First time CMOs

The rate of first time CMOs is up 50% in the past 12 months. Curious.

I’d been having a chat with a marketer, about how Peloton right now is a perfect opportunity for a CMO to cut their teeth. It’ll be challenging but they’ll learn a lot as they tackle the many challenges the business faces. So I wondered, has all the market activity created opportunities for new CMOs to break through?

I looked at all the CMO announcements in the past 12 months. And then peeked their job history on LinkedIn, to see if they were a first time CMO. Using Nasdaq announcements as my source.

It turns out, yes, in the past 12 months, 45% of the CMOs announced were first time CMOs as compared to 29% in the prior 12 months. An increase of 50%. Note a small sample size of 24.

That’s refreshing to hear in some respect, bring in new blood, fresh perspectives. And there are new opportunities for new folks at the table. 45% of the CMOs named were female, and 55% of the first time CMOs were female.

It’s a reminder, that change creates opportunity and enables people to move up. And that’s nice to see.

That leads nicely into my other observation, it feels like marketing has got its mojo back, companies are leaning more into investing in marketing, view it as a strategic priority. And we heard this repeated at AdWeek.

“We see marketing as an investment not an expense. Get the finance team involved in your planning process as early as possible.” Michele Allen, CFO, Wyndham

“Having the trust and confidence in each other helps our teams to partner effectively.” Lisa Checchio, CMO, @WyndhamHotels pic.twitter.com/i8kDxV3o8Z

— Lou Paskalis 🇺🇦🇺🇸🇮🇱 (@LouPas) October 18, 2022

Whatever this back to work recovery is, its still messy and marketing has to work hard, with digital experiences, to bridge customers lifestyle. An anecdote I heard was, at the moment, weekend flights are still high in the US. Every weekend is like a holiday weekend, as people can come back on Monday, and remote work as they go. All of this makes it harder for brands to cut through, and with growth in margins, they have room to invest. Marketing is soup du jour.

Are you seeing the same?

• Please stop calling it the ‘newsletter economy’.
• The rise of the VC publisher.
• Branded content on Facebook Reels rolls out globally.
• Walmart launches new content creator platform.
• Who are the Twitter creators?
• Semafor woos advertisers with promises of depolarization. Will include content options for advertisers.
• How publishers became addicted to the traffic hit from news alerts.
• The next Sims game aims to be a “nest generation creative platform”.
• YouTube’s providing more creators with access to shoppable links.
• TikTok announced a new performance monitoring tool which will charge advertisers based on users attention and engagement.
• Everyone wants to sell your attention.
• Netflix announces their ad tiers, and previews what ads will look like.

• Ye to acquire Parler.
• Snowflake acquires stake in OpenAP.
• Spindl, a web3 attribution company raises $7m.
• Hubspot invests in Jasper.

Campaign of the week

• Amazons Holiday Kids Gift Book. I spotted this on Twitter, someone sharing a photo of the physical copy. It’s just neat, and what a smart placement for the brands involved. Just a click away from buying.

• Paul Daugherty on technology, transformation and sustainability. Accenture with HBR.

View all 2022 best campaigns.

Smartest commentary

• “In this world, we have to think about content a bit differently because we don’t have that undivided attention. We have eight seconds. That’s it. That’s the amount of time you have to capture people’s attention. We have to stand out in those 8 seconds and to do that, we have to deliver to them what they want, and what they need, and make it valuable and desirable.” –Matthew Renzulli, T Brand Studio

Datapoints of note

• Substack has 1.5m paid subscribers, there are more than a dozen publications that make over $1m and the top 10 publications collectively make $25m.
• TikTok’s BeReal clone has 10m downloads.
• 19% of US consumers subscribe to digital publications.
• In the past three years, YouTube has paid out over $50b to creators and artists.
• Netflix added 2.4m subs in the last quarter.

That’s it for this week.