10 Priorities Every CMO Needs for the Rest of 2025

Welcome to C-Suite Perspectives, a signature series by The Conference Board. I'm Steve Odland from The Conference Board and the host of this podcast series, and in today's conversation, we're going to talk about the top 10 priorities for chief marketing officers in today's ever-changing marketplace. 

Joining me today is Ivan Pollard, the leader of our Marketing & Communications Center and the former global CMO of General Mills. Ivan, welcome back. 

Ivan Pollard: Thank you very much for having me, Steve. Delighted to be here. 

Priority Number 10: CMO Burnout 

Steve Odland: OK, so Ivan, here we go. We'll start with the drama. We're going to start with number 10 on your priority list for CMOs for the rest of 2025. 

Ivan Pollard: This is a really good exercise to do. Of course, there are more than 10 priorities for CMOs as there always are, but we're going to go for the rank order. 

And number 10 is the burnout of the CMO and their staff. I'm going to draw on data from The Conference Board, like our CMO Meter and our C-Suite Outlook. From the CMO Meter. 48% of marketing leaders are saying that right now they have a high or very high level of burnout. They have tactics to deal with it, of course. 72% prioritize aggressively. 61% say no, but never to the CEO. And 44% are starting to delegate the work more effectively to their team. So that's number 10.  

Steve Odland: Yeah, but it's not sustainable. You can't just keep burning out. And by the way, burnout is not necessarily being used in a clinical fashion. It means that they're pushing themselves and their teams too hard and they need to get the priorities straight and match that with the time available. 

Ivan Pollard: Spot on. And a part of helping that is going to come up in some of the other priorities, which is around how tech is both helping and enabling them to cope with the workload, but also causing stress.  

Steve Odland: Yeah. But you can't do that. And by the way, if the CMOs themselves are feeling that, wow, what their teams must be going through. 

Priority Number 9: Organizational Design for Agility 

Ivan Pollard: So that's a good question, Steve. And actually that burnout and the way that you deal with that links to number nine, which is organizational design and how to optimize for agility and performance. 

And, as somebody once told me, and it's stuck, you have to plan for the "what if," but you have to organize for "what the heck?"With all the change going on in the outside world at the moment, there is a lot of pressure on rethinking the best way to scope your team out to be able to deal with the unexpected. 

Steve Odland: It's interesting, so these first two, number 10 and nine priorities, sound more like human capital priorities, but that sort of underscores the importance of people in marketing, right? And you have to have a team that's motivated, that's highly functional, that has their accountabilities and responsibilities laid out.It's about leadership in order to get creativity, innovation, and everything that's expected, right?  

Ivan Pollard: Yeah. Without a doubt. And that's what the organization is trying to be focused on. How do we focus on the things that matter, empower our people to do the things that they do best, and then use machines to get it done more productively? 

Priority Number 8: Marketing Fragmentation and Sales Partnership 

Steve Odland: We'll talk about that. All right, number eight on the hit parade, Ivan. 

Ivan Pollard: OK. Number eight is just coping with the fragmentation of what marketing is and the implications for the partnership with sales. So thinking about 15 years ago, when I joined the Coca-Cola Company, there was a brilliant woman who led marketing organization and capabilities around the world, and she had us focus on just over 20 capabilities. 

I caught up with her last week. She now runs marketing operations for a big global tech company. She has them focus on 103 capabilities, and of course, when you use "focus" and "103" in the same sentence, it raises eyebrows.  

Steve Odland: Yeah. Doesn't sound like focus. If you said three, but not 103. So what does she really mean? She obviously doesn't mean that she's tracking 103 things, but she's saying that it's a complex world.  

Ivan Pollard: It's a very complex world, and in fact, the organization, of course, is no longer just a marketing team. It stretches into sales, which I'll talk about in a moment. But also, of course, IT and all of the things that help the marketers do what marketers do best are actually a little bit more distributed across the organization. 

And even the things that you focus on, like imagine social media, for instance. 22% of all marketing money around the world goes into social media at the moment and that's the biggest channel. And, of course, just social media is not a thing. It's hundreds of thousands of things from a micro-influencer to buying ads on YouTube during the Super Bowl.  

Steve Odland: Yeah, this partnership with sales is an interesting one because in some companies, sales is the line leadership. In some companies, marketing's the line leadership, but sales is the primary interface, with a direct interface with a customer. And clearly, in a B2B world and also a multi-tiered B2C world, that's different than in a straight B2B world, where marketing is more direct. 

So that leads you to needing to really describe and agree upon a RACI, or some tool like RACI, where there are discrete ownership of each area so that balls aren't dropped and frustration doesn't ensue. So it's a partnership, but it's also a well-orchestrated dance with that part. 

Ivan Pollard: Yeah. It's a great dance. And that dance is getting more complicated but also much more rewarding. So yeah, in some companies, marketing leads, in other companies, sales leads, in all companies, they have to work together, and they need to look like partners on the dance floor. 

I think one of the things that is causing a little bit of confusion, that we are hearing from our members, as the funnel is getting more and more automated, and as the data becomes a little bit more distributed, the need for collaboration becomes even more. And in some, some spaces perhaps it verges into competition. Who's taking the lead, and who's got the R and the A? You're right: Without a RACI, it doesn't work. 

Priority Number 7: Balancing Long-Term Strategy and Short-Term Execution 

Steve Odland: Number seven on your list of priorities for CMOs in 2025.  

Ivan Pollard: So in 2025, we're seeing a bit of a resurgence of thinking a bit more long term. So how do you balance the long-term strategic work with the short-term executional work? Again, going back to our CMO Meter in March, 61% of CMOs—so one of the biggest challenges, in fact, it was the biggest challenge in managing their work—is getting that balance right. 

And the biggest cohort of marketing leaders are in the 30% strategic, 70% execution work. And we also found, going back to number 10, that the more executional work you do, the more likely you are to be stressed out and burning out. So managing that balance is really important.  

Steve Odland: How do you advise CMOs who say, look, I don't have time to think about the long term cause I'm just buried in the day-to-day execution and, gee, wouldn't it be a luxury to have that time? But I'm never going to have it. How do you encourage them or advise them to make that time?  

Ivan Pollard: I think it's the sort of the effort-reward equation here. You can find a lot of evidence that the better you have formulated a long-term strategy, with a vision and all of your goals clearly articulated, it's actually easier to get the execution all work done.So you invest in the strategy in order to be able to accelerate the execution. And when you find the balance, it makes it a much more rewarding and productive function.  

Steve Odland: That then suggests that there needs to be an alignment across the C-Suite on the long term. And once there is, then the CMOs and their teams can go and focus on the execution. You see this all the time where there's misalignment or there isn't buy-in, and so you've got marketing operating on their own. And when that happens, then it's this constant tug of war between short and long term, right? 

Soit's the need to make sure everybody's in the same boat from an objectives perspective so that there's freedom to execute. 

Priority Number 6: Strengthening Relationships with the CEO and CFO 

Ivan Pollard: Brilliant. I think that's very well put, Steve, and it leads us to number six on the list, which is strengthening the relationship with the CEO and the CFO. So that's on the balance of the things that we are hearing from our CMOs and from outside in the world. We see that is a necessary need that, as a CMO, you are a business leader that does marketing. You don't want to get isolated as the marketing person. 

So we find that 55% of CMOs at the moment say they have a very strong relationship with the CEO, 48% with the CFO. Having said that, almost all of them are saying that they're working harder to strengthen that relationship and make sure that alignment directs their work. So an interesting little factoid was 76% of those CMOs who said that they were having a bigger impact on the business in the last six months also said they have a very strong relationship with the CEO. 

Steve Odland: Yeah. And they feel more rewarded and motivated because they know that there's this alignment. Remind me, what is the average CMO tenure these days? 

Ivan Pollard: So the average CMO tenure is, it depends. If you're doing Russell 3000, it's just over two and a bit years. In the Fortune 100, it's starting to edge towards four. And whilst that's the average, we've got a lot of people who go quickly, and several people who have stayed for over a decade.  

Steve Odland: CEO tenure is roughly five years. And that means that every CEO is going through two CMOs per tenure on average, which is terrible. You can't really have a partnership that way, and you can't get a cadence going. So it does suggest that this is a really important relationship. And it's not just about, "Hey, let's go hang out together." It's about making sure that there, there's consistency and alignment around that, the strategic plan and the goals of that. And you've written a lot about this.  

Ivan Pollard: Yeah. And we'll put some links that you can follow under the podcast, but yeah, you are absolutely right, Steve. It's not about being friends. It's about being partners. So that notion of tenure extends over time, the more aligned you are on your objectives.  

Steve Odland: Yeah. The CFO is the other piece of this, and that's a case where there needs to be alignment on delivering results and the commitments, but making sure that CFOs understand that. I had a CFO once who described to investors that a marketing spend was just a one-time expense and was trying to get them to sort it out. That suggests a lack of alignment, a lack of understanding between the two areas, both of whom are accountable for driving results. So these relationships, as you say, are so critically important,  

Ivan Pollard: And may I suggest that perhaps the CFO was the one that wasn't connected there. Marketers these days know, as I said, they're business leaders. Whether they all are able to act on it, Steve, I think is a valid point, but business leaders first who are expected to deliver results.  

Steve Odland: We're talking about the top 10 priorities for CMOs in 2025. We're going to take a short break and be right back. 

Welcome back to C-Suite Perspectives. I'm your host, Steve Odland, from The Conference Board, and I'm joined by Ivan Pollard, the leader of our Marketing & Communications Center at The Conference Board, and a very important former CMO. Sowe're talking about the top 10 priorities. We're halfway through the list. Coming up now on number five. 

Priority Number 5: Impact of AI and MarTech 

Ivan Pollard: OK, so we talked about marketing getting more complicated. At the same time, it's getting more automated. And this is a really interesting period where marketers can have a greater impact on the business, perhaps, thanwe're seeing currently. 

So how do you get ahead in this? One of the things that drives that, of course, is the last three or 10 years of really starting to see the rewards of the application of AI and other MarTech applications. I touched on it earlier, we are seeing 44% increases in productivity. And productivity, of course, we're seeing savings, and that was perhaps the drive for 2024. 

In 2025, we're starting to see more pressure being put on to show the gains, the rewards, the revenue-driving opportunities of AI. And that's really what the priorities for the CMO are at number five. 

Priority Number 4: Future of AI in Marketing 

Ivan Pollard: And number four, by the way, is as well as looking at what they're getting from what they've currently done, of course, they have to be looking, the CMO has to be looking at what comes next. As somebody said at one of our AI events, it doesn't matter where you are on the journey, so long as you're moving forward, and you'd better all be moving forward. Sowhat's next is agentic AI, or AI agents, and managing end-to-end workflows. 

So instead of "Write me an email," you don't set the task, you set the objective. "Find me five new qualified leads this week for no more than $20 a lead, and then tell me what I need to do best to convert them."  

Steve Odland: Yeah, but let's go back to the value on number five, cause we didn't really finish that. This seems a friction point, or a potential friction point, between CMOs and either the CEOs or the CFOs, which is a prior priority. Because AI is an investment, number one, sothere's that potential friction point. But it also can be flipped around to be a great source of alignment because AI can really help in the productivity side. Talk about that.  

Ivan Pollard: Yeah. And let's remember. Marketing, sales, customer service. They are probably the first movers. They're in the vanguard of AI, but the CFO and CHRO and CLO are all deploying AI applications, too. All of them need to prove that this is returning on the investment. 

And we're starting to see definite gains, for instance, in productivity, efficiency, innovation coming through the marketing chain. There was some research that landed this week, it reflects a little bit what The Conference Board said: 49% of CMOs are seeing efficiency gains. 40% are starting to see cost gains, reducing costs. And interestingly, 39% of CMOs are saying that automation is starting to help them reduce their agency costs and reliance on external partners. 

So we're seeing that cost saving, Steve, that is the thing that everybody's demonstrating. I think the priority for the balance of this year is starting to show revenue growth that's coming from AI. 

Steve Odland: Yeah, we'll come to that. This whole thing, I sat through a brilliant presentation that you made to a group of CFOs, a CMO presenting AI to a group of CFOs. I've never seen them more excited when you showed them how they could save millions of dollars in creative design through use of AI. Talk about that.  

Ivan Pollard: Yeah, so generative AI was perhaps the thing that lit the fuse for this becoming scaled about in marketing. So this was a while back, GPT-3, essentially we just gave it a prompt saying, make some packaging. We gave it a very shrewd prompt, of course, which is what you have to do, and it generated a new packaging design that we would never have thought about because it went back into the history of the brand we were doing. 

It did it in two minutes live. Was it perfect? No. But was it a really interesting start point? Yes. So here are the savings that the CFO looked at. Number one, I didn't pay an agency. Number two, I was using an open-source GPT model. Number three, I did not waste three months of my team's time going backwards and forwards about the start point, which is usually what happens. And the brief, the prompt was actually written by using GPT to help me write the prompt. So very clear savings there, Steve.  

Steve Odland: And when you say the shrewd prompt, what you're really talking about is the brief. You're giving them, here are the parameters around which you should design that. That's all you mean. That's not hocus-pocus.  

Ivan Pollard: Not hocus-pocus. And in full transparency, I used ChatGPT to help me write that prompt.  

Steve Odland: Yeah, so I continue to hear that people are worried about their jobs being supplanted by AI, but I just view this as an enormous productivity and innovation tool that doesn't do away with people at all but makes them more productive. 

But back to number four, though. On the next application of AI, where does that go? 

Ivan Pollard: Mark Zuckerberg on May the 1st did an interview with a third party where he's talking about the future of the $1.15 trillion advertising economy. Mark's point of view was you could essentially remove that entire business. His literal line was, "Link your bank account to us, and we'll take care of the rest. Tell us what you're willing to spend and we will get you the business that you need." 

Now I think you could take issue with that, but it is an extension of what's the possibility.And just to put that in hard terms, there are jobs that are going to disappear. There are jobs that are going to get created as well, though. So WPP announced on Monday it's letting 45% of their staff go from their big media agency called GroupM because a lot of those things that a media agency does can be automated. It can be made more efficient, can be made better, so it's not just about getting there faster or cheaper. You have to get there better. And unfortunately, those people will reskill and find other jobs which will get created by AI.  

Steve Odland: Yeah. And you hope that people are open to that. And I think if you don't fear it, it allows you to learn new things, because it really, AI is getting rid of all of the mundane, repetitive kinds of work products. But it can be disruptive to people, and that's what causes a little bit of fear, so you have to get ahead of it. 

OK. We're coming down to the final three. 

Ivan Pollard: All right. 

Steve Odland: The number three priority is?  

Priority Number 3: AI Agents in Marketing 

Ivan Pollard: How will AI agents change marketing? So I just touched on that a little bit, that those automated repetitive tasks thatactually a machinedoes better. That's the thing that's critical here. It still needs people to work with machine, but you just don't need as many. We're already seeing those implications. In the marketing budget report that's just broken, you're seeing that marketing budgets are staying flat year on year. 

So 7.7% of revenue—average company they talked to was $6 billion—so 7.7% of revenue is going on marketing. Interestingly, in 2020, that was at a recent high of 11%. Marketers are expected to compete in a very chaotic environment, to win in that environment, and obviously drive efficiency and productivity. So I think we're starting to see it change things, automated some of those tasks. 

But to put it super-simply, Steve, look at what's happening to search. So I don't know if this fact is true or not, but I read online almost 10% of Amazon's e-commerce is now coming directly to them through an AI search. Not SEO search or a Google search, or even directly from Amazon. Sowe're empowering the AI to make trusted decisions for us about, for instance, what to buy. 

And that's going to change the whole ethos. We focused for 15 years now on making sure that we click with the algorithm, and we're going to have to shift from clicks to mentions. So AI, of course, is reading what people say. It's reading Glassdoor, it's reading Facebook, it's reading X, it's reading Reddit. Interestingly, of course it's also reading your own website and your own comments. So agents will change marketing for sure, without a doubt. And of those 103 capabilities that I talked about that big tech companies looking at, it will change every one of them.  

Steve Odland: It's interesting, it reminds me of a period in time, back in the late '80s and early '90s when the web started to be used, and websites started to be developed by companies, by brands, by businesses as a selling tool. And everybody wanted their website to be the portal for the industry and so forth. And it didn't evolve that way. It evolved to a search engine or two becoming the portals because it was just far more efficient. 

Even if you knew that you wanted to look at Coca-Cola's caffeine-free drinks, it's easier to Google it than it was to try to find it through Coca-Cola dot com. So people have learned this. So AI, to me, is an evolution of that whole process.  

Ivan Pollard: Yeah, nicely put. I think that's right. Automation has always been, go all the way back to the steam engine or things before that. Automation has always been about doing the things that human beings can do and taking the work off us, and doing them better, faster, smarter, and cheaper. AI is the next evolution of that. I just think it's an exponential leap forward versus where we were with the internet. Moving faster, doing more, and getting much more. Wait till physical AI starts to really manifest everywhere.  

Steve Odland: Yeah. So the reason it's the number three priority is that people have to hop on this and make sure that you're deploying it in the best way for your business. Number two on the hit parade for priorities for CMOs. 

Priority Number 2: External Factors Affecting Marketing 

Ivan Pollard: Number one and number two are not going to surprise anybody. Number two is all about the external factors that affect, essentially, what's going on in a particular market for a CMO. So at the beginning of the year, we asked them, what's on your mind for 2025? The most important priorities, in rank order: inflation, geopolitics, AI, and changing customer buying behavior. 

So that is a constant that we always have to think about that. What are my customers and what are my current consumers thinking, and how am I going to shape what I've got to offer value in that world? 

Steve Odland: Yeah. But this is, it's interesting cause I think this year—now we've been through many black swan events, which by definition are not forecastable. But the fact that it used to be that you have one once in your lifetime. Now it seems to be every few years. It's not that you can necessarily forecast it, it's just that it's going to happen. These things are going to happen, and you have to build in that agility to your teams and the ability to pivot in your messaging and your marketing. 

SoI think your point is really important. Yeah, you can write a marketing plan and everybody goes, "Yawn, of course we've got to take into account exogenous factors," but they've never been as impactful as they are today. And consumer behavior, yeah, they shift over time, but it was more generational. Now it's every few years, driven by technology, And you've got social media as a lightning-fast communication tool. 

All of this stuff just converges to create a more important understanding of the external world, economics, geopolitics, which is not what you would've described as something that CMOs needed to really focused on a few years back. 

Ivan Pollard: I think the good CMOs were ahead of that game, Steve, and they were. But every CMO nowadays has to be able to do this. Of course, as we talked about, AI and the internet helps, but that's only one signal that you could be reading. You have to be reading many signals from many of the different stakeholders. 

And as I said earlier, you've got to plan for what might happen. So, scenario planning. You've got to organize to be able to react to whatever does happen. And that, I think, is an interesting challenge for today's CMO. 

Priority Number 1: Driving Growth 

Steve Odland: OK, here we go. Drum roll. The number one priority for CMOs for the balance of 2025 is? 

Ivan Pollard: Well, I kind of want to ask you what you would guess, but I'm not allowed to do that. You'll be pleased to know that in every conversation we're having, in all the research that we're doing, that the biggest thing that a CMO wants to focus on is driving growth. 

Steve Odland: Hallelujah. 

Ivan Pollard: Hallelujah. Whether they're doing it well, I think, is the challenge, but every one of them is trying to do it well, trying to prove it's working, and trying to be competitive in the way that they do it. Driving growth, you go all the way back to Drucker, the principles of marketing about winning a customer and retaining them. They stay the same. The practices are definitely changing. And by the way, this is also what we see the CEOs want from their marketing leaders. 

Steve Odland: And this is part of that friction that we talked about earlier, and the gap between CEOs and CMOs is this hyper-focus on it. But you know what, Ivan, if it was easy, you wouldn't need these super-brainy, super-experienced, super-innovative CMOs. And so, it's hard to figure this out, and it's hard then to translate it into tactical programs that will actually move the needle. So it's not that, necessarily, CMOs are not focused on it, but it's that success added is sometimes elusive.  

Ivan Pollard: Yeah, and I think I thought for a moment then you were going to say super-brainy, super-experienced, and super- adaptable machines. But no, you're right. We need the humans still here. When they start working with those machines, and we put the two together, then I think we can start to see really interesting new methods and new approaches to driving growth across all sorts of different businesses. 

And that's what The Conference Board is here for, helping people stay ahead, connecting people. That makes them better, and doing it in a way that helps society improve.  

Steve Odland: But your whole thesis here is that there's greater and greater complexity, exogenous world, micro factors, consumer and customer changing behavior, technology. 

All of this then says these tools that are emerging here, AI tools and other kinds of analytical tools, are really arriving at exactly the right time. And that in order to sort this, it's not just about hiring an agency and saying, giving me a good storyboard and let's go. It really requires more than that. And hence the order of your priorities and the number of these priorities for 2025.  

Ivan Pollard: Yeah. And I like the idea that the AI and technology is causing some of the complexity, but it's also creating all of the opportunity. 

Steve Odland: Yeah. Brilliant. Ivan Pollard, thanks for being with us today. 

Ivan Pollard: Thank you very much for having me.  

Steve Odland: And thanks to all of you for listening in to C-Suite Perspectives. I'm Steve Odland, and this series has been brought to you by The Conference Board.