By W.B. King
Chief marketing officers (CMOs) are at crossroads, a sobering reality Zeta Global believes is a direct result of artificial intelligence (AI) and related initiatives. Noting that the role of CMO is relatively new — first popularized by Coca-Cola in 1993 — Steven Gerber, president and COO at Zeta Global said CMOs can no longer be simply viewed as stewards of branding and advertising.
“The evolution of the CMO has been inexorably tied to the evolution of marketing technology. Marketing was first disrupted by the rise of digital, particularly the growth of Meta, Google, and later Amazon,” Gerber cited in the report he authored, Driving Growth in the AI Era: The CMO’s New Playbook. “In this era, the CMO evolved to be a digital navigator.”
The Intelligence-Powered Era
The New York City-based Zeta Global bills itself as empowering CMOs and marketers to transform ambitious goals into “remarkable results and business growth” through AI and real-time proprietary data. Its fully customizable Zeta Marketing Platform (ZMP) allows CMOs to tailor AI-driven insights and campaigns.
“As digital navigators, marketing executives were forced to adapt to new interactive channels, figure out how to increasingly apply insights to business challenges, and integrate Big Data and marketing automation tools to create more effective marketing,” he continued. “While the CMO role has evolved from brand stewardship to digital navigation, the ‘Intelligence-Powered Era’ requires CMOs to become Chief Growth Officers — leaders who align data, strategy, and AI to deliver measurable results.”
To this end, the report offered statistics provided by the CMO Council, which found that 54% of marketing leaders are now expected to deliver on revenue growth, with a similar percentage (51%) held accountable for operational efficiencies. “CMOs face a pivotal choice: embrace their mandate to drive growth or risk being sidelined in the C-suite,” the report stated, adding there are three eras of marketing leadership: Era I, brand stewardship — 1995-2009, Era II, the digital navigator — 2009-2023, and Era III — the CMO at a crossroads.
“Marketing is working to engage a connected consumer. This connected consumer is always on, always filtering, sharing, shopping — and ignoring typical marketing,” Gerber wrote. “But marketers are approaching the challenges of this connected consumer with disconnected organizations and disconnected tech stacks.”
Legacy tools, he added, often hold CMOs back. “Outdated systems struggle to keep pace with the demands of modern marketing, lacking the agility and integration needed to leverage real-time data effectively. As a result, CMOs find themselves hampered by fragmented insights, slow decision-making processes, and limited ability to personalize at scale.”
The Intelligence Gap
While the report noted that CMOs have access to growing amounts of data, they often don’t have the tech tools to efficiently extract actionable intelligence that can be turned into successful personalized marketing campaigns.
Lauren Wiener, managing director and partner at Boston Consulting Group, shared her thoughts in the report: “The more that you try to break through with the customer, the more it has to be relevant to them. In our surveys, 70% to 90% of consumers say if messages aren't personalized to them, if they're not relevant, they're going to tune it out.”
Gerber refers to this as “the intelligence gap,” which is forecasted to widen unless new technology and tools are introduced. “The Intelligence Gap isn’t just a technical challenge — it’s a strategic roadblock that prevents CMOs from unlocking the full potential of personalization and AI. This gap is expanding in the AI-powered era, resulting in a doom loop of more data, less intelligence and lower impact marketing.”
Steering GenAI Use Cases
To ensure organizations successful embrace Era III, the report offered new rules of engagement for CMO success: metrics, mindset and mastery. “The modern CMO is a data-driven architect of growth, adept at leveraging AI, aligning with the C-suite and transforming marketing into a profit center.”
Weiner adds that CMOs must adopt a growth mindset that just doesn’t look at brand awareness but also at profitability.
“Really what CMOs need to do today to survive, to thrive, is to be able to drive growth,” Wiener said. “In a recent survey that we did of over 200 CMOs, 70% of them said that they were in charge of steering the company for gen AI use cases. They were in charge — not the CIO, not chief strategy officer — they were the ones in charge. And so, for CMOs, it's really important to be able to look at these trends, look at these technologies and think about how to drive not just the top line, but also the bottom line with it.”