POV

Twenty-five years. That's not just a milestone, it's a revolution disguised as an anniversary.

Before I dive into the provocations, let me start with gratitude. Thank you, Donovan—for your vision, your relentless energy, and your unwavering belief that marketing leadership matters. 

You didn't just build an organization; you built a movement. And to your team, those who were there at the start, those who've moved on to new chapters, and those who stand with you today:

Thank you for creating a platform that elevated all of us. 

The CMO Council became more than a network; it became our intellectual home, our sounding board, and our collective voice when marketing needed one most.

Now, to the uncomfortable truths...

When I joined the CMO Council's Middle East Advisory Board in 2009, we were still debating whether digital was a "channel" or a "strategy." 

Today, that question sounds quaint. We've lived through the death of the campaign, the rise of the algorithm, and now stand at the precipice of technology rewriting every playbook we've ever known. And yet, here's the uncomfortable truth: most marketing organizations are still structured for a world that no longer exists.

Let me be provocative: 

The CMO role isn't dying—it's splitting into two distinct species, and only one will survive the next decade.

The Past: Building Brands in a World We Could Control

Across Coca-Cola, Unilever, Wrigley, Citigroup, QNB, NBK, Gulf Air, and Majid Al Futtaim, I've had a front-row seat to marketing's identity crisis. In 2009, we still believed we could control the narrative. We built campaigns, bought media, created brand guidelines, and expected consumers to receive our messages gratefully. 

The Middle East was particularly fascinating. A region where traditional brand building collided head-on with mobile-first consumers who skipped entire technological generations. We didn't evolve; we leapfrogged.

I remember heated advisory board discussions about whether Facebook was a fad. Whether influencers were "real" marketing. Whether CMOs should own the website. These debates seem almost charming now, but they reveal something profound: 

We've spent fifteen years fighting the wrong battles while the war shifted entirely.

The Uncomfortable Present: Sixty-Seven Flavors of Chief:

You mentioned the proliferation of C-suite marketing roles—Chief Brand Officer, Chief Growth Officer, Chief Digital Officer, Chief Customer Officer, Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Experience Officer, Chief Innovation Officer, Chief Commercial Officer. Let's call this what it is: organizational fragmentation masquerading as specialization.

This isn't evolution; it's confusion. CEOs and boards created these roles because they fundamentally don't understand what modern marketing is supposed to do. And we let them, because too many CMOs couldn't articulate our expanding value in language the C-suite understands: revenue, retention, lifetime value, market share, shareholder return.

Here's the uncomfortable question: If 70% of Fortune 500 companies now have a C-suite marketing leader, why is average CMO tenure still under four years? Why do boards still question marketing's value? Why do we still fight for a seat at the strategy table?

Because we've been playing defense when we should be playing offense.

The Fork in the Road: Two Types of CMOs

The CMOs who survive the next decade will fall into one of two categories:

Type One: The Orchestrator—A business leader who happens to specialize in growth through customer value creation. They don't "do marketing"; they architect the entire commercial engine. They own revenue alongside sales. They design products alongside innovation. They shape strategy alongside the CEO. They're fluent in P&L, not just brand equity. They build organizations, not departments.

Type Two:  The Specialist—Exceptional at brand, creative, or communications, but operating as a service function. Valuable, yes. Strategic, sometimes. But ultimately replaceable by consultants, agencies, or the next organizational restructuring.

The former becomes CEO. The latter becomes unemployed.

I've been both, and I can tell you: only one keeps you awake at night for the right reasons.

The Future: Marketing as the Operating System, Not an App

Here's what the next 25 years demand from marketing leadership:

Technology won't replace CMOs; it will expose the ones who were never really doing the job. When automation can generate brand campaigns, optimize media spend, and personalize content at scale, what's left for humans? 

Strategy. Judgment. Courage. The ability to make bold bets when the data is ambiguous. The wisdom to know when to ignore the algorithm.

The convergence is coming, whether we orchestrate it or not. 

Brand, commerce, technology, data, experience, innovation:

These aren't separate functions. They're facets of a single discipline: 

Creating and capturing customer value. The CMO who can't orchestrate this convergence will be replaced by someone who can. That "someone" might be the Chief Growth Officer who doesn't carry marketing's historical baggage.

Sustainability and purpose aren't marketing messages; they're business models. The next generation of consumers, and increasingly, B2B buyers—won't tolerate the gap between what we say and what we do. 

Marketing's role isn't to spin this; it's to architect organizations where the gap doesn't exist.

The Middle East, Africa, and Asia will teach the West more than the reverse. These markets have innovated out of necessity—mobile payments before credit card infrastructure, social commerce before traditional retail, community-driven growth before performance marketing. 

The future of marketing is being written in markets that Western playbooks never anticipated.

My Provocation for the Next 25 Years:

The CMO Council shouldn't spend the next quarter-century defending the CMO title. Titles are irrelevant. Instead, let's define what the Chief Architect of Growth must be regardless of what their business card says.

Because here's what I've learned across banking, aviation, retail, and FMCG, across the Middle East, Europe, and global markets, across 16 years with the CMO Council: 

The organizations that win don't have better marketing. They have better marketers in positions of genuine power, making decisions that shape the entire business.

The question isn't whether the CMO role is viable. It's whether we have the courage to claim the authority that modern business demands of us or whether we'll keep accepting the diminished version of leadership that makes everyone comfortable.

Twenty-five years in, we should be done making people comfortable.

Here's to the next 25 years of making them uncomfortable in the best possible way.

And here's to you, Donovan, and everyone who's been part of this journey. You've given us a platform. Now let's use it to reshape what marketing leadership means.