For marketing professionals, Boathouse’s Fifth Annual CEO Study has good news and not-so-good news. On the plus side, 71% of the 150 CEOs surveyed said their CMO put the interests of the company ahead of their own, up from 55% last year. However, a scant 15% of the CEOs gave their CMO’s performance an A grade, down from last year’s 24%.

Increase in Perceived Commitment

Not only did most of the surveyed CEOs believe their CMO prioritized the company’s interests over their own, but 79% said their CMO showed strong commitment to the CEO and board of directors, the highest since the survey began in 2021. That first year, only 44% of CEOs saw that same commitment.

“My sense of it is the CMOs have gotten the memo: I’m here for the organization, not just marketing focused,” says Maurya Overall, Principal at Boathouse.

Nearly three-quarters (74%) of CEOs credited their CMO with pushing the organization forward, up from 57% last year, and 60% said their CMO actively contributed to shaping overall enterprise strategy. Only 8%, however, said their CMO actively led the strategy. What’s more, 57% of CEOs viewed the CMO role as leading execution, with just 43% seeing the position’s primary role as a strategic one.

Decrease in Perceived Performance

The shift in CEOs’ perception of their CMO’s commitment to the organization and the board “feels huge,” Overall says. Their perception of the CMO’s performance, however, is less glowing. “CMOs are saying ‘You’re here and you’re trying, but you’re not performing,’” she explains.

Only 38% of this year’s respondents rated their CMO as best in class, down from 45% last year. Slightly fewer than half (49%) described their CMO as someone who “solves problems effectively,” compared with 57% last year. Similarly, 43% believed their CMO “seeks different perspectives,” also down from last year’s 57%.

Perhaps most disheartening, only 43% of CEOs said they have “great confidence” in their CMO, a decrease from 50% last year. With that in mind, it’s not surprising that a mere 36% of this year’s respondents believed their CMO could eventually become CEO.

Overall believes AI is a principal reason for CEOs’ disappointment in their CMO’s performance:“We’re doing so much AI experimentation and piloting, and we’ve not yet been able to prove an impact.” Just one in 10 CEOs said AI was already delivering measurable impact on marketing, and only another 14% expected to see an impact within the next six months. More than a third (38%) didn’t anticipate AI making a measurable impact on marketing for at least a year.

Seeking Control of the Narrative

This could also by why 60% of this year’s CEO respondents viewed marketing as a cost center rather than a profit center, a major change from last year’s 35%. And though the percentage of CEOs who viewed their organization’s marketing capabilities as best in class was 35%, down only two percentage points from last year, that’s a significant decline from 49% two years prior.

The belief in marketing’s relevance to the organization has declined as well. This year 21% of CEOs declared marketing to be “much more relevant” to their organization than it had been three years ago, compared with 33% of last year’s respondents. To strengthen CEOs’ perception of marketing as relevant, Overall advises marketers to “define marketing’s relationship to and impact on growth better and really knit together all the pieces to prove cause and effect.”

The top issues CEOs want marketing to handle has also changed somewhat. Driving sales and/or growing market share remained top of the list, cited by 65% this year and 57% last year. But while last year “stay ahead, differentiate, grow faster than the competition” tied for top priority, just 46% of this year’s CEOs rated it a primary issue, putting it in fifth place.

CEOs this year put much more value on transforming the company’s narrative in the marketplace: 47% cited it as a priority, more than double last year’s 23%. Conversely, 27% of this year’s respondents cited serving customers better as a top concern, down from 44% last year. Overall suggests that in volatile times such as those we’re currently experiencing, organizations view protecting the brand narrative as more important than ever.