The Chief Everything Officer

Being a CMO today is like running a technology company that happens to sell a product or service. It's become more complex, and at the same time has dropped in perceptions of value creation. In McKinsey's latest research (worth a read), revealed that CEO-CMO alignment dropped by 20% between 2023 and 2025. Miscommunication over roles and muddy metrics are eroding trust in the C-suite. And the cracks are showing: Only 22% of CEOs say marketing drives growth in their organisation. Ouch.

I perceive that CMOs have become distracted by the invisible complexity of implementing marketing technology - and are losing credit for that and the work that matters.

Fifteen years ago, my span of control as a CMO was elegantly simple. I had 5 agencies in very clear swim lanes: creative, media, direct, events and 'digital' (yes… back then…). Each knew their role. Each delivered their piece and I and the team orchestrated the work.

I didn't have to deal with the CTO about the martech stack. I didn't need to understand programmatic bidding algorithms, let alone AI prompt engineering. Sure we our our CRM, SEO, PPC and CPMs…. But I did not have to think about CMS, DSP/SSP, DMP, CDP and the rest…

Today's CMO isn't just managing marketing—they're managing everything that touches the customer, which in a digitally connected world, means everything touches everything.

The data reveals just how dramatically the marketing landscape has exploded in complexity:

Technology Proliferation: Scott Brinker's annual martech landscape survey shows we've grown from approximately 150 marketing technology solutions in 2011 to over 15,384 solutions in 2025—a 9% increase just from 2024 alone (Chief Marketing Technologist, 2025). That's not just more tools; that's an entirely different universe of technical competency requirements (despite this, Gartner reports that martech utilisation is just 33% (Gartner, 2023). We have more tools than ever, but we're using them less effectively than ever.)

Role Fragmentation Impact: McKinsey's analysis of Fortune 500 companies reveals that organisations with multiple customer-facing roles (CMO, Chief Commercial Officer, Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Growth Officer) see up to 2.3 times less growth than those with a single unified role (McKinsey, 2025). The very expansion meant to drive growth is actually fragmenting it.

Declining Influence: Spencer Stuart found that CMO representation at Fortune 500 companies actually declined from 71% in 2023 to 66% in 2024 (Spencer Stuart, 2024). As the job became more complex, companies started questioning whether they needed the role at all.

Strategic Marginalisation: McKinsey's CMO Growth Research Survey revealed that only 50% of CMOs believe marketing executives are involved in the strategic planning process (McKinsey, 2025). The very expansion of responsibilities has somehow led to strategic marginalisation.

This brings us full circle to McKinsey's recent research on CMO alignment. Their study reveals that 80% of CEOs and 77% of CMOs believe marketing departments are underfunded. According to Gartner, marketing budgets dropped to 7.7% of revenue in 2024, down from 9.1% the previous year.

What's the issue then? As CMOs took on more responsibilities, they gained less influence. As their scope expanded, their strategic impact contracted. As they became responsible for everything, they became accountable for less.

McKinsey found that 70% of CEOs measure marketing's impact based on year-over-year revenue growth and margin, but only 35% of CMOs track this as their top metric (McKinsey, 2025). We've created a situation where CMOs are drowning in operational complexity while losing sight of strategic outcomes.

I've watched brilliant CMOs become Chief Everything Officers, and the transformation is rarely pretty. They start their days reviewing AI performance metrics, move to retail media optimisation calls, pivot to customer data platform implementations, then end with martech vendor evaluations. Where in that schedule is time for the strategic thinking that actually drives growth?

The modern CMO spends more time managing technology vendors than understanding customer needs. They're more likely to be found in IT meetings than brand strategy sessions. They've become the Chief Administrative Officer of customer-touching technology rather than the Chief Marketing Officer driving business growth.

The complexity has created a vicious cycle. As the role expanded, it attracted operations-minded leaders rather than strategic visionaries. As operations-minded leaders took charge, the role became even more operational. As the role became more operational, it lost strategic credibility. As it lost strategic credibility, CEOs started questioning its value.

For agency leaders, this CMO complexity crisis presents both challenge and opportunity. Your clients aren't just busy—they're drowning in the operational demands of roles that have grown beyond human capacity.

This reality demands a fundamental rethinking of how agencies create value. Two principles should guide every client interaction:

1. What you do for your client is a tiny minority of their complex work lives—so make it the best part.

Your CMO client juggled seventeen different technology platforms before your call, reviewed AI-generated content variations, analysed retail media performance across four different platforms, and debated customer data privacy policies with the legal team. When they interact with your agency, it should be the moment in their day when complexity reduces rather than increases.

That means arriving with solutions, not problems. Coming with integrated recommendations, not more options to consider. Delivering clarity, not additional complexity. Your role isn't to add to their already overwhelming array of responsibilities—it's to be the rare partner who actually reduces their cognitive load.

2. The greatest gift you can give a client is to work to remove friction and complexity—solve a problem larger than any work you create solving it.

In a world where CMOs manage impossibly complex technology stacks, the agency that can simplify rather than complicate becomes invaluable. This isn't about doing less work—it's about doing work that reduces the overall complexity burden.

Instead of adding another martech tool to evaluate, integrate with their existing stack. Instead of creating another reporting dashboard to monitor, unify metrics they're already tracking. Instead of launching another campaign to manage, build systematic approaches that reduce ongoing management overhead.

The agencies winning long-term relationships today aren't those offering the most sophisticated solutions—they're offering the most simplified solutions to sophisticated problems.

The solution to the Chief Everything Officer problem isn't more tools, more data, or more capabilities. It's integration, orchestration, and ruthless prioritisation.

McKinsey's research points toward a crucial insight: companies with a single customer-oriented role significantly outperform those with multiple fragmented roles. The answer isn't expanding the CMO's responsibilities further—it's consolidating scattered customer-touching functions under unified leadership with clear accountability.

This requires CEOs to make hard choices about what marketing actually owns versus what it merely coordinates. It demands CMOs who can say no to additional responsibilities that don't directly drive growth. And it needs agency partners who understand that their value lies not in exploiting complexity but in reducing it.

The most successful CMOs I know today aren't Chief Everything Officers—they're Chief Integration Officers. They don't try to master every marketing technology; they orchestrate the ones that matter. They don't chase every innovation; they focus on the innovations that create competitive advantage. They don't manage every customer touchpoint; they ensure every touchpoint serves a coherent strategy.

The best marketing has always been about simplicity: understanding what customers need, creating products they want, and communicating value they understand. Everything else—all the technology, all the data, all the platforms, all the innovations—should serve that simple purpose.

The Chief Everything Officer needs to become the Chief Integration Officer. The endless expansion needs to become thoughtful orchestration. The complex needs to become clear.

Because at the end of the day, no customer has ever fallen in love with a martech stack. They fall in love with brands that understand them, serve them, and make their lives better.

That's what great marketing has always been about. It's what great marketing will always be about. Everything else is just noise.

Brandflow is written by Justin Billingsley, who has spent his career on all three sides of the industry's table: senior client, global agency leader, technology founder. First published 4 July 2025 in the Brandflow newsletter on LinkedIn.