Kurt Allen

expert panel

For years, search marketing has been built around a familiar goal: earn enough visibility to get a customer to click. AI-generated search results are changing that equation. For example, a 2025 analysis found that Google users clicked traditional search results in just 8% of visits when an AI summary appeared, compared with 15% when it didn’t—suggesting brands may have fewer opportunities to speak for themselves on their own turf.When an AI system becomes the layer between a company and a prospective customer, brand reputation isn’t shaped only by what the company publishes. The system may synthesize information from a range of sources, and that synthesis isn’t guaranteed to be accurate. Widespread problems, from speculative answers to fabricated links, have been found with the ways generative search tools retrieved and cited source material. For CMOs, that makes the broader information ecosystem surrounding a brand a more immediate marketing concern, since an incomplete, outdated or inaccurate answer can influence perception before a customer ever reaches the company’s website—if they reach it at all.As AI changes how customers discover and evaluate companies, marketing leaders need to rethink what it takes to earn authority when they may not control the first—and sometimes only—description a buyer sees. Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank, a curated group with expertise in brand storytelling, digital advertising and the rise of AI in marketing, discuss how CMOs can approach brand authority, message consistency and reputation in an AI-mediated search environment.

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A rising conversion rate is the kind of metric that can make a leadership team feel good about growth. Customers are moving through the funnel more efficiently, acquisition costs may be improving and marketing can point to a clear return on investment. But there’s a critical question hiding behind those results: Is the business actually creating more demand, or simply getting better at converting the demand that was already there?That distinction matters because efficiency can improve even as a company’s future growth potential weakens. A business can become highly effective at reaching people who already know the brand, have an existing need or are close to making a purchase without expanding the pool of potential customers. Research from the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising reinforces the importance of balancing short-term sales activation with longer-term brand building, noting that sustained investment can contribute to growth over time.For marketing leaders, the challenge is to make that difference visible inside the organization. Members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank bring deep experience in brand storytelling, digital advertising and customer engagement to this challenge. Here, these marketing leaders explore how to tell if a business that is turning interest into revenue today is also creating the conditions for more customers to enter the market tomorrow.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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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Every marketer anticipates that a new campaign will lead to strong engagement, healthy conversion rates and a measurable lift in awareness. They may hang their hopes on a clever turn of phrase or viral moment. But the campaigns people remember years later are usually grounded in something more: They clarify what a brand stands for, shift how customers see a category, or prove that a team’s instincts were sharper than the safer, more obvious play.That’s why “great marketing” can’t be measured only by whether a campaign hit its targets. The most meaningful campaigns often require leaders to make tough calls about what to emphasize, what to leave out and how much risk the organization is willing to take in pursuit of a bigger idea. Real, emotional connection plays a big role in customers’ loyalty to a brand, so marketing that makes them feel seen, understood or invited into a story is marketing that yields long-term results—and is far more memorable.Of course, that kind of impact rarely happens by accident. It comes from knowing when to trust the data and when to trust the room, when to polish a message and when to let it feel more human, when to center the brand and when to give the spotlight to the people it serves. Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank, a curated group with deep expertise in brand storytelling and customer engagement, reflect on the campaigns they’re proudest of leading and the lessons those efforts taught them about enduring, effective marketing.

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Despite regular stories about declining social media participation and algorithm fatigue, both B2B and B2C marketing teams are still convinced that social media marketing delivers real ROI. However, if brands don’t proceed with care, the line between engagement and extraction can get thin fast. Followers usually welcome a useful recommendation, a smart point of view, or even a clear offer, but if every post feels engineered to move them down a funnel, the relationship starts to feel less like a conversation and more like a checkout lane. That’s a critical misstep, especially as younger generations enter the workforce and command more purchasing power. Surveys have shown that Gen-Z turns to social media first for information—including when they’re on the hunt for products and services. If a brand’s presence on social media becomes too sales-heavy, it can weaken the very trust and attention that make conversion possible in the first place. So how can marketing leaders create momentum toward sales without turning every interaction into a transaction? Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank share strategies for balancing value, relationship-building and sales intent in ways that help followers see becoming customers as a natural next step.

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For many marketers, Reddit is treated simply as a community platform—a place to monitor conversations, answer questions and occasionally engage with niche audiences. But its role in the digital ecosystem has expanded. And that evolution creates a new challenge for CMOs.Brand perception is no longer shaped only by owned content, paid campaigns or carefully managed social channels. It’s also shaped by open, peer-driven exchanges where customers compare options, challenge claims, share frustrations and look for trusted perspectives before making decisions. These are exactly the type of discussions that happen on Reddit. Today, Reddit threads—including complaints about brands—are favored sources for AI engines. The platform has even struck a deal with Google that allows the search leader to use posts from the site to train its AI models. With consumers increasingly turning their attention to AI results when researching products and services, marketers can’t afford to underestimate Reddit’s influence. So how should marketing leaders rethink Reddit’s role in the marketing mix? Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank share practical insights on how CMOs can better understand and tap into Reddit’s growing influence on brand discovery, customer trust and the broader digital conversations that shape purchasing decisions.

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Marketing is often treated as the part of the business that responds to strategy: launch the campaign, refine the message, fill the funnel and report on performance. But CMOs are in a unique position to spot changing consumer behavior and signals early on, making them highly effective “scouts” for spotting critical market and customer shifts. Before a concern shows up in revenue reports, product reviews or support tickets, it may first appear in the way buyers search, engage, compare options, question value or quietly lose interest.That early insight becomes essential as customer expectations rise and market behavior becomes harder to read. Salesforce research has found that 65% expect companies to adapt to their changing needs and preferences. When CMOs effectively interpret customer and market signals, the knowledge gained can provide a real competitive edge in terms of marketing messaging, product enhancements and sales support.So what should CMOs be watching for, and how can they turn customer and market understanding into smarter decisions across the business? Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank share the signals they’re often in a position to spot first, along with how those insights can help product, sales, service and strategy teams make better decisions.

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Marketing teams have long treated headlines, summaries and preview text as small but important pieces of brand real estate. They’ve studied the mechanics of search engine results pages, recognizing that search details are often an audience’s first introduction to an organization—a chance to frame the story, set expectations and earn a coveted click.But the framing of that first connection is getting less predictable. As Google and other platforms increasingly reshape how content appears in search results, social feeds and AI-generated summaries, companies may find that their audience’s first encounter with them is an intermediary’s version of their pitch, USP or vision. That changes a fairly simple question—“Did we get the headline right?”—to a much more complex one: “Does our message survive reinterpretation?”When the channels driving discovery are also translating, compressing and repackaging content, it can be tempting to retreat from outside platforms, but that’s not realistic; they’re too central to how people find information. Instead, marketing leaders need to think more carefully about how brand meaning holds up when it’s filtered through systems they don’t own. Below, members of the Senior Executive CMO Think Tank discuss how CMOs can protect clarity, trust and differentiation as search engines, AI tools and other intermediaries reshape audiences’ first encounters with their messaging.