The CMO's Guide To Getting A Seat At The Corporate Strategy Table

Forbes

16-07-2025

As uncertainty about the global economic situation has become a major theme over the last several years, some companies have forgotten about the central role that CMOs play in overall growth. A new paper from McKinsey illustrates an example seen in many boardrooms: The CMO tells their company's executive team about a successful campaign, but then the CFO follows up with news that sales are declining. The apparent disconnect between the two positions causes confusion and spurs the CEO to start looking for new areas for growth.
As McKinsey writes, executives who are focused on other priorities are overlooking the relationship between the CMO, the customer and business growth. Many CMOs told McKinsey in a survey they have limited input on strategy, while there's no agreement between different executives on what measurements equal marketing success. And CMOs—or singular marketing leaders by other titles—are on the decline. Only two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies had CMOs in 2024, according to Spencer Stuart research cited by McKinsey, a 5% decline from 2023. With the rise of omnichannel marketing and business, some companies have added a suite of digital officers to work on marketing, further complicating basic corporate strategy. And in just two years, the number of CEOs who say marketing is clearly defined and understood by their company's corporate leadership fell by 20%.
In order to get CMOs back in the driver's seat, the McKinsey report suggests they rebuild relationships and collaborate with other executives. They should work with CEOs to come to common ground about what they do, why it is important, and what needs to be achieved. The value of what CMOs bring to the table, which is often key data about customers and the market in general, needs to be understood by CEOs. But CMOs also need to forge tight bonds with CFOs, coming into alignment about how to track success and how marketing numbers feed into the finances that are important to the company. This kind of relationship not only establishes clear accountability for the marketing department, but builds deeper trust in marketing throughout the organization.
While McKinsey's study is looking at larger trends, some CMOs have been successfully inserting themselves into corporate strategy and reaping the rewards. I talked to Beth LaGuardia Cooper, CMO of Advantage Media, about how CMOs can help steer a company's direction. An excerpt from our conversation is later in this newsletter.
The Elon Musk-owned xAI Grok chatbot has had an active and controversial week. Jaap Arriens/NurPhoto via Getty Images
It's been a memorable week for Elon Musk's X, and considering the social network's infamous history under the world's richest person, that's really saying something. Last Tuesday, the Grok chatbot, powered by Musk's xAI, started responding to users as the antisemitic persona 'MechaHitler.' The bot claimed it had been programmed that way from the start, and seemingly praised Hitler and referred to Israel as 'that clingy ex still whining about the Holocaust.'
Musk responded in a series of posts, saying that the chatbot was 'too compliant to user prompts' and 'too eager to be manipulated,' adding that the issue was 'being addressed.' But just a day later, X CEO Linda Yaccarino announced she was stepping down from her leadership post at the platform. Yaccarino, a former advertising leader at NBCUniversal, did not give a reason for her departure in her announcement, and no interim leader for the platform appears to have been named.
Yaccarino had pushed to expand advertising on X, but it was a perpetually difficult job. In late 2023, many advertisers left the platform, citing a new prevalence of antisemitic and hateful content on users' feeds, as well as Musk's personal endorsement of an antisemitic post. Because X is part of a private company, advertising and user revenues are not publicly reported, though Yaccarino said at the beginning of 2025 that 96% of its top advertisers had come back.
While Grok's MechaHitler AI persona went away, antisemitic posts on X didn't stop. Over the weekend, a hacker breached the X account of beloved Sesame Street muppet Elmo, posting antisemitic slurs and calling for violence against Jews. Sesame Workshop has since said the account was back under its control, and the objectionable messages had been deleted.
In the midst of the MechaHitler controversy, Musk announced that he'd upgraded Grok to a new version he claimed was 'smarter than almost all graduate students.' He admitted that the chatbot might lack 'common sense,' but said it's also coming to Tesla vehicles in the near future. A Tesla info page says the chatbot will not be used for navigation or vehicle controls, appearing to be more about providing conversation and information. Users can 'choose Grok's voice and personality, ranging from Storyteller to Unhinged, to enhance convenience while you're on the go,' Tesla says. ATTENTION ECONOMY
"Love Island USA" cast members at the "Love Island: Beyond the Villa Event." Randy Shropshire/Peacock via Getty Images
Streaming accounted for nearly half of all U.S. television viewership in June, according to Nielsen figures. The 46% of TV use directed to streaming last month is a 5.4% increase over May. Streaming has been steadily growing, but June's spike can largely be attributed to two platforms: Netflix, which reported a 13.5% increase from the previous month, and Peacock, which posted a 13.4% increase. Original programming likely drove the growth. Netflix released new seasons of comedy/drama hit Ginny & Georgia and South Korean drama Squid Game , plus began streaming acquired series Animal Kingdom and Blindspot . Peacock, meanwhile, featured the wildly popular reality show Love Island .
Streaming will likely continue to dominate as networks find new ways to build engagement. The most recent season of Love Island also launched an interactive mobile app featuring quizzes and games, which NBCUniversal claims has been responsible for the show's skyrocketing viewership. Meanwhile, Netflix's original movie KPop Demon Hunters features an animated K-pop girl group that slays evil fans—and its soundtrack has been a real-world hit, with multiple songs reaching top positions on the U.S. Spotify charts, writes Forbes contributor Lily Ogburn. Forbes senior contributor Paul Tassi calls the double whammy of high viewership numbers and hit songs impressive. And popular properties, especially for children's shows, have continued to perform well. According to Nielsen, Australian cartoon Bluey , which chronicles a fun family of dogs and is streamed on Disney+, was the most viewed streaming show in the first half of 2025, with more than 25 billion minutes watched so far this year. NOW TRENDING
Luxury brands may see more sales declines if they don't refocus their strategies. getty
It's been a difficult year for luxury brands, with many companies reporting declining sales and an outside report projecting another 5% drop in sales in 2025. Forbes senior contributor Pamela Danziger writes that a new report from BCG and Altagamma shows that many luxury brands in recent years have worked to make themselves more accessible to new—and perhaps less affluent—customers, which has eroded some of the soul of the luxury segment.
While broadening accessibility may have paid off in the past, it's heralding financial difficulty going forward. Aspirational customers are more likely to pull back on luxury spending as the economy becomes more uncertain—35% have definitively directed luxury spending elsewhere—and brands with at least half of their customers in this classification are seeing the steepest declines.
The report recommends that luxury brands refocus on their top tier consumers, who will still have the ability to buy regardless of what happens next in the economy, recalibrating their level of intimacy and connection with these consumers. That also includes enhancing the online experience. Forbes Research found that 51% of high-end consumers prefer a hybrid approach to luxury shopping: browsing online, but completing the purchase in person. ON MESSAGE How CMOs Can Shape Larger Corporate Strategy
Advantage Media CMO Beth LaGuardia Cooper. Advantage Media, Getty
Sometimes, marketing strategy feels completely different from the larger corporate strategy, even though marketers have a unique perspective on the business and consumer. I talked to Beth LaGuardia Cooper, CMO of thought leadership marketing company Advantage Media, about why CMOs' input on corporate strategy is important to success.
This conversation has been edited for length, continuity and clarity. Advantage Media is the publisher of Forbes Books, which is a separate business unit and not associated with Forbes editorial staff.
How can a CMO surface ideas that can help with devising a larger corporate strategy from their unique perspective of being CMO?
LaGuardia Cooper: One area of focus is consumer sentiment, consumer behavior. What's going on with the consumer in terms of the things they're facing that are motivating them and keeping them up at night, and how does that align with what we're offering? Thinking about bringing the consumer into the conversation and being forward leaning. A marketer could have a marketing [or] customer advisory board, or the general customer research that is at their fingertips to bring to the table. And the third-party research that they're normally coming across as part of the job.
Every conversation everywhere is AI. It's been something that's [been] second hand to the performance marketing side of the business for a long time. Working on ad platforms and all of those arenas, giving us the opportunity for personalization at scale, and seeing the value of taking that further with the use of AI has been naturally a part of our business, not feeling like something that threatens us, which could be the case with some disciplines.
A third would be we have a test-and-learn mindset. That's just what the job is. You're never really done. Thinking innovatively about not just what are the big things that leapfrog the organization—which is what the CMO needs to think about—but all the levers that unlock optimization: Let's test this and refine it, rinse and repeat. That's [the] more campaign-oriented mindset that can be brought to an innovative arena.
CMOs have been a key part of the strategic team for the last several years, but how willing are other members of the executive team to listen to what the CMO says and to take it to heart?
It depends a lot on [the] people who are in those roles, how oriented they are to marketing, experience and the customer in their background, and how central they see that.
Coming from a pure functional perspective, what talks is stories and quantitative analysis. I want to tell a story with the data. Sometimes, that's best brought to life with a video of customers talking, or showing an experience visually in terms of where the drop-off is happening in a funnel, and comparing it to a prior period or trends that make the point in a very visual way. I don't find that a lot of C-suite members have a lot of tolerance for any of the deeper-in-the-woods marketing data at the level that we are hungry for, and often look just to find those nuggets. Keeping the story at a higher level and focusing on the outcomes for the business in an ROI [and] quantitative fashion is always the best.
I also think having a plan that has a contained analysis around both the opportunity and the opportunity cost of not doing something is often helpful. Maybe [also creating a] risk analysis that outlines when you create a milestone [or] plan for deciding if you want to keep moving forward with something or cut the investment off. That feels less risky to a CFO, in particular.
Bringing [other executives] into decisions that are not necessarily their area [is also helpful]. Taking into account feedback from a CFO about the creative concept of an ad campaign might not be as valuable as somebody else—but at the same time, they feel like they have a stake in it, an opportunity to weigh in, and it also feels less risky and out of their league.
How have you shaped strategy from the CMO's seat?
I look for early themes and also lagging points. We're connecting those dots on the front end and [sharing] what we're seeing and expecting as we move into the future periods. I do think it's our responsibility to make sure that we're looking beyond and saying, 'This is where we are right now. Here's some warning signs that we're seeing. Here's what we're doing to mitigate those or think beyond those,' and determine what not only we need to be solving for, but [also] how to take advantage of this opportunity in a different way because we're seeing it before our competitors.
The opportunity when you're sitting at that table is not just to respond to what other people are seeing, but to present new themes that somebody else might not yet be seeing: why you think they're important, what impact they could have on the business from a bottom line if we do or don't do anything about them, and discussion that I think is not just about a marketing mindset, but about business. What do we as a business strategically see as the opportunity here? Is it worth making some decisions around that, and maybe shifting investment or doing something differently that has material impact in some way?
I also think it's good not to be afraid to be the first person to say: 'Here's where I think we can trim.' Often, a marketer is making the case for more money or investment in certain areas. And a lot of times those investments need to not be in our area. They need to be on tech or another group that is fueling what we do. That is another way to really get together with your peers on a regular basis, understand what their challenges are, and float some ideas to think about working together. I think the budgets of a lot of other teams are more labor intensive or fixed, and a lot of times the significant portion of the marketing budget is variable advertising spend. Sometimes, there is opportunity to adjust and not feel like you're giving something away in a controlled environment as a team member. COMINGS + GOINGS AI firm Anthropic hired Paul Smith as its first chief commercial officer, effective later this year. Smith will join the firm after working in leadership at ServiceNow, Salesforce and Microsoft.
hired as its first chief commercial officer, effective later this year. Smith will join the firm after working in leadership at ServiceNow, Salesforce and Microsoft. Technology services provider Persistent Systems appointed Shimona Chadha as chief marketing officer, effective July 3. Chadha most recently worked as vice president and head of North America vertical marketing at HCLTech.
appointed as chief marketing officer, effective July 3. Chadha most recently worked as vice president and head of North America vertical marketing at HCLTech. Convenience retail company the Wills Group tapped Matt Simon as its chief marketing officer, effective June 30. Simon previously worked in the same role at Penn Foster Group. STRATEGIES + ADVICE
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Amazon's Prime Day sales event last week surpassed all records for the online giant. According to Adobe, how much was tallied in online U.S. sales at the mega-retailer?
A. $24.1 billion
B. $24.8 billion
C. $26.2 billion
D. $26.9 billion
See if you got the answer right here.