A Study in Characteristics
The most valuable conversations in marketing happen off the record—between peers, without press or pretense. That’s where candor lives. This project was born from a simple belief: no one needs another study about “what keeps CMOs up at night.” We need to listen to what CMOs say to each other when they can speak freely. In partnership with Jon Evans, host of the Uncensored CMO podcast, we set out to capture those authentic exchanges—the laughter, the frustrations, the shared ambition to make marketing matter again. When Jon and Scott Galloway sat down in Cannes with thirty CMOs, we knew we’d tapped something real. This report gathers those truths and offers them back to the community that inspired them. To every CMO who trusted us with your honesty—thank you. Together, we’re not just studying evolution. We’re taking part in it. John Harris, CEO, Worldwide Partners
By Rie Bridges and Krisi Packer
This study is based on a series of candid, anonymized interviews with CMOs and senior marketing leaders around the world, conducted between May and September 2025. Designed as open confessional” conversations rather than formal questionnaires, the methodology encouraged unfiltered reflection on moments of swagger, adversity, and risk. Participants spoke under Chatham House rules, enabling honesty about the pressures and mutations shaping the modern CMO role. The resulting conversations were thematically analyzed to uncover patterns of behavior, belief, and adaptation—revealing not only data points, but the human truths behind the title.
The Death of the CMO
It’s the headline that refuses to die. A favorite on conference stages and LinkedIn think pieces. For years, analysts have forecast the extinction of marketing leadership—its habitat destroyed by shrinking budgets, shorter tenures, and rising skepticism. And yet, the data tells a different story. According to McKinsey, when CMOs lead customer-centric growth, companies see 1.4x higher top-line performance. When that leadership is fully integrated, growth doubles again. These stats indicate that marketing power isn’t dying but adapting. The species survives because it evolves.
What’s changed isn’t the role’s necessity, but its biology.
Under constant pressure—from finance, from technology, from culture itself—marketing leadership has undergone rapid mutation. Other publications have charted these external forces in detail: the shortened tenures, fractured titles, proliferating metrics, shrinking budgets, and boardroom misunderstandings that define the modern corporate environment.
What’s been absent from this conversation is the subterranean view. What’s happening under the surface among the CMOs who’ve survived this onslaught? How have they adapted their instincts, their influence, and their tactics to thrive under business conditions that should have wiped them out?
In short: What traits have allowed CMOs to survive and thrive in today’s corporate environment?
THE MISSING LINK: CONFESSIONS OF A CMO
Answering that question requires a different kind of research—an approach that’s less census, more field study. Analyzing org charts and performance data can tell us how the environment changes, but not how the species evolves. To uncover those unseen adaptations, we turned to the genre of confession. Thirty CMOs across industries and continents spoke with us candidly under condition of complete anonymity. Their revelations expose the emerging traits and winning tactics that don’t appear in job descriptions—but determine who survives the gauntlet of modern marketing leadership. If an earlier era CMO was a single apex predator—a commanding, charismatic and culturally dominant creative—its modern descendants are agile specialists, built for corporate turbulence. Each has developed new organs to survive in today’s harsher climates: one thrives by provoking change, another by disappearing into it; one steadies the weather; another moves faster than boardroom tensions can form. And so, a new taxonomy emerges.
Each modern CMO species is defined by a distinct set of survival strategies, carving its own evolutionary path through the C-Suite. In the chapters ahead, we offer a modern field guide to these new corporate animals. Drawn from our trove of private confessions, this report charts the defining behaviors and recognizable markings of the new CMO species. We’ll cover how to spot them in the wild, collaborate with them safely, and ultimately, what their adaptations reveal about the ongoing evolution of corporate influence itself.
Disruptive Mutation of the Chief Marketing Officer
The shifting landscape of the C-suite is a place of fierce competition and sudden extinction. Once, the CMO stood at the edge of the herd—tentative, reactive, scanning for threats. But over many fiscal cycles, a new creature evolved: part strategist, part saboteur, carrying disruption in its very DNA. This CMO doesn’t wait for change—it provokes change. Its presence unsettles consensus, disturbs the calm, and forces adaptation across the herd. It survives not through harmony, but through productive tension. Behold, the new CMOs.
THE CHIEF MUTINY OFFICER. Chief Mutiny Officers took the creative charisma and devil-may-care attitude of the apex CMO but pivoted inward. They evolved like a parasitoid wasp—disrupting the host organism (corporate leadership) from within. Think of them as invasive-species introducers—thriving in complacent or financially engineered organizations that ignore external cultural currents. The same trait that once made them misfits now makes them indispensable: acting as cultural vectors, they smuggle in movements, memes, and rebellions that corporate immune systems would otherwise reject. But they’re not invaders: most are invited in by leaders who sense the need for shock therapy. And not every insurgent storms the gates. Some arrive camouflaged, blending into the boardroom ecosystem with the polish of a non-disruptor. They build trust and wait for the moment when the organization has relaxed its guard. Then, with stealth and precision, they strike—forcing the system to metabolize change and prevent evolutionary stagnation.
Strategic insubordination
Gone are the days of CMOs asking for permission. Mutiny Officers survive by operating in pockets of limited oversight, wielding niche authority to take actions others wouldn’t dare. They go big in small ways—because it’s technically no one else’s remit. One of our confessors described forcing an unconventional sponsorship through a skeptical board who later hailed it as genius. Another greenlit a provocative campaign that challenged the prevailing narrative during a travel shutdown. These small acts of defiance re-humanized the company by injecting empathy back into the corporate bloodstream.
“We didn’t ask for permission – we just went ahead because it was the right thing to say.” At their boldest, these leaders draw energy from internal resistance, turning friction into fuel. While presenting a bold strategy for differentiating the firm, one CMO was interrupted by pushback from a more senior executive: why shouldn’t they simply emulate category leaders? Our Mutiny Officer used this very intuition as evidence of commoditization, presenting mimicry as the true danger. “That moment flipped the conversation. What they saw as safe, I framed as the reason we weren’t growing.”
In that moment, the board’s definition of risk changed. That’s the hallmark of a Mutiny Officer—changing the narrative and pointing out sameness as the existential threat.
Cultural infiltration. A sure sign you’ve encountered a Mutiny Officer is the Trojan horse attack—when brand enters the boardroom disguised as culture. Rather than storming the gates with decks and budget asks, they slip through side doors labeled customer insight, consumer expectation, or cultural relevance. Once inside, they unpack their contraband: the business case for brand investment, camouflaged as external inevitability.
“I’ve always had to come in sideways, because the minute you say ‘brand,’ people’s eyes glaze over. So, I start with culture—how shopping behavior is changing, how people want to feel smarter about value, not cheaper. Then you can say, ‘and that’s why our storytelling has to evolve.’ Once they see it’s about cultural change, not marketing, they stop arguing.”
The genius of the Mutiny Officer lies in turning external pressures into internal imperatives. Whether the stated excuse is generational shifts, talent scarcity, or buying patterns, they inject cultural urgency into their organization’s decision making. When the case leaves the realm of marketing spend and enters existential adaptation, resistance evaporates.
“You have to show leadership that the next generation of talent and customers won’t join or buy from a company that feels old. That’s not a comms problem—it’s a cultural one. Once you frame it like that, investment stops being optional.”
Weaponized difference. Disruptors at heart, Mutiny Officers live closer to consumer culture than corporate culture. In confession after confession, CMOs described this outsider energy not as eccentricity, but as armor—the insulation required to spark, then survive, internal resistance. One spoke of cultivating a “fear rouge” among their Finance colleagues to keep efficiency from suffocating growth. Another embraced the role of provocateur, proud to force a healthy friction between product and marketing. “I think the role of a good CMO isn’t to keep the system tidy—it’s to create disorder. You have to shake the machine so new ideas can come through… [But] creating disorder doesn’t mean chaos—it means forcing change before the company becomes irrelevant.”
What their colleagues may dismiss as the quirks of a senior creative, Mutiny Officers privately describe as signals of quiet dissent. Their visible difference—from the way they think to the way they dress—is a living reminder of the customer world beyond the conference room walls. “You want your CMO to be a little bit off… you want a CMO in cufflinks? You’re hiring the wrong guy… If your marketing leader looks like your banker, you’ve got a problem. Just like if your CFO walks in wearing jeans and a hoodie—call security.” If the Mutiny Officer leans into roleplaying, one of their cleverest tricks is getting others to do the same. One assigns C-suite peers audience lenses to use when reviewing creative—a subtle way to break cognitive bad habits.
“Go to your CFO and be like, ‘You’re not the CFO anymore, you’re a consumer—beat this up like a consumer would.’”
With that one move, resistance becomes insight—and the external perspective gains a foothold inside the room. Mutiny isn’t rebellion for rebellion’s sake—it’s engineered disruption, designed to provoke the antibodies a complacent organization will need to weather the next external shock. At its core, this mutation is about weaponizing life at the margins of power. Mutiny Officers’ dissent isn’t ego-driven, but ecosystemic: they compel the system to evolve—or risk irrelevance. After all, it’s only mutiny if you’re still inside the ship.
CHIEF MISSING OFFICER
Beneath the seemingly calm surface of corporate habitats, threats to the marketing agenda are everywhere. Rival species—CFOs and COOs—jostle for dominance and clash over limited resources, but this CMO mutation has already slipped underground. You won’t see it stalk or strike—it tunnels quietly through process and politics, reshaping the landscape from below. This elusive creature survives by blending with its surroundings, borrowing the cover of safer priorities. When the dust settles, the terrain looks different, though no one can quite say why.
Stealth adaptation of the Chief Marketing Officer
Chief Missing Officers evolved from the same collapse of centralized marketing power that produced the Chief Mutiny Officer, but along a different path. Both traded authority for influence, but their adaptations diverged. While Mutiny Officers provoke change through visible disruption, Missing Officers thrive on strategic invisibility. Camouflage is their defining adaptation. They channel influence under the cover of alignment, attaching brand work to dominant corporate initiatives—employee engagement, workforce upskilling, sales enablement—so that marketing priorities move through the system disguised as someone else’s business strategy. This species’ genius lies in embedding marketing’s agenda so deeply that no one recognizes it as such. The outcome mirrors the Mutiny Officer’s impact but inverted: where Mutiny Officers force change from without, Missing Officers rewire it from within. In their hands, brand becomes inseparable from other corporate operations—and therefore immune to antimarketing predators.
Invisible influence. Despite its misleading name, this mutation is far from absent—it’s just rarely observed in the open. Known more by downstream effects than direct actions, this species operates through quiet orchestration, not overt persuasion. “This is not a marketing challenge, it’s a change-management challenge… you need internal know-how and political capital.” Missing Officers don’t win through spectacle—they win through anticipation and choreography. They approach colleagues the same way they approach consumers—building journeys, predicting objections, and timing nudges for maximum effect. Their behavior mirrors a multi-channel campaign. Instead of a single, heroic hard sell, they emit steady signals, emotional framing, memorable earworms, and gradual alignment.
“If you’re not laying the groundwork and taking people on a journey—showing them other great stuff that’s working—then it’s hard to get good work through. You can’t just walk in and expect to persuade everyone with brilliance.”
This is internal influence as ecosystem design: small, sustained touches that make alignment look like consensus, not conquest. The same philosophy extends upward. For Missing Officers, influence doesn’t stop at peers—it includes managing the conditions above them so their teams can thrive below. They see executive alignment not as self promotion, but as ecosystem maintenance: clearing the political air so the people doing the work can breathe. One CMO described this mindset bluntly: “If your leadership isn’t backing you up, you can’t actually be a good leader. So managing up feels self-serving, but it’s actually serving your team far more.”
Evasive co-creation. A Missing Officer’s true talent lies in what they don’t do. Survival here often means relinquishing creative credit. In the agency jungles, prestige comes from the big reveal—but in the corporate savannah, ta-da! Moments can be fatal. Ironically, showmanship honed by coming up on the agency side may not be the most powerful tool for a CMO whose goal is to ensure their creative offspring survive to maturity. By setting aside pride of ownership—or better yet, offering it to others—that this species champions creative work. Because Missing Officers have learned that the more fingerprints on an idea, the safer it becomes. “One of the fundamental problems with agencies is, it was such a transactional relationship. You brief, you go off, you do work and then you present something and ta-da. Whereas actually, the magic happens in the co-build. The collaboration is the work.”
Here, the collaborative creative’s motto, “no pride of ownership,” is not passivity—it’s a survival tactic. In nature, what’s less identifiable is harder to attack. Rhetorical restraint. This brings us to a surprising trait for a leader who is typically the seniormost creative in the organization. Missing Officers try not to be the most interesting person in the room. Their survival tactic lies in foregoing the flamboyant theatrics of a corporate muse to operate as an underground conductor. You can see it in how they build coalitions, but also in how they inhabit a room. If the Mutiny Officer’s provocations draw attention to jolt the system awake, Missing Officers do the opposite. They redistribute oxygen and credit while reassuring jumpy CFOs that a steady hand is on the tiller.
“You can’t out-firework a CFO. The trick is to be convincing, still, not shaken.” Everyone knows today’s marketing leaders must speak the language of finance. But in private, our confessors described a subtler art that’s at least equally necessary: adopting the affective and rhetorical cues that make financial fluency believable when it comes out of a creative’s mouth.
“They expect you to dance around the data—so when you stay calm, confident, and measured, it disarms them. It says, ‘I’m not here to sell you something; I’m here to run something.’”
That steadiness turns out to be one of the Missing Officer’s defining strengths. One CMO described their role as guardian of consistency, moderating the organization’s reflex to reinvent, and so protecting the continuity that gives brand its credibility. “It’s very easy in retail to chase the new shiny thing—this season’s color, that campaign line. But if you do that, you lose the red thread. I’m not trying to sell peach this season; I’m selling an idea that outlives peach. Consistency is what makes the brand feel alive over time.” This species’ toolkit relies on understatement to advance its agenda. For the brand, this means trusting consistency to work its magic in customers’ memory structures. For the organization, it means using restraint to make bold ideas appear inevitable, not disruptive. Ultimately, the Missing Officer’s job is to make creativity merge with the system until it no longer looks like invention at all—just good business.
CHIEF MOOD OFFICER
Every ecosystem has its stabilizers—the ones that keep chaos from washing progress away. Like mangroves bracing a turbulent shoreline, this species roots itself at the edge between emotion and reason, absorbing pressure so others don’t erode under it. Without claws or armor, it survives by controlling the climate itself. A subtle shift in tone here, a pause there, and the storm dissipates. When tempers flare, this species steadies the front, restoring calm so others can act. You won’t hear its call, only feel its effect—the quiet regulation that holds the shoreline together long enough for new growth to take hold.
Vibe-tuning offshoot of the Chief Missing Officer
Just as certain species stabilize ecosystems through subtle shifts rather than force, Mood Officers steer an organization’s emotional rhythm through timing, presence, and finely tuned cues that diffuse tension and restore balance. Their defining adaptation is sensitivity to atmosphere—they react to change before others even detect it.
Evolving the Missing Officer’s invisible influence into something more physiological, the Mood Officer regulates emotional climate, moving through environments rather than systems. As a result, this species neither fights nor flees; they absorb, redirect, and equalize. Their survival advantage: emotional thermos regulation.
Managing the tone
Mood Officers know that the tone they set doesn’t just influence the room—it shapes the decisions made within it. It’s here that the traditionally celebrated, room-commanding presentation skills of a senior marketer find new relevance under today’s selective pressures. It’s not only customers who are moved through emotion; the same instinct that moves audiences can push a leadership team past analytic deadlock. “A good CMO can wow everyone. It’s not just the logic of the business case—it’s the way you communicate, the swagger. Sometimes the room doesn’t need more numbers; it needs someone to make people believe again.” Across our global confessions, one truth was constant: today’s CMOs don’t sell creative to their colleagues—they create the conditions for other leaders to buy in. The Mood Officer understands that you can’t really persuade anyone—you can only make them willing to think again. “And when you are in those conversations, you’re not trying to sell anyone. You’re creating the conditions for the organization to buy an idea. You’re not selling an idea.”
Redirecting with humor
Our CMOs spoke repeatedly about using humor to neutralize an attack and reset the room’s emotional temperature. A Mood Officer’s joke isn’t a signal of submission; it’s a tool of strategic redirection. In fact, many of our CMOs confessed that their greatest boardroom successes relied on the ability transform negative energy into forward motion. One CMO described a leadership meeting that could have derailed when a finance executive dismissed marketing as “the coloring-in department.” Instead of defending or retaliating, the CMO diffused the barb with humor.
“When the jab came, I didn’t defend marketing. I just smiled and made a quip about how expensive the crayons were. Everyone laughed, including the CFO. The tension was gone. A few minutes later, that same exec was asking for our input on a pricing brief.” Through little feats of emotional alchemy, Mood Officers help the system release pressure before it fractures under stress. Often, this means leaning into the absurdity of marketing’s classic catch-22s rather than bemoaning them.
“They wanted growth, but zero risk. They wanted speed, but no mistakes. I said, ‘So you want us to be bold, but invisible? Great, I’ll work on that.’ Everyone laughed. Then someone said, ‘Okay, fair point.’ That’s how we got to a real conversation about trade-offs.” This technique can also serve as pre-emptive defense. One CMO uses self-deprecating humor to take the sting out of anticipated CFO pushback. “You can sense the CFO’s about to say something like, ‘Can we have less emotion and more product?’ So I’ll beat them to it: ‘Don’t worry, we’ve got a version with more logos if it helps you sleep.’ They laugh—and then they listen to the argument for why the emotional cut works better.”
For leaders who advance agendas through influence rather than authority, humor may be their last real form of control. A joke signals confidence, exposes the tension others avoid, and turns hostility into shared absurdity—ultimately giving a Mood Officer control of tone, and therefore, direction.
Embracing the absurd
A Mood Officer’s defining adaptation may be their ability to face—even harness—corporate absurdity. They understand that fielding illogical pushback isn’t a distraction from the work; it is the work. Someone has to connect business logic with human illogic—especially when the subjectivity is coming from the “hard metrics” side of the conference table.
“You have to understand—marketing is the lightning rod for every irrational thing a company does. Everyone has a view on the logo, the color, what their wife or kid thinks. So you learn that your job isn’t to avoid the absurdity—it’s to field it.”
One CMO confessed just how draining that can be. They suggested that the burden placed on marketing leadership is the non-negotiable requirement to absorb emotion-saturated perspectives from every other leader. “You take all that crazy, emotional noise, and you don’t let it derail you. You smile, you make a joke, you absorb it, and you keep the room moving. It’s the only C-suite role where the job is actually fielding absurdity—and somehow turning it into momentum.” Modern CMOs start to thrive when they make this evolutionary leap—from resenting irrationality to mastering it. Taken to its extreme, this adaptation can make a Mood Officer willing to act as a temporary scapegoat or sacrificial lamb, absorbing the negativity that accompanies change long enough for everyone else to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Their characteristic combination of credibility and good humor makes them oddly invincible in this position.
As one CMO tasked with the unappealing task of centralizing globally dispersed marketing functions said: “You can bring Philip Kotler to the table and he’s going to get f***ed. You need someone with the internal know-how and political capital to weather the resistance. So I said, unfortunately, I’m the useful idiot—and that’s why I recommended I take the role.” Mood Officers are at their strongest when they see this exposed position not as weakness, but proof of trust. They understand that levity and catharsis often precede alignment—and that sometimes, the fastest way to move an organization forward is to take the joke yourself.
CHIEF MEANING OFFICER
Under the punishing conditions of the corporate plateau, signals scatter and purpose dissolves into air. Yet amid the data dust, a small pollinator moves between clusters, carrying fragments of story that let life reconnect. With each pass, patterns emerge—disparate functions begin to hum in sync. This creature thrives on exchange, turning complexity into clarity, noise into rhythm. Without it, the plain grows silent; with it, the system blooms anew.
Pollinator offshoot of the Chief Marketing Officer
If the ancestral CMO could survive as a lone wolf creative, the Chief Meaning Officer thrives by making themselves, and their craft, useful to the entire corporate ecosystem. To do it, this species evolved the ability to metabolize complexity—whether abstract data, financial imperatives, or technological change—into narratives and symbols their colleagues can feel. Without them, the organism suffers cultural anemia. Meaning Officers deploy their gift for narrative and symbolic throughline not only in marketing. They also use it to bind every function back to the organization’s purpose and the human emotion at its core. Think of them as pollinators carrying nutrients across silos, spreading connective tissue that turns scattered activity into shared meaning.
Stating the obvious. Meaning Officers thrive by articulating what others overlook. In a culture that fetishizes analytics, novelty, and the latest AI tricks, stating the obvious can be a powerful act. Knowing that clarity, not complexity, galvanizes group action. “It sounds ridiculous, but half my job is saying out loud what everyone’s pretending isn’t true: we don’t have a brand problem, we have a trust problem. Or, our communications are confusing because our products are confusing. Once you name it, people relax. It’s like exhaling after holding your breath.”
“The wins that really changed things for us came from stating the obvious—things no one had stopped to notice. Everyone was so deep in dashboards, KPIs, frameworks, that they couldn’t see the human thing right in front of them. We had a whole team debating how to increase customer lifetime value. Hours of slides. Finally, someone said, ‘We’ve stopped saying thank you to customers.’ That was it. It wasn’t data science. It was remembering our manners. We built a campaign around gratitude, and it lifted everything—morale, retention, even NPS.” Meaning Officers know their job isn’t to be clever—it’s to help people see the forest for the trees, by whatever hackneyed metaphor necessary. Their superpower is delivering “duh” moments that pierce corporate fog. Even if that means crafting yet another airplane analogy.
“I said, ‘Imagine you’re on a plane and everyone moves to the back. The plane doesn’t take off. The reason we can’t just cluster where leaders are is because you get no lift. We need to be differentiated to generate lift…’”
“I’ll have a CEO… say in front of the entire ExCo, ‘You’ve done such a great job… we’re so far ahead, we’ve decided to cut all of your funding.’ But because you’re in an ExCo meeting with all the grown-ups, you can’t go, ‘Are you a f**ing idiot?’ You have to say… it’s like getting a plane into the air: you need all that fuel to leave the runway, but if you stop fueling, you’ll come down. We won’t crash right away—it’ll glide for a while—but eventually all the other planes will stay up. And they’re like, ‘Ohhh, okay,’ and you’re like [eyeroll].
”Even when demystifying their own craft, Meaning Officers embrace simplicity. Asked to explain targeting to non-marketers, one CMO put the matter baldly: “It’s putting the billboard on the exec’s way home, so they see the money.”
When your explanation feels so simple it’s silly, you’ve made meaning everyone can share. Speaking the language. Being the cross-silo pollinator of the C-suite requires fluency across corporate dialects. Meaning Officers unify the organization without formal authority by translating brand into outcomes that matter to colleagues in finance, product, and sales. This species doesn’t force other functions to speak marketing’s language—it shows how marketing already speaks theirs.
“I kept saying to the sales team: without brand, you spend 25 minutes explaining who you are. With brand, you spend five—and have 25 minutes left to sell. It’s not indulgence; it’s efficiency.”
Another CMO in a product-led organization described how marketing earned its seat by offering a customer lens, rather than a competing (or commanding) perspective. “We weren’t telling engineers what to do—we were showing them what buyers were saying. Instead of saying, ‘this is the campaign,’ we said, ‘this is what your customers are telling us.’ That’s how we got them on side.” A different leader used the banner of consistency to make brand meaningful without stepping on toes. Their operationally focused colleagues were able to appreciate the relevance of a guardian role focused on ensuring that evolution doesn’t become amnesia.
“I saw my role not as fighting for budget, but as the archivist of our red thread—the one who holds the continuity of our culture and challenges us when we drift.” By translating brand purpose into everyone’s native tongue, Meaning Officers remind the organization that marketing’s true power isn’t persuasion—it’s connection. Pollinating toolsets. But Meaning Officers don’t just share stories—they spread tools. One CMO confessed to extending influence into HR by offering the help of basic marketing frameworks to design audience journeys for internal communications.
“We took segmentation and journey mapping from marketing and applied it to the employee experience—different personas, different touchpoints. Suddenly HR could see the same patterns we see in consumers. It gave us one shared language.” Another used the same tactic to connect engineers, clinicians, and marketers: “Our scientists spoke in studies, and our marketers spoke in stories. We started mapping patient journeys that combined both—what the data shows and what the patient feels. That’s when the company started to see brand, product, and purpose as the same thing.” By sharing methods, Meaning Officers create shared worldviews. As the name implies, Meaning Officers connect an organization through story—but story as instrument, not ornament. Each metaphor, translation, or framework they seed becomes a living nutrient, helping the organization grow forward without growing apart.
CHIEF MOMENTUM OFFICER
For generations, the migration pattern remained unchanged—ancient routes carved deep into the corporate terrain, followed faithfully, even as the food thinned. But now, something stirs. A new migration begins. Where larger beasts hesitate, this agile species pushes forward, leaping from one safe patch to the next. It never lingers long enough for predators of process to close in. Each landing leaves a faint mark—a pilot here, a proof point there—before it lifts again, carried forward by instinct toward new currents that promise life.
Nimble scion of the Chief Missing Officer Lineage
The Chief Momentum Officer evolved from the workaround instincts of the Missing Officer lineage. But where Missing Officers influence through stealth, Momentum Officers express their adaptation kinetically. They survive not by blending in, but by staying in motion—too quick for bureaucracy to trap, too experimental for resistance to form. This is influence through pacing.
Approval bypass. With their finely honed sense of timing, Momentum Officers protect creative ideas and brand investments by never allowing debates to stall. “I didn’t even ask the CEO’s opinion—I just put the logos on the wall and waited.”
Every move is a reversible experiment, small enough to feel safe but big enough to prove impact. One CMO confessed, “I call everything a pilot.” When it’s all a test, debate ends and data decides. “The main critiques were: ‘It’s not traditional,’ and ‘How will you prove it’s working?’ So I said, ‘Let’s measure what it costs us to increase brand awareness.’ We agreed on that before the campaign began. That was key—deciding how we’d measure success so it wasn’t just my gut feeling.” Think of it as kinetic camouflage: Momentum Officers avoid analysis paralysis by running pilots. Once they succeed, retroactive alignment emerges. “Now everyone is like, yeah, that’s so obvious. At the time, they thought it was crazy.”
Tempo control. Momentum Officers understand that survival isn’t about constant acceleration—it’s about controlling the tempo. They move just fast enough to outrun bureaucracy, yet steady enough to keep others in step. This doesn’t always mean speeding up. It can also look like deliberately slowing down to create unity across a fragmented organization. One CMO described the process of gaining alignment not as a frustrating battle, but a dance to find shared rhythm. “The secret is cadence. We make sure everyone arrives at the finish line together. There’s a discipline of tempo and shared ownership that keeps creativity from fragmenting across markets.” Whether by sprinting ahead or setting a sharable pace, this species reads organizational rhythm like weather—accelerating before resistance forms, then creating the ritualized synchrony needed to sustain motion. Their genius isn’t speed or patience—it’s pacing: knowing when to push, when to pause, and how to keep the system moving as one, even if it’s just baby steps.
Reframing risk. For Momentum Officers, championing risk isn’t bravado—it’s how they keep creative boldness alive. One of their crucial survival skills is making big moves look responsible, and responsible moves look essential. One CMO told us how they turned a controversial sponsorship into a prudent financial play. The board had resisted backing a niche sport, dismissing the spend as frivolous. So our CMO recast the idea in their leadership’s own language: acquisition efficiency. Suddenly, it looked irresponsible not to spend the money. “I told them, forget the sport—look at the numbers. This will bring awareness at one third the cost of paid media. That’s when the CFO said, ‘Okay, now it makes sense.’”
Another confessed to applying a venture capital mindset to every major marketing decision. This leader never asks themselves whether a decision is “safe.” “When you’re thinking about what risks you take, my secret is simple. Show me uncapped upside and capped downside. That’s how I calculate it. If the worst that happens is we lose a little money, some time, some pride—but the best that happens is we change the game—then it’s a bet worth making.” Momentum Officers know that inaction is its own kind of recklessness. To bring others along in this mindset—and to cultivate appetite for bold moves among their colleagues—they take steps to redefine what risk really means. “I just say: the real risk is we do something that doesn’t cut through and nobody sees it. That’s most marketing. That’s the risk.” This calculus turns fear into fuel. By redefining risk not as danger but as stagnation, Momentum Officers position movement as the safest bet. To them, the only unacceptable outcome is standing still.
Momentum Officers don’t waste energy converting skeptics. They know belief follows evidence, not the other way around. By trading theory for traction—running pilots, generating data, and moving faster than debate—they keep creative ideas alive through droughts of confidence and consensus alike.
MARKETING WILL ALWAYS FIND A WAY
As Harvard Business Review observed in 2024, “Marketing as a name is somewhat dated.” On the surface, that diagnosis could lead to another obituary for the CMO. Our fieldwork in the confessional booth suggests that what’s fading isn’t the function—just the form. In biological terms, it’s not extinction we’re witnessing, but adaptive radiation: one species splintering into many, each evolved to survive in a different niche of the same environment. In place of a single archetype now stands a range of adaptive variants—each tuned to survive where the old apex predator could not, each capable of thriving under conditions that once threatened to wipe out the role entirely. The CMOs who inspired our taxonomy haven’t just adapted to harsher conditions. They’ve developed new organs of survival—built for sensing, interpreting, and metabolizing change. They learned how to feed adaptation back into the organization itself. Collectively, they act as a living immune system for the corporate body, metabolizing change before it becomes crisis. The pressures that once hunted only CMOs now stalk the entire C-suite. And the adaptations catalogued here are not marketing curiosities; they’re early glimpses into leadership’s next stage of evolution.
Translation, timing, emotional acuity, and the instinct to evolve ahead of one’s environment—these are the markers of modern influence, the traits of leaders who are succeeding where authority is scarce, data is abundant, and change is constant. In nature, the most vital systems are those that sense change first. And in business, that system is still marketing: the corporate organism’s nervous system, the translator of its environment, the part that keeps the enterprise alive to the world. So the next time someone declares a corporate role obsolete, listen closely. Somewhere in the wilds of the boardroom, you’ll hear the faint rustle of adaptation. And so the species endures—smaller, swifter, more subtly attuned to its environment than ever before.
Worldwide Partners, the world’s most collaborative agency network, fuels brand growth through access, flexibility and partnership. With over 90 independent agencies in more than 50 countries, and experience in over 90 industry verticals, Worldwide Partners serves as a hub that harnesses the talent, expertise and diversified capabilities of the agencies within its network to reimagine growth for brands. www.worldwidepartners.com. Interviews, analysis and report by Monigle, www.monigle.com Moderators: Dominic Leung & Gabriel Cohen. Report lead and co-author: Rie Bridges Co-author: Krisi Packer
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