More than 100 CMOs gathered May 7 in Chicago for the third annual Marketing Vanguard Summit, sharing under Chatham House Rule their common challenges and troubleshooting solutions.
Over the past three years, the Marketing Vanguard Summit has established itself as a convener of CMOs, CEOs, and other senior leaders from some of the world’s biggest brands—alongside cultural icons, emerging leaders, and academia stars.
This year, we brought them together under the summit theme Essential Bravery, which underscores what’s needed of CMOs now.
These are some of the key themes that emerged.
Performance has gone too far—brand is now the priority
Brand has roared back as the fundamental necessity for differentiation in an AI-driven, slop-filled world. Performance marketing, a fixture of marketing focus in recent years, has gone too far as a priority. The line of the day: “Performance can optimize demand, but brand has to create it.” Brand is the only thing that will make companies matter in an AI-mediated world.
Marketing must drive growth
As one CMO said, “Our work isn’t marketing work anymore, it’s enterprise growth work.” Marketing will win if it isn’t merely defending its turf. Rather, marketers must prove necessity by going outside silos, swim lanes, and comfort zones by recognizing a heavier responsibility: taking ownership of growth across the organization.
But proving value can also undercut value
The quest to prove marketing’s value is actually undercutting its value—and that of the CMO. “The industry is so infatuated with proving marketing works that it’s stopped making marketing that works,” one participant said. The CMO is being redefined as Chief Measurement Officer. Or worse, Chief Spend Officer, which means you can be cut when the quarter tightens. The CFO quote that landed hardest: “I measure, and I ask my CMO to measure, because I don’t think they’re managing.”
Humanity is a real differentiator
It was a consistent thread: “In a world where competence becomes a commodity, humanity is not your fallback, it is your only real differentiator left.” Being human isn’t soft, it isn’t pat, and it isn’t a nice-to-have. It is the thing that will separate brands from not just each other, but from the artificial crafting of stories, positioning, signs, and designs.
Embrace the agentic enterprise
The function with the highest exposure to job loss from AI? Marketing. The kill order: code first, then project management/engineering/design, then marketing. One participant said he uses Claude to write briefs that were “better than I can write,” despite having decades of experience. Show of hands on who’d vibe-coded anything? Embarrassingly few.