CMO: The Endangered Species.
In his most recent post, the celebrated Bob Hoffman, a.k.a. The Ad Contrarian, reports on a recent study showing the median CMO lifespan has now fallen from a nerve rattling 30 months in 2019 to a nubs-where-I-used-to-have-fingernails 25.5 months. To which the equally esteemed Michael Palma, headhunter and agency rainmaker extraordinaire, ripostes “Every recession. It was 22 months in 2009.”
Ouch. And it’s not exactly as if these gigs grow on trees. Hoffman, however, goes further to assign at least part of the blame for foreshortened careers to head marketers’ over-enthusiastic embrace of digital advertising. In his view, CMOs responding to the slings and arrows of tardy data-driven adoption are way ahead of their CEO’s embrace of bits-and-bytes-based channels.
I haven’t asked Palma, but it would come as no shock to hear him focus on the similarities between falling corporate profits and the headsman’s axe—in either case, heads must roll. In tough times, the bean-counters take over. And, without quarreling with Bob’s long-running attack on the fraudulent aspects of the “new” media, there’s one area I do part company with his thinking: the view that all would be sanguine if we would only return to the good ol’ days of mass media delivered to mass audience with mass throw-weight.
Two problems:
There ain’t a whole lot of mass audiences out there surfing the channels no mo’.
There are entire flocks of smaller advertisers for whom big media budgets, like CMO jobs, are a distant and impossible dream. For the smaller advertisers, digital isn’t just a lifeline; it’s the only available way they have to catch their customers’ eyeballs.
So, what’s the best survival strategy for a marketer caught between the ugly snake of fragmentation and the uglier monster of shrinking market share? Never having had the balls (or TBH, the technical analytic skills), to dare this death-defying act. It would be vastly impudent for The Reductionist to proffer advice to people he generally refers to as “the source of all heat and light” except to suggest that now is a damned good time to:
Get clever (demonstrate value by searching for and leveraging all, and I mean, all the channels at your command).
Get creative (as noted in previous posts, you can’t win the battle for share, without first winning the battle for attention).
·Get insistent (this is a time when sky-high standards for tactical quality and flawless execution are beyond essential).
Get down (as in, simplify your activities to be as big as possible in fewer places versus trying to spread yourself thin).
In that spirit, now seems like a good time to close on this: