-told story helps audiences learn and retain information far better than a list of facts.  So how can brands pinpoint meaningful insights and weave them into noteworthy narratives? The members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank have deep experience in brand storytelling, digital advertising, customer engagement and the growing role of AI in marketing. Below, a group of them draws on their years of frontline experience to share how marketing teams can uncover differentiating data competitors overlook and transform it into stories customers recognize, repeat and rally around.

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Increasingly strict data usage and privacy regulations have expanded protections for consumers. But for marketing teams and agencies, they’ve rewritten the digital advertising playbook. The ad industry has scrambled to adapt by reworking ad spend, retraining teams and investing in first-party datasets. However, a significant challenge still remains: “Show us the ROI” conversations with C-suites and clients are more difficult than ever.  Third-party cookies are fading, consent banners are everywhere, and platforms keep tightening what can be tracked. With limited access to consumer data, proving performance with concise, data-driven attribution reports is neither as easy nor as reliable as it used to be. When you can’t follow every user breadcrumb, you need a smarter way to connect marketing activity to business outcomes that clients actually care about. So what replaces the old playbook now that the days of detailed digital dashboards are over? In today’s marketplace, the strongest strategies blend tighter targeting, bottom-line proof points and carefully crafted conversations. Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank share what’s working for them as they seek to pinpoint and prove the ROI of their digital marketing.

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Personalization was intended to be the “concierge” of digital marketing: a helpful nudge, a timely reminder or a suggested shortcut that made a customer feel understood. Somewhere along the way, however, personalized marketing started feeling more like a carnival barker with a confetti cannon—loud, distracting and relentless, as well as oddly confident about what you “must” want to see next. And all those sights and sounds aren’t just overwhelming; they’re often off-kilter and off-putting. In one survey, two-thirds of global consumers reported being targeted by inaccurate or invasive marketing.Now, Gartner’s November 2025 report, “Leadership Vision for 2026: Chief Marketing Officer,” adds a sharper warning: Overly aggressive, algorithm-driven personalization can actively weaken trust and leave consumers feeling overwhelmed with information and hesitant or regretful about making purchases. Even so, abandoning personalization altogether isn’t the answer; the majority of consumers still expect personalized interactions and are frustrated if they don’t receive them. So what does “better personalization” look like in 2026, and how can CMOs make customers feel seen, not herded? Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank share their takeaways from the Gartner report as well as practical strategies to help marketing teams produce personalized messaging that’s compelling rather than creepy. 

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CMOs accustomed to a focus on crafting polished brand messages for their own websites and traditional search are waking up to a new digital marketplace. Increasingly, buyers aren’t clicking links on search pages—they’re going to AI assistants to do work-related research, get detailed answers to personal questions, find product recommendations and even manage shopping lists. Brands can no longer rely solely on Google rankings—they need to show up in the AI-generated summaries people read, quote and act on. While a November 2025 Semrush report noted that ChatGPT is citing Reddit and Wikipedia less frequently than it has in the past, they’re still among its top three sources—a signal that “useful” content in the GenAI era often looks less like a polished campaign page and more like a living knowledge base. Companies are responding in a shift that’s been framed as a move toward generative engine optimization (GEO), where visibility increasingly depends on whether your expertise is shared in such a way that it answers real questions and can be pulled, summarized and trusted in AI-driven results.  So what new strategies should marketing leaders pursue in the face of these changes? Here, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank—experts in brand storytelling, digital advertising, customer engagement and the rise of AI in marketing—share what these citation patterns suggest about the content AI models treat as credible and offer practical ways to rethink content and engagement.

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Now that Google is indexing Instagram content, the borders between social and search have been redrawn, turning visually led, storytelling-driven posts into searchable assets. What once existed solely within a brand’s Instagram feed can now appear alongside its most curated web pages, turning an educational carousel or a simple Reel into a potential driver of search discovery. This shift arrives as search behavior continues to transform. A 2024 Statista survey found that 46% of Gen Z respondents prefer social media to search engines to find information, showing that social content increasingly informs which products and services younger consumers find, trust and eventually buy. When Instagram posts meet users at the exact moment of intent, they become more than engagement drivers; they become micro-landing pages capable of pulling new audiences into your ecosystem. Even so, opportunity comes with strategic challenges. Optimize too lightly, and you miss the visibility gains. Optimize too aggressively, and you risk watering down the creativity and authenticity that makes social content worth engaging with in the first place. Here, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank explore how brands can navigate this new search-social convergence, sharing their insights to help marketing teams rethink their approach to Instagram content.

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As bot networks swell and AI tools pump out endless content, it can be hard to separate genuine human input from digital noise in the bustling online marketplace. From fake followers to bot-created faux outrage campaigns, gauging whether your brand is sparking real connection or just attracting automated cheers (or jeers) has become a high-stakes challenge. It’s estimated that bots account for more than 50% of internet traffic—and they’re skewing marketing metrics in their wake. For marketing leaders, this distortion can create dangerous illusions. Dashboards can look healthy—even impressive—but surface-level performance numbers can mask genuine audience behavior, and relying on them can send teams chasing the wrong strategies, the wrong channels and the wrong assumptions about what’s working. Members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank emphasize that in a landscape where metrics can be manufactured and noise can mimic relevance, the real competitive edge comes from learning to listen more carefully. Here, they share tips on how to pinpoint authentic human engagement and focus on the signals that cut through the static rather than amplify it. 

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In recent years, several prominent brands have learned that marketing can misfire when it collides with consumer sentiment. Bud Light, American Eagle and Cracker Barrel, among others, have drawn public attention not for their creativity or ambition, but for misreading how audiences would react to “clever” campaigns or evolving branding. Even well-intentioned marketing or modernization efforts can alienate longtime customers if they believe campaigns aren’t grounded in authenticity and respect. For marketing leaders, these examples underscore the need for disciplined “backfire filters”—structured ways to assess cultural sensitivity, audience alignment and brand equity before campaigns reach the public. Here, senior marketing experts from the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank share how they would have approached the internal conversations surrounding recent “marketing misfires.”

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Google’s grip on how consumers discover information online may finally be loosening—and marketing leaders are taking notice. In a landmark antitrust ruling, the tech giant has been ordered to share search data with competitors and limit its exclusivity deals, signaling the first meaningful crack in its long-standing search dominance. Marketing leaders agree: This is not a narrow story about the future of Google, but an inflection point in how discovery systems are designed—and who controls them next. The ruling suggests marketers should revisit long-held assumptions about search channel dependency, audience access and the role of owned data and experience design in an increasingly open, multisurface search future.  Members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank have lengthy and wide-ranging expertise in brand storytelling, digital advertising and customer engagement. Here, three of them unpack what this shift means for brand visibility, customer acquisition and data strategy.

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The marketing agency landscape faces its most significant transformation in decades. With global AI spending for sales and marketing reaching $57.99 billion in 2025 and 88% of marketers now using AI tools daily, the dynamics between brands and their external partners have fundamentally shifted. The era when agencies could command premium fees for producing content, managing campaigns or generating creative assets is rapidly closing. AI is automating repetitive workflows and enabling real-time personalization and campaign optimization, fundamentally changing what clients can do for themselves—and what they can’t—as well as what they value and are willing to pay for.  Success in this new landscape requires a fundamental recalibration of what marketing consultants and agencies sell—and how they prove their worth. Here, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank—specializing in brand strategy, digital transformation and the integration of emerging technologies—offer critical insights into how consultants and agencies must reposition themselves to remain indispensable.

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With Meta reportedly planning to fully automate ad creation by 2026—from copywriting and creative to targeting and placement—CMOs face a pivotal question: What’s left for human marketers? Members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank share their insights on the risks, rewards and redefinition of creative work in the age of AI.

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As AI-powered answer engines reshape how people discover information online, CMOs are rethinking SEO—not abandoning it. From optimizing for structured data to prioritizing brand authority and content relevance, marketing leaders are evolving their strategies to stay visible in both traditional search and conversational AI results.

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While flashy marketing trends dominate headlines in 2025, many CMOs are steering clear. Members of the CMO Think Tank share why they’re skipping the hype in favor of strategy, substance, and sustainable growth.