''' I talk to a lot of founders. Most of them hate their marketing department.
They see a budget black hole, fuelled by jargon and justified by metrics that feel disconnected from the only thing that matters: profitable revenue.
They see a Chief Marketing Officer, and they see a passenger. Someone who talks a good game about "brand" but can't draw a straight line between their £5m budget and the number on the bottom line.
This isn't just founder frustration. It's a structural failure. The average tenure of a CMO, according to Spencer Stuart, is about 40 months. This isn't a sign of a dynamic industry; it's a revolving door of failure. The CMO gets hired on a bold promise, spends 12 months making plans, 18 months executing them poorly, and the final 10 months preparing their CV. The music stops, and they're the one left without a chair.
That tenure is about to drop to zero. The role of the Chief Marketing Officer, as we know it, is already dead. The anachronistic blend of brand guardian, spreadsheet jockey, and agency middle-manager is being replaced. Not by a person, but by a system. By an AI CMO.
The Data Delusion: Why Your Dashboard is Lying to You
Every CMO I've met in the last five years claims to be "data-driven." What they usually mean is that they are "dashboard-obsessed." They have screens showing website traffic, social media engagement, and a myriad of other vanity metrics that provide an illusion of control while offering zero genuine insight.
They are managers of complexity, not drivers of growth. They preside over a sprawling martech stack, a collection of SaaS tools that promise silver bullets but deliver cognitive overload. They manage agencies, who in turn manage freelancers, in a horribly inefficient chain of Chinese whispers where strategy is diluted into a bland paste of "best practice."
Let's be brutally honest. A huge portion of marketing activity is wasted. Gartner famously found that CMOs waste, on average, 26% of their budget. From my experience talking to UK businesses, I believe it's closer to 50%. The money isn't just inefficiently spent; it's set on fire in a ritual sacrifice to the gods of brand awareness. Want to see how much budget you are likely setting on fire? We have a calculator for that.
Consider the John Lewis Christmas advert. It is a cultural institution in the UK, a £7 million monument to sentimental brand building. In 2022, the company spent that money on an advert about a man learning to skateboard, only to post a £234 million group loss. Is the advert solely to blame? Of course not. But it is a perfect symbol of an outdated model. A model that prioritises a vague feeling of "brand love" over a relentless, data-hardened pursuit of commercial results. The ad is a beautiful, expensive, strategically irrelevant piece of art from a bygone era.
In an agentic AI paradigm, the first question a system would ask is, "What is the most effective use of £7 million to increase profitable revenue in Q4?" I can guarantee its answer would not be a 90-second film about skateboarding.
Generative AI is a Head Fake — The Real Revolution is Agentic