7 Shifts for CMOs in the New Era of Marketing

1. Organizing organizations.

This is something nearly every CMO the Traction team has spoken to through The Futureproof Project has expressed to us. They are asking themselves:

The data backs this up. A late‑2025 study on B2B CMOs reported that 62% do not feel ready to compete with AI‑enabled companies due to gaps in skills, budget, and resources, implying roughly 38% feel at least somewhat ready to scale AI in practice.

When you drill down (and look beyond B2B), the reality of organizational preparedness is even more stark. An IBM 2025 CMO study found that only 21% of CMOs believe they have the talent needed to meet their AI goals over the next two years, and only 17% strongly believe their function is prepared to integrate more advanced, “agentic” AI into processes—which is exactly what you actually need to do to scale your org.

Marketing org design consulting is our fastest growing practice at Traction, not only for clients to be AI-ready, but to take a hard look at efficiency across the board. An engagement in 2025 for a $20B retailer where we assessed their agency partnerships, media investments, team structure and mar-tech stack and created a transformation roadmap for the next 3 years will save them 33% of their marketing resource investment ($4.5M per year!) — even while in-housing key functions and building up their team (yes, they are hiring, not firing).

The takeaway is that for the majority of marketing organizations, there is organizational work (and change management) to be done in order to build a lean, mean marketing machine ready to take on the next five years and remain competitive.

2. Shift: from using AI tools to optimizing AI outcomes.

We’ve graduated from a period where “we need to use AI tools” to one where “we need to get better outcomes from AI tools.”

This is how you turn experts into superhumans.

Getting there requires consistent experimentation. You learn how confident you can be in outcomes by comparing synthetic data to real data.

3. The counter-intuitive rise of brand value.

It's no surprise to say that performance has been given higher priority over the past few years as every dollar of marketing spend has become more and more scrutinized. We've even seen many companies replace CMOs with CROs to convey that they are in the business of making money.

But the Rise of the Agents will change that equation. In the not too distant future, we're going to see AI assisting — or even just doing — our shopping for us. If an AI agent scours the web looking for the best deal on laundry detergent, it could commoditize consumer products and create a dramatic race to the bottom. The powerful emotional "stuff" of branding with humans won't have an impact on the AI agents making decisions.

BUT — and this is a big but — that means that brand-building will be even more vital. Why? Because the primary way agents are going to have brand preference is if consumers ask for a brand.

The other way will include another critical ingredient in brand-building: customer experience. Agents won't have emotions, but they will read reviews and Reddit posts. That will be part of their decision-making criteria as they find the best product for their prompter.

In a world where every company swears it’s “all about revenue” and swaps CMOs for CROs to prove it, the ironic twist is that the only way your future agents will find that revenue is if your brand and customer experience are so strong that people actually tell their AI, “buy them”—which is the ultimate conversion signal.

4. Consumers have changed.

The concept of "the funnel" is very practical. You anticipate the linear mindset objectives for consumers (awareness, interest, consideration, purchase, loyalty), you draw an upside-down triangle to illustrate that you're only going to be successful with a subset of those consumers at each stage, and you map tactics that are best to achieve those to their media consumption behavior (ie. network TV spots build awareness, banner ads fish for conversions).

Your funnel objectives need to be re-evaluated as consumer loyalty has become a historic relic. People will change brands at the drop of a hat. They are more open to trying brands. They spend impulsively when a TikTok shows a product in the middle of their entertainment. Their journey is no longer linear or clear cut — is consideration still the right goal on the way to interest if someone just jumped the line from being unaware to making a purchase?

Your communications planning has to adjust. The way consumers consume media has totally been up-ended. They don't tune-in, they stream. They don't focus, they scroll. They don't search keywords on Google seeking websites, they ask questions on ChatGPT or Gemini seeking answers. They don't do their shopping in one sitting, they add to cart, initiate checkout and then get distracted by the next shiny object. This impacts the whole marketing meshpucha — media planning, creative direction, content strategy and social engagement.

5. The rise of ‘Renegade Marketing.’

If you attended Cannes last year, it was hard to peer through the AI haze, but if you did, the one thing that shined through was creator marketing. Unlike old-school influencer marketing, which rents reach and slaps products onto anyone with a big enough follower count, creator marketing is about partnering with people who actually make things audiences care about, and whose content would exist even if brands disappeared tomorrow.

This shift is happening at the same time social platforms are turning into full-blown commerce engines. TikTok Shop alone generated an estimated 33.2 billion dollars in global GMV in 2024, including about 9 billion dollars in the U.S. in its first full year, while Instagram drove roughly 37.2 billion dollars in social commerce sales in the same year, underscoring how feeds have quietly become storefronts. And because 63 percent of shoppers say they are more likely to buy a product if it is recommended by a trusted influencer or creator, the content that feels native, messy, and human is increasingly outmuscling the polished ads people swipe over in their feeds.

All of this sets the stage for the rise of what's been called renegade marketing (it's also been referred to as method marketing): campaigns that don’t just “feature” creators or talent, but fully inhabit a persona, a world, and a story across channels. Timothée Chalamet’s recent campaign is the clearest example yet — he didn’t just promote a movie, he played an exaggerated version of himself in the marketing itself, turning behind-the-scenes chaos into must-watch canon for fans.

Of course, most CMOs aren’t lucky enough to be selling products with a built-in fanbase like Timothée Chalamet. But that is exactly why this matters: his campaign is a preview of where expectations are headed. CMOs across categories will be pushed to think less in terms of “influencer drops” and more in terms of ongoing, character-driven, creator-powered narratives that make the marketing feel like part of the story, not an interruption.

6. Hyper-personalization & journey orchestration.

Hyper-personalization is where “Hi {First Name}” goes to die. It uses real-time data, AI, and predictive models to shape what each person sees, when they see it, and on which channel, so experiences feel like the brand actually knows them rather than lumping them into a crude segment.​

Dynamic customer journey orchestration is the engine that makes this work: instead of static funnels, it continuously watches behavior across channels and decides the next best action in the moment – the message, offer, or touchpoint that should happen right now, not what was planned last quarter.​

For CMOs that means three concrete requirements:

In practice, that looks like a customer browsing running shoes on mobile, then automatically receiving a size- and brand-specific recommendation via push, a tailored “you left this behind” email if they ignore it, and an in-store associate seeing the same product and offer when that customer walks in on Saturday – not as a special campaign, but as the default behavior of the system.

7. Storytelling: The new hard skill.

In a world drunk on data and AI-generated sludge, storytelling has quietly become one of the last real differentiators left. Traction's VP of Client Services, Lauren Evans, recently wrote an article making the compelling case that "the AI companies that win won't have the best tech—they'll have the best story."

The key insight is that In markets flooded with innovation, story is the ultimate differentiator. 63% of B2B buyers can't differentiate between providers—winners are crowned by message clarity, not code elegance.

There will be a reckoning. The AI companies that win won't have the best tech—they'll have the best story. CMOs will need to evaluate what AI partners they want to get into bed with. The ones that win will need to"

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The percentage of LinkedIn job postings that include the term “storyteller” doubled last past year, to nearly 70,000 marketing and communications roles. This is not a cute rebrand of “copywriter”; it is a signal that as all these other challenges come into the picture — consumer behavior, method marketing, hyper-personalized journeys — brands will need people who can actually make all of that feel like a coherent, human story rather than a martech diagram.​

The numbers back the logic:

In a landscape where creator content outperforms traditional ads and hyper-personalized journeys tailor every interaction, the connective tissue is narrative: who the brand is, what it stands for, and why any of those micro-moments matter.​

A recent story in the Wall Street Journal by Katie Deighton’s — "Companies Are Desperately Seeking ‘Storytellers’" — explained how this is reshaping org charts: Companies from Google Cloud now have storytelling teams. Notion merged comms, social, and influencer into a single storytelling banner. Brands need in-house talent who can architect ongoing, serialized stories.​

For CMOs, the practical implication is blunt. Storytelling can no longer be a “nice-to-have” soft skill sitting in a brand deck while the real money goes to media and mar-tech. It has to be treated as core infrastructure: teams, partners, data and KPIs all need to be rethought. Success will be measured not only in clicks but in recall, loyalty, and the willingness of people to follow your story from a creator’s TikTok to a personalized offer and, eventually, to a purchase. The brands that win will be the ones that can do all of that and still feel like there is a human at the center telling a story worth caring about.