Leadership News, Features, and Interviews

It’s a wonderful time to be leading as CMO - assuming you’re up to the challenge. As companies face growing pressure to drive growth in this unpredictable environment, marketing is increasingly on your CEO’s agenda and, rest assured, it is being hotly debated in the boardroom, as well.

The average tenure of a CMO has risen dramatically in recent years, and is seen by many to signify a CMO’s legitimacy to ultimately taking the top job: CEO.

Given her solid background in the software and telecoms space, it shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn PGi’s marketing chief Melissa Wong is a passionate believer in CMOs embracing technology. What will arguably raise more eyebrows is that she doesn’t like to be called a marketer.

The CMO has finally arrived. It might have taken five years to get there and involved a radical transformation of marketing as a practical function and principle, but the CMO has officially become a leader of corporate strategy.

Technology is infiltrating all aspects of marketing, regardless of whether you see it as a good or bad thing. The questions is, how does the average CMO keep on top of it all?

Gartner’s report on the decline of the CIO and rise of the marketer as the key technology buyer made plenty of waves last year. According to the analyst group, 35 per cent of enterprise IT expenditure by 2015 will be out of the CIO’s hands, with CMOs responsible for the majority of technology purchasing by 2017.