{"id":11042,"date":"2026-05-14T18:44:21","date_gmt":"2026-05-15T00:44:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/?p=11042"},"modified":"2026-05-14T18:44:21","modified_gmt":"2026-05-15T00:44:21","slug":"why-ai-makes-brand-leadership-more-important","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/?p=11042","title":{"rendered":"Why AI makes brand leadership more important"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"young<\/div>\n

There\u2019s a cruel irony at the center of marketing leadership. The CMO is in charge of one of the most complex, long-horizon jobs in business.\u00a0But everything they do is measured on a short-term performance system, using a shrinking budget, to boost company sales before their clock runs out.<\/p>\n

Perhaps CMO should stand for chief miracle officer. Or, like some companies, why not just eliminate the role altogether? Bad idea. Especially with the onset of AI. But more about that later.\u00a0<\/p>\n

According to Forrester\u2019s 2025 report, \u201cThe Representation and Tenure of Fortune 500 CMOs<\/a>,\u201d only 49% of Fortune 500 top marketers hold the CMO title today, down from 55% just one year ago.\u00a0Over one in five Fortune 500 companies changed their entire marketing leadership in the past 12 months. Average CMO tenure has dropped to 3.9 years, still the shortest average in the C-suite.<\/p>\n

Yet for some, the institutional response to a structurally failing model wasn\u2019t to fix the model. It was to dissolve the role. UPS, Etsy, and Walgreens all eliminated the standalone CMO position and didn\u2019t replace it. Marketing responsibilities were folded into the chief commercial officer or chief operating officer roles, and distributed leadership structures were implemented. Or worse, the martech was left to IT to implement.<\/p>\n

The unspoken message: brand-building leadership is overhead, not infrastructure.\u00a0As Forrester VP and Principal Analyst Ian Bruce put it<\/a>, the CMO\u2019s remit had become \u201cstretched between brand and demand, product and pipeline, digital and physical.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

CEOs did what made intuitive sense: they split the job up or gave it to someone who offered analytical measurement and short-term ROI metrics.\u00a0What they didn\u2019t account for is what happens to a brand when nobody is left to ask whether it means anything.<\/p>\n

As more and more people use AI to find products or services, your promotional spend doesn\u2019t drive sales. AI doesn\u2019t care about your jingle, clever ad, or sales promotion.\u00a0To AI, that stuff is invisible. It\u2019s looking for meaning.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n
\n Your customers search everywhere. Make sure your brand shows up<\/span>.\n <\/div>\n

\n The SEO toolkit you know, plus the AI visibility data you need.\n <\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n Start Free Trial<\/span>\n <\/div>\n
\n
Get started with<\/div>\n

\"Semrush\n <\/p><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n

The plateau of indifference: What fills the vacuum<\/h2>\n

When marketing becomes performance spend management and dashboard oversight, brands drift onto what I call the plateau of indifference.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a deceptively comfortable place. Revenue doesn\u2019t collapse. Customers don\u2019t disappear overnight. The brand is still known, still available, still spending. But it has stopped meaning anything to people. The justification for price vs. value erodes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Consumers can still name the brand, but with so many me-too solutions, they choose based on price, which becomes the only real differentiator.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Congrats. You\u2019ve cut your own margins and increased the need for promotional spend.<\/p>\n

The thing is, market share shuffles back and forth between competitors running identical playbooks, and performance spend has to increase just to hold flat results.<\/p>\n

\n
\"Plateau
<\/em>Plateau of Indifference\"\u2122\" and AI visibility. \u00a9House of Holmes Idea Labs<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

As you look at that figure, notice how much farther over the plateau of indifference brand clarity gets you than just price.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The more things change, the more things change\u00a0<\/h2>\n

For example, decades ago, when General Mills bought the Lacoste fashion brand and merged it with Izod, things went reasonably well.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But then they optimized it for short-term revenue. The brand began appearing in discount stores. Distribution broadened into mass outlets. It lost its premium cachet, and margins dropped like a microphone at the end of a hip-hop concert.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Rebuilding those formerly fat margins after Lacoste repurchased the brand in 1992 took years of patient reinvestment: pulling back from discount channels, raising prices, and reestablishing meaning.\u00a0Sales eventually climbed 800% over the following decade. Leaving behind at least two decades of lost profits.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The lesson isn\u2019t just that the turnaround worked. It\u2019s how long it took, and how much of that time ran directly against quarterly pressure to show faster results.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s the real cost of living on the plateau of indifference. Not a bad quarter. Years of compounding irrelevance that get progressively harder and more expensive to undo.<\/p>\n

McDonald\u2019s learned a version of this lesson in 2019 when it eliminated its global CMO role. Within a year, the company reinstated the position and has since expanded its CMO\u2019s portfolio.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It turns out that when you remove the person responsible for instilling meaning into the brand, you eventually discover that the question still needs to be asked. Meaning matters to those whose money you\u2019d like in exchange for your product. These days, AI gets the first vote.<\/p>\n

The new penalty: AI doesn\u2019t care about your media budget<\/h2>\n

The stakes have changed, and there\u2019s no way around it.<\/p>\n

AI doesn\u2019t surface brands based on ad spend, impression share, or promotional pricing. It synthesizes the brand\u2019s narrative footprint. It surfaces what problems the brand demonstrably solves, what values it consistently demonstrates, and how much customers appreciate it.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A brand that has spent years in performance-only mode, with no one stewarding its meaning, has a thin and transactional narrative. AI reads that thinness and routes around it. It\u2019ll grow more and more invisible.<\/p>\n

The numbers behind this shift are not trivial. Studies already show organic click-through rates dropping between 15% and 64%<\/a> when AI-generated answers appear in search results.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The brands without clear meaning aren\u2019t just losing ground. They\u2019re losing the ability to be found at all in the channel, replacing traditional search.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a simple audit any CMO, or whoever inherited the marketing function, can run today. Ask ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity to recommend a solution in your category.\u00a0<\/p>\n

If your brand doesn\u2019t appear, or appears vaguely, you\u2019ve just received a more honest brand health assessment than most tracking studies will give you. No amount of media spend fixes that result. Only meaning does.<\/p>\n

The CMO\u2019s structural trap (short tenure, performance-only metrics, brand investment treated as discretionary overhead) has been quietly building this AI vulnerability for years.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The elimination of the role didn\u2019t just cost brands a title. It cost them the only executive whose job was to prevent that invisibility.<\/p>\n

3 things a CMO needs to actually do the job<\/h2>\n

The miracle the C-suite keeps requesting isn\u2019t brand equity in 90 days. The actual miracle, the harder, quieter one, is making the organization understand that brand meaning is infrastructure, not overhead, and that without someone protecting it, the business is flying without instruments.<\/p>\n

1. A longer measurement window\u00a0<\/a><\/h3>\n

Binet and Field\u2019s research<\/a>\u00a0establishes the empirical baseline: short-term effects are measurable within a year, but the compounding value of brand meaning, higher margins, lower acquisition costs, and greater resilience in downturns, plays out over three or more years.<\/span>\u00a0<\/p>\n

CMOs are being asked to build something that may take longer than their likely tenure to fully materialize. That\u2019s not a talent problem. It\u2019s a system design problem.<\/p>\n

2. Budget protection for brand-building, separate from performance spend<\/h3>\n

Binet and Fields\u2019 60\/40 principle (spend 60% on long-term brand building, 40% on short-term activation) isn\u2019t a philosophical preference.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an empirically derived formula for maximizing total marketing ROI. When that ratio inverts, as it has across most organizations, short-term sales numbers hold for a while. Then the baseline erodes.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Then you\u2019re on the Plateau of Indifference, wondering why performance spend keeps taking more money to produce the same results.<\/p>\n

3. A seat at the strategy table, not just the media table<\/h3>\n

Brand meaning starts with what a company does, not what it says. The CMOs who are driving growth and increasingly making the leap to CEO are the ones involved in product decisions, customer experience design, and organizational values \u2014 not just creative approvals and media planning.<\/p>\n

The job needs a new name<\/h2>\n

There\u2019s a final reframe worth making. The title chief marketing officer may itself be part of the problem. It signals a functional lane: campaigns, creative, media, at the exact moment the job demands something broader.<\/p>\n

What the role actually requires is someone whose mandate is relevance.<\/em> Relevance in the most operational sense: ensuring the brand means something clear and consistent to the people it\u2019s trying to reach, to the algorithms increasingly deciding what those people see, and to the culture the brand operates in.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s call the role chief relevance officer. The companies that figure that out first will have brands that AI can surface.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The ones still treating the CMO like a media interruption ROI spreadsheet jockey, or who distribute the function across a COO, or IT, and a dashboard, won\u2019t.<\/p>\n

The companies that eliminated the CMO role lost the only executive whose job was to make the brand mean something, not just to the people it\u2019s trying to reach, but to the AI platforms that need that meaning to make you visible.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the age of AI-mediated discovery, no other factor will be more consequential or more expensive to leave unanswered.<\/p>\n

The post Why AI makes brand leadership more important<\/a> appeared first on MarTech<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s a cruel irony at the center of marketing leadership. The CMO is in charge of one of the most complex, long-horizon jobs in business.\u00a0But everything they do is measured on a short-term performance system, using a shrinking budget, to boost company sales before their clock runs out. Perhaps CMO should stand for chief miracle … <\/p>\n

Read more “Why AI makes brand leadership more important”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11042","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"featured_media_urls":{"thumbnail":["https:\/\/martech.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/q5xuymen2s4-2.jpg",0,0,false],"medium":["https:\/\/martech.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/q5xuymen2s4-2.jpg",0,0,false],"medium_large":["https:\/\/martech.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/q5xuymen2s4-2.jpg",0,0,false],"large":["https:\/\/martech.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/q5xuymen2s4-2.jpg",0,0,false],"1536x1536":["https:\/\/martech.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/q5xuymen2s4-2.jpg",0,0,false],"2048x2048":["https:\/\/martech.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/q5xuymen2s4-2.jpg",0,0,false],"inspiro-featured-image":["https:\/\/martech.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/q5xuymen2s4-2.jpg",0,0,false],"inspiro-loop":["https:\/\/martech.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/q5xuymen2s4-2.jpg",0,0,false],"inspiro-loop@2x":["https:\/\/martech.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/q5xuymen2s4-2.jpg",0,0,false],"portfolio_item-thumbnail":["https:\/\/martech.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/q5xuymen2s4-2.jpg",0,0,false],"portfolio_item-thumbnail@2x":["https:\/\/martech.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/q5xuymen2s4-2.jpg",0,0,false],"portfolio_item-masonry":["https:\/\/martech.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/q5xuymen2s4-2.jpg",0,0,false],"portfolio_item-masonry@2x":["https:\/\/martech.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/q5xuymen2s4-2.jpg",0,0,false],"portfolio_item-thumbnail_cinema":["https:\/\/martech.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/q5xuymen2s4-2.jpg",0,0,false],"portfolio_item-thumbnail_portrait":["https:\/\/martech.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/q5xuymen2s4-2.jpg",0,0,false],"portfolio_item-thumbnail_portrait@2x":["https:\/\/martech.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/q5xuymen2s4-2.jpg",0,0,false],"portfolio_item-thumbnail_square":["https:\/\/martech.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/q5xuymen2s4-2.jpg",0,0,false]},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11042","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11042"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11042\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11042"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11042"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/attentionmedia.io\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11042"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}