How to Navigate an Increasingly CMO-Less Future

Originally published in April 2021, adapted from an article I wrote for Forbes. Lightly updated in October 2026.

CMOs are being replaced and renamed as chief customer officers, chief revenue officers, chief strategy officers and chief growth officers. Marketing is no longer a siloed function. It's being integrated more closely with sales, product, technology and operations. Around the time I first wrote this, companies including Uber, Johnson & Johnson and Taco Bell had eliminated the CMO position.

Marketing is simply too important to be an isolated function. So how do agencies operate in this environment and sell their expertise to very different kinds of teams?

The way forward is to evolve, both in understanding how to drive growth across the business and in delivering better experiences. Agencies need to work across the C-suite and show how an idea, proposition or strategy creates long-term value. Advertising alone can no longer do the job. Whether you're a holding-company agency or an independent shop, you're at the start of a journey that will define how you uniquely deliver value to brands.

That's what we focused on at Dendro, the brand strategy consultancy I founded: engaging further upstream as drivers of business growth, not just brand growth, and helping leaders navigate change across the C-suite during transitions. We helped enterprises develop corporate narratives and product value propositions that sharpened their selling stories and pitch decks, guided companies restructuring acquisitions and rebuilding their business model around a new brand, and worked with startups on brand and go-to-market strategy.

Looking back on my own journey, I see several opportunities for agencies to drive long-term value for brands.

Clients don't care who delivers value

They want business results driven by creativity. They have access to consultancies that can articulate their business challenges, agencies that can tell their story to the masses, and tech platforms that can broaden reach efficiently.

When you're building or marketing a brand, know exactly what makes it different. If you understand the soul of a brand through both a strategic and a creative lens, you can decipher its core challenges and deliver solutions that drive revenue.

Brands aren't built from advertising anymore

They're built where customer thinking and technology change meet. As industries converge and culture shifts, new opportunities appear. Agencies have to follow evolving customer needs to help leaders transform faster, which means thinking beyond ads to products, services and experiences that create real value and marketing ROI.

A few examples from that period that I thought were done well: Mattel's gender-neutral doll line, Tommy Hilfiger's adaptive clothing line, and Kellogg's "All Together" inclusion cereal featuring six of its brands and mascots.

Strong narratives can change your organization

Analyze your client's business from its core outward. Study every facet of the organization and the people it reaches. Done well, this builds ownership throughout the organization and alignment around a high-level narrative that clarifies the company's strategy and moves it forward.

People don't hate advertising. They hate bad advertising.

Creativity is one of the last remaining ways to gain an advantage over the competition. That's why I believe the most talked-about brands address truths and tensions head-on. The right creative idea moves the business and the brand forward together. The right campaign makes products relevant by creating culture people talk about. The goal is to make people care.

Diverse client questions need a diverse team

I predicted that the agency of the future would look like a general contractor: managing the client relationship and bringing in highly specialized experts to solve specific problems, with no baton hand-offs and a lot of agility. Future agencies have to bring creativity, strategy and technology together to deliver disruptive ideas across a breadth of challenges in ways traditional models can't.

When agencies engage upstream, we can produce much more than ads. We can deliver creative solutions that move people to act on behalf of a brand, and that create real business value.

Five years later

AI has made this argument more urgent, not less. When execution gets cheap, the value moves even further upstream, to judgment, strategy and imagination. I've written about what that means for agencies today in The Agency After Prompts and The Future of Creative Agencies Starts With a Signature Move.

If you lead an agency or a marketing team working through these shifts, get in touch.