The CMO Is Dead. Long Live the CMO.

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Only 49% of Fortune 500 top marketers hold the "CMO" title today. That is down from 55% just one year ago, according to Forrester's 2025 study.

Over the past two years, UPS, Etsy, and Walgreens all eliminated the CMO role entirely. Not replaced. Eliminated. The responsibilities got absorbed by COOs and "Chief Commercial Officers."

The title is disappearing. But here's the thing nobody's saying out loud: marketing has never been more important. The CMO just stopped being the person who owns it.

What's Actually Happening

The numbers are stark.

Forrester's 2025 study found that only 58% of Fortune 500 companies now have a marketing executive reporting directly to the CEO or sitting in the C-suite. That's down from 63% last year.

B2B got hit hardest. According to Forrester's research, B2B companies saw the steepest decline in CMO representation.

Average tenure? Now 3.9 years, down from 4.1. One in five Fortune 500 companies changed their marketing leadership in the past 12 months.

The title replacements tell the story: Chief Revenue Officer. Chief Commercial Officer. Chief Growth Officer. Generalist roles that span marketing, sales, CX, and product, not specialists who own brand.

And here's the uncomfortable context: only about 10% of Fortune 250 CEOs have marketing backgrounds. Just 4% have previously held a CMO-like role. Over 70% come from operations or finance.

The people deciding whether to keep the CMO role don't understand what it does.

Why It Matters

Let's be clear: marketing isn't being eliminated. It's being unbundled and absorbed.

Look at the pattern Fortune documented:

• UPS: CMO Kevin Warren departed. Matt Guffey became "Chief Commercial and Strategy Officer," inheriting marketing while also overseeing global revenue, product management, and growth strategy.

• Etsy: COO Raina Moskowitz now runs marketing after CMO Ryan Scott's exit.

• Walgreens: Marketing functions distributed across other senior leaders.

Companies aren't hiring Chief Revenue Officers to replace CMOs. They're positioning ultimate responsibility for marketing under COOs and "CEOs-in-waiting."

The "CMO" title increasingly signals a narrower, more tactical scope. The strategic work went upstairs to people the CEO already trusts.

What Most People Miss

Here's the paradox nobody's talking about: the title died because the job got too big.

Digital, data, and AI expanded the CMO's remit beyond what one person can own. As Forrester puts it, the role became "stretched between brand and demand, product and pipeline, digital and physical."

The CMO was supposed to own:

• Brand strategy

• Demand generation

• Customer experience

• Digital transformation

• Data and analytics

• AI implementation

• Content and creative

• Revenue attribution

That's not a job. That's a department.

So CEOs, most of whom came from ops and finance and never understood how to evaluate marketing leadership, did what made sense to them: split it up, or give it to someone they could measure.

I call this the CMO Paradox: the more critical marketing became to the business, the less the title survived. As marketing touched everything, it became "everyone's job." Which means it became no one's job at the C-level.

The CMO didn't fail. The job description did.

What This Means for You

If you're a marketing leader in 2026, you have three paths:

Path 1: Expand or Die

Become Chief Commercial/Revenue/Growth Officer by owning pipeline, not just brand. This means learning to speak finance, owning a P&L, and accepting that "marketing" is just one tool in a broader commercial toolkit.

The CMOs who successfully rebranded as CROs didn't abandon marketing; they expanded their territory until the title no longer fit.

Path 2: Go Deep

Accept the fragmentation. Become indispensable as Chief Digital Officer, Chief Brand Officer, or Chief Customer Officer. In a world where the CMO role is being unbundled, own one piece so completely that they can't function without you.

This works best if you have genuine depth in data, digital, or customer experience, not just general marketing chops.

Path 3: Own the Seat

If you're still called CMO, act like a mini-CEO of marketing. Own revenue outcomes. Build bridges to ops and finance. Make yourself legible to a CEO who doesn't naturally understand what you do.

Richard Sanderson from Spencer Stuart puts it well: "When people say, 'Oh, the CMO role is being eliminated,' that doesn't mean marketing isn't important. It simply means a company has chosen to structure around the role in a different way."

The CMOs who survive 2026 won't be the best marketers. They'll be the best executives who happen to understand marketing.

The Prediction

By 2028, I expect fewer than 40% of Fortune 500 companies will have a "CMO."

But marketing leadership will be more powerful than ever; it will just be fragmented across 3-4 titles, reporting to COOs and CGOs. The work didn't go away. The single owner did.

This isn't a tragedy. It might be an opportunity. The leaders who figure out how to thrive in a fragmented model (owning pieces, building alliances, speaking the language of ops and finance) will have more influence than the old-school CMOs ever did.

The question isn't whether you'll be called CMO.

The question is whether you'll be in the room when the decisions get made.

The Bottom Line

Stop defending the title. Start expanding the job.

The CMO is dead. Long live the marketing leader who figured out they're not just in marketing anymore.