31% of the Fortune 500 Has No CMO Role

S2E8 Cole Moir on what replaced the CMO role - the four hires that matter, and how he'd manage budget for a $200 million brand.

31% of Fortune 500 companies don't have a CMO right now. Starbucks, Walgreens, and General Motors are three of them.

That number is the cleanest way to describe what's happened to the CMO role.

Cole Moir has spent close to 20 years inside the shift. He led brand marketing at TCL, where the company became the fastest-growing consumer electronics brand two years running. Before that, Samsung, Sony Entertainment, and Motorola. Before that, agency years at Ogilvy, Edelman, and 360i. He has owned the NFL relationship, partnered with Olympic athletes, and run Call of Duty campaigns.

Ricardo Belmar and Casey Golden put the obvious question to him. If the CMO role keeps getting renamed or removed, what takes its place?

Cole's answer is an AI marketing organization that looks nothing like the org chart most companies run today. Small always-on strategy teams. Cohorts of five to twenty agents doing tactical work. Four roles carrying the entire function. And the people who last are the ones who can look at infinite AI-generated creative and say which piece is any good. Cole calls that taste. He thinks it's the scarcest skill in marketing.

Then Casey put a number on the table. $200 million brand. How would you budget marketing? Cole answers with real percentages, then adds a warning: spend under 25% in the upper and mid funnel and you'll pay for it inside two years.

We also get the partnership math nobody publishes. Only 5% of NFL fans have ever been to a game. 95% watch at home, on their own TV or a friend's. Of the 100 most-watched TV shows over the past decade, 96 are football. That's how a challenger TV brand builds the case for an NFL deal.

Cole closes with a single question that tells you whether your AI marketing organization is real: if AI disappeared tomorrow, would your system break, or would everyone go back to what they were already doing?

What You'll Learn in This Episode

Why 31% of the Fortune 500 has no CMO, and which titles absorbed the CMO role.Why the next CEO is more likely to come out of marketing than sales.The four roles Cole says every marketing team needs, and the two he'd stop hiring for.How an AI marketing organization gets staffed, from agent cohorts to human-in-the-loop.How to split a $200 million budget across upper funnel, conversion, and testing.The 25% floor Cole says you can't drop below without paying for it later.How NFL and Olympic partnerships get evaluated before anyone signs anything.The two influencer groups that will matter, and why last-click kills the case for both.Brand lift studies, messaging pull-through, and MMM as the influencer scorecard.How AI changed creator discovery, and why Cole writes influencer contracts in two parts.The three skills he'd tell a 25-year-old marketer to build, and the two habits to drop.Cole's one-question test for whether AI is integrated or decorative.

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