Evan White

expert panel

Companies increasingly look to their CMOs for more than brand awareness, campaign performance and lead generation. Today’s marketing leaders are often expected to influence revenue, customer loyalty and long-term growth, even as research has found that many CMOs believe their roles as designed hinder their ability to maximize marketing performance outcomes.Part of the challenge is that CMOs and their executive colleagues may define growth—and marketing’s contribution to it—differently. For example, McKinsey found that 70% of CEOs measure marketing’s impact through year-over-year revenue growth and margins, while only 35% of CMOs consider those to be top metrics. CMOs may also take a longer view of brand building and customer relationships, while CEOs and CFOs face pressure to demonstrate more immediate financial returns. But even when there’s little to no C-suite agreement on priorities, timelines and measures of success, a CMO is often held responsible for delivering growth—without the necessary shared framework.Closing that gap requires more than expanding the CMO’s job description. Members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank are a curated group of experts with years of experience in marketing, including brand storytelling, digital advertising and customer engagement. Here, several of them explore the mindsets and strategies that need to change if CMOs are to have the influence, alignment and operating support needed to achieve what today’s organizations expect of them.

expert panel

Marketing leaders are used to proving their work through numbers that move quickly: leads captured, conversions completed and pipeline generated. Community-led growth, however, plays by a different set of rules. Its value often develops over time through relationships, conversations and shared experiences, and a strong brand community may influence business outcomes long before they can be traced to a transaction.Gen-Z’s skepticism toward polished advertising campaigns is leading many brands to shift from chasing clicks to building relationships. The benefits go beyond simple discovery: A large audience may see a brand’s message, but a genuine community chooses to return, participate and bring others into the conversation.Where many organizations stumble is in trying to create and manage community initiatives with the tools, timelines and expectations built for traditional demand generation. When leaders look primarily for immediate conversions, they may undervalue promising progress or pressure teams into tactics that weaken the relationships they’re trying to build. Further, with communities like TikTok and Instagram playing a large role in community-building, brands that don’t understand the priorities of today’s social media algorithms—which favor metrics like watch time, engagement rate and content relevance—may even struggle to get out of the starting gate.Community-led growth, then, requires leaders to rethink both how value is created and how progress is demonstrated. Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank draw on their expertise in brand storytelling, digital advertising and customer engagement to examine where community-building initiatives go wrong, what leaders should do differently and how they can measure success more accurately.

expert panel

The modern marketing calendar can feel like an airline flight board—constantly updated, rerouted and in need of attention. When a trending conversation erupts, a platform changes its algorithm or a competitor jumps on the meme of the moment, sitting out can feel like falling behind. But a brand that’s always changing course may never give its customers a clear sense of where it stands.Timely marketing certainly has value, but speed and effectiveness aren’t the same thing. Maintaining a coherent identity across channels helps strengthen recognition, trust and loyalty. Constantly shifting a brand’s messaging, voice or presentation in response to external events can make that invaluable customer bond much harder to build.At the same time, brands can’t afford to tune out cultural shifts or emerging conversations altogether. Trends can reveal changing customer interests, new expectations and opportunities to participate in moments that matter to an audience. Brands today have many ways to engage with culture as it unfolds, but doing so effectively requires speed paired with sensitivity and sound judgment. The challenge for marketing leaders, then, isn’t to ignore what’s happening around them. It’s to recognize which moments can strengthen the brand—and which will merely pull the team off course. Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank draw on their expertise in brand storytelling and customer engagement to examine the mistakes leaders make when immediacy takes priority over long-term brand-building and explain what teams should do instead.

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Is your marketing team producing more content than ever, yet still failing to convert customers or align employees around a single story? The problem might not be content at all; it's clarity. Members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank break down the specific signals that separate a content gap from a clarity gap, and the first, often counterintuitive, steps to close it.Ask five people inside the same company what it actually does, and you might get five different answers: The VP of sales talks about solving one problem. Marketing's slide deck talks about another. The newest hire on the support team simply repeats whatever's on the website. Customers notice the mismatch even when they can't name it, and the result is hesitation, not conversion.It's tempting to solve that hesitation with more content: another landing page, another explainer video, another round of ads. But volume rarely fixes what's actually broken. According to a Forbes Agency Council analysis of e-commerce checkouts, a Baymard Institute study found that the average cart-abandonment rate is more than 70%, driven largely by confusion and surprises at checkout—not by a lack of information. The same pattern shows up well before checkout: when a brand's story shifts depending on who's telling it, messaging confusion sends buyers straight to a competitor, no matter how much content sits behind it.So how does a leadership team tell the difference between a company that needs better content and one that needs a clearer story altogether? And once that diagnosis is made, where's the right place to start? Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank, whose backgrounds span brand strategy, performance marketing and high-stakes corporate communications, share the signals they watch for and the first moves they'd make to turn a fuzzy narrative into one everyone in the building can repeat with confidence.

expert panel

Marketing teams have never had more data, automation or channels to work with. Yet the problems that stall growth, weaken trust or drain a team’s energy often aren’t technical at all. They’re rooted in people: how customers feel, how teams collaborate, how leaders handle uncertainty, and how organizations respond when old assumptions stop working.That tension is becoming harder to ignore as AI changes both the volume and nature of brand communication. Americans remain cautious about AI’s broader impact, and recent industry conversations have pointed to a related marketing reality: As AI-generated content and commerce tools multiply, brands still need real trust, relevance and direct human connection to stand out.A marketing problem may look like a messaging issue, a measurement issue or a channel issue, but to resolve it, leaders often need to look deeper. Because no matter how many campaigns launch or what dashboards say, marketing is only effective if it reaches and connects with the audience—and that requires both inward and outward focus on the humans who write and receive the story.Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank, a curated group with expertise in brand storytelling, customer engagement and the rise of AI in marketing, share and discuss examples of the human challenges that will always impact marketing and how teams can adjust their strategies once they adopt a human-centered viewpoint.

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It’s undoubtedly rewarding to see your company’s name on a prestigious industry list. The badge looks sharp on the website, and the LinkedIn posts practically draft themselves. But beyond the glow of recognition, many executives are asking a harder question: Is applying for lists like the Inc. 5000 actually worth it? The investment required to attract high-profile attention isn’t trivial. There’s time spent pulling financials and coordinating submissions. There may be fees tied to promotion, events or licensing the badge. Polishing your award application so it stands out requires even more effort. And for marketing teams with slim resources or budgets that are under a microscope, every line item needs to prove its value. As with most strategic marketing decisions, the value of garnering an industry award depends on intent and execution. Industry lists can function as powerful trust accelerators. They can influence how quickly prospects take meetings, how confidently candidates accept offers, and how seriously partners view your brand. But recognition alone doesn’t close deals. It has to be activated, integrated and aligned with a broader growth strategy. The members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank are a vetted group of marketing leaders with deep expertise in brand storytelling and customer engagement. Here, they discuss the real ROI from garnering a coveted spot on an industry recognition list and share how to translate the award into enhanced credibility, deal velocity, talent acquisition and long-term brand authority.

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If you’ve recently used Google to track down a quick answer, you may have read the summary at the top of the results page and moved on. When time is tight and the information is clear and straightforward, that instant snapshot can be enough to meet your immediate needs. Or perhaps you’ve taken the route increasingly favored by users and leveraged a generative AI tool like ChatGPT or Claude for research or shopping. Both those scenarios reflect a single truth: Competitiveness in the world of online search is becoming more and more about being the source an algorithm trusts enough to summarize, cite or synthesize.  Brands that have spent years tuning keyword strategies and chasing incremental ranking gains need to rethink their strategies. Recent findings underscore the stakes: A Pew Research Center analysis shows that when an AI summary appears at the top of a Google results page, users are less likely to click one of the links below. This means regularly winning a coveted spot on the first page of search results won’t necessarily drive steady traffic to your website. In this moment, the real question isn’t whether SEO is “dead”; it’s whether your brand messaging is accessible and understandable for AI algorithms without being bland and forgettable to humans. The members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank live at the intersection of brand storytelling and AI-driven marketing changes. Here, they discuss practical, future-focused search strategies for brands, including how to make content easier for AI to interpret, the authority signals that make it worth surfacing, and how to balance visibility with authenticity and impact.

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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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Authenticity is a recognized cornerstone of effective marketing—especially in a high-information digital marketplace. Savvy consumers understand the ways advertisers seek to influence them and increasingly doubt highly polished messaging, seeking genuine signals that a brand’s actions align with its stated values.  Studies of consumer behavior have shown that emotions influence engagement and purchasing behavior. And when a brand is able to make a genuine connection with its audience, the impact goes beyond just making the sale: Salsify’s 2025 Consumer Research report found that 87% of shoppers are willing to pay more for a product from a brand they genuinely trust.  As experts in brand storytelling and customer engagement, the members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank understand that, in a saturated, noisy market, clarity and consistency are no longer just differentiators—they’re necessities. Consequently, understanding what “authentic” truly means has never been more vital. Here, five of them share their definitions of authenticity, identify the qualities that distinguish trustworthy brands, and share examples of companies that have successfully built lasting connections by staying true to themselves and their target audiences.

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In the brand marketing world, there’s always been a scramble to catch consumers’ attention. In a digital marketplace, jostling for position takes place moment by moment, and finding a hook that grabs the audience can make a game-changing difference for both new and established brands. In this spirit, unlikely brand pairings are having a moment. Cross-industry collaborations are gaining momentum as brands look for fresh ways to earn new audience attention in an oversaturated market. A quirky matchup can spark curiosity, intrigue or delight—maybe even a viral moment. From beauty lines teaming up with cookie makers to fast food giants joining forces with toothpaste brands, the collision of categories is becoming a bona fide strategy rather than a passing stunt.  But as any CMO will tell you, “novelty” campaigns that catch fire quickly can also burn out fast. The marketing leaders of Senior Executive CMO Think Tank spend their days navigating the intersections of brand storytelling and customer psychology. They know that the real magic happens only when the bold and unexpected is grounded in something meaningful—alignment, authenticity and a reason for customers to care long after the initial surprise wears off. Here, a group of them share what it really takes to turn a head-turning partnership into an enduring marketing advantage.

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Advertising on streaming platforms is no longer at the margins—it’s squarely in the mainstream. As of March 2025, streaming accounted for 43.8% of overall TV time in the U.S.—an increase of 10 points over two years. Meanwhile, linear TV’s primetime ad sales continue a gradual decline—2025-26 primetime ad sales were down 2.5% from the previous upfront, dropping by $1.2 billion since 2023-24 upfronts.For brands, this shift is driving a full-scale reevaluation of media strategy: where to reallocate budgets, how to measure results and how to avoid wasted spend in new formats. Members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank—a curated group of marketing leaders with deep expertise in brand storytelling, digital advertising and more—discuss how the shift to streaming media should influence advertising investment decisions, where the biggest opportunities lie in connected TV, and how to spot and manage risks.

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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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Global brands are rethinking their marketing strategies, moving beyond simple localization to a more immersive, consumer-led approach. Instead of dictating trends, they listen, adapt and co-create with local audiences. Members of the CMO Think Tank share insights on how leading brands are blending global strategy with local nuance to win in diverse markets.

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Marketing automation is no longer a luxury—it’s a necessity. With artificial intelligence (AI)-powered tools revolutionizing everything from customer segmentation to content personalization, the industry is changing faster than ever. In this article, members of the CMO Think Tank share insights on the most impactful marketing automation tools and how businesses can leverage them to drive efficiency, engagement and return on investment (ROI).