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Creating a ‘CMO Command Center’ to Navigate a Year of Flux

With its inaugural Marketing Vitality Index, the CMO Council has amassed a data lake’s worth of statistics and insights from myriad sources to help marketers navigate through what promises to be a year of flux.

The report tracks and analyzes data within five core marketing categories, assessing marketing vitality for each:

  • Marketing mix and spend. The CMO Council categorizes budget allocation, channel attribution and accountability, and related aspects for 2025 as “challenging.” Despite companies allocating an average of 13.6% of their total budgets to marketing last year, according to Offnet, 37% of CMOs surveyed by the CMO Council admitted that their campaign performance needed improvement.
  • Organizational dynamics. At first glance, this category doesn’t appear particularly vital either, with cutbacks and restructurings leaving teams strapped for resources. Eighty-six percent of CMOs surveyed blamed a lack of resources and capabilities for missed revenue, growth or customer acquisition opportunities. Things are “evolving positively,” however, according to CMO Council’s analysis, thanks to organizations closing the digital skills gap and optimizing generative AI.
  • Technology adoption and execution. The CMO Council found that 57% of CMOs expect genAI to be the martech investment most likely to create value and ROI, with customer data platforms and insights in second place. Slightly more than half of marketers (51%) are “testing” AI, according to InMarket. In the meantime, Exploding Topics reports that 91% of global marketers are already reporting success with marketing automation. Moreover, 80% of creative talent will use genAI daily by 2026, which will allow for more strategic work and result in increased spending on creative, according to Gartner.
  • Market outlook and trends. “Dynamic” is how the CMO Council characterizes this area, which includes consumer confidence and multichannel engagement. Chat technology is a bright spot, with companies that enable customer interactions via chat averaging 75% year-over-year annual revenue growth, per Aberdeen Group. Granted, not all of that growth can be attributed to chat; one could conclude that growing organizations were more likely to invest in chat than others. Even so, Forrester states that chat commerce had a 61% higher conversion rate than email and 87% higher than other mobile apps.
  • Customer affinity and attachment. The Council sees this as an area of “opportunity,” so long as marketers look beyond traditional channels to engender loyalty among younger consumers—more than two-thirds of buyers involved in large complex transactions valued over $1 million are fall into the Millennial and Gen Z category, Forrester claims. One indication that they are in fact reaching them is the growing investment in influencer marketing. According to Edelman, 40% of marketers now allocate at least a quarter of their marketing dollars to influencer campaigns, and that’s up significantly from previous years.

Taking Charge of Data

The greatest challenge marketers face isn’t in any one particular area but rather in juggling multiple demands, threats and opportunities across numerous arenas. “Today CMOs have to be massively grounded in so many different areas,” says Donovan Neale-May, the CMO Council’s executive director/founder. For that reason, “we have to be looking at ourselves as a command center with real-time data. Dynamic data, prospect data, intention-based data, transactional data operational data—all these things have to be part of the CMO command center.”

That data already exists, but it’s how marketers apply the data that’s critical. “CMOs are at a crossroads,” Neale-May says. “They have to become more technical and data-based. People have been saying this for decades, but now it’s really needed.”

This is where AI will prove especially productive, Neale-May believes, by enabling more precise, speedier data analytics and more actionable outputs. “AI is an enabler, an elevator, a lubricant,” he says. “The faster you process, the more successful you are. The idea is you mitigate some of the inefficiencies. It’s not that you’re going to cut your staff; you’re going to increase its output and efficiencies.”

For instance, Neale-May contends that most CMOs focus on customer acquisition at the expense of retention, despite it costing 15-22 times more to recruit a customer than to keep one, according to Wise Marketer Group. AI can enable marketers to more efficiently and effectively “understand where and why they’re leaking customers” even as they continue to attract new ones. Rather than marketers having to choose between acquisition and retention, AI can help them do both.

Taking Command

From their position in the command center, CMOs must also strengthen their relationships with other C-suite leaders. The growing importance of AI and automation requires marketing leads to collaborate with CTOs, and supply chain turbulence will likely necessitate closer partnerships with COOs.

“One of the things marketers are good at is being responsive and adaptive,” Neale-May says. Even so, he reiterates, “marketers today have to uplift themselves. If they’re not focused on data-driven decisioning, they’re not going to make their mark.”