6 wild ways the CMO role evolved in 2024

1. Buddy up with other departments

There have been some interesting examples of new ways to structure the marketing function this year, with greater collaboration between product, design and even policy teams.

Etsy’s chief marketing officer Brad Minor shared the retailer’s unique structure, which sees the marketing and comms function sit within operations. The benefit, Minor said, is that marketers aren’t siloed from the product, trust, safety and strategy teams. “It means you have a better understanding of the how and the why and the direct impact that every decision has on customers because you are working day-to-day with folks who are better able to infuse and inform your decisions.”

European fashion retailer Zalando has an equally unusual new structure whereby Anne Pascual oversees design, marketing and content as senior vice-president. Pascual has been connecting the design, marketing and content teams to build a single Zalando brand. The results? “One holistic Zalando brand with different touch points but with an emerging red thread in the way we show up and how we are perceived.”

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2. Utilitarian brands had to embrace creativity

Pharma, banking and B2B marketing aren’t exactly known for creativity; they aren’t the cool sectors everyone is desperate to make ads for. CMOs at more functional and practical companies are seeing the benefit of pushing their brands to make more creative advertising. But it does require a lot of work and internal buy-in.

Alberto Hernandez, chief growth officer at Sanofi Consumer Healthcare, wanted to challenge that notion and make health advertising a bit sexier. “As a previously boring self-care company, we were not a destination for creatives who wanted to explore crazy ideas: they prefer to go to a Heinz or a P&G or a Unilever or Nestlé or anyone else rather than us,” he told The Drum.

Since Hernandez introduced his plan, Sanofi has seen a 250% increase in creative awards compared with the previous year. “By embracing creativity as a way of operating the organization, agencies are now telling us that we’re considered a destination because talent wants to come and work for us because they can bring ideas.”

3. Become experts in fashion

This year we saw unexpected brands enter the fashion world, everyone from Tinder to Bose to Ikea and Toyota.

Chief marketing officer at Tinder Melissa Hobley was behind the dating app’s first foray into fashion, creating a clothing line with the Asian American designer Chet Lo. “Tinder is having a moment where it wants to show up in all the ways it hasn’t before. And Gen Z wants to show up and express themselves and, obviously, fashion is the way that they’re doing that. So Tinder is thinking more creatively about those plays than we ever have before,” Hobley said.

Hobley had to find new ways to measure the success of the partnership by tracking social sentiment and sales of the collection while also using brand trackers to see if it changed the perspectives of the brand.

4. Make the case for brand marketing

The switch from performance marketing to brand marketing was a trend in 2023, but in 2024, CMOs doubled down to make the case for brand. Monzo was one company that invested heavily in brand marketing after a five-year break from the channel.

Monzo’s vice-president of marketing, AJ Coyne, said the bank had grown “exponentially” year-on-year, boasting 10 million users today, but has hit a point where it needs to scale. Coyne told The Drum: “Monzo can’t do that in the same channels that it worked on in the past, so above-the-line, high-reach media and investing in the brand are critical to that success.”

Because it had been so long since Monzo went above the line, its data team needed to set the marketing team up to measure these kinds of campaigns through mixed modeling. It takes a lot more than creating a TV ad to make brand investment worthwhile.

5. Understand local marketing needs

You can’t be a global CMO today “if you don’t understand what’s changing in the role of a brand manager in Uzbekistan or Tanzania or Cairo or Kyoto,” PepsiCo’s chief marketing officer for international beverages, Mark Kirkham, said in April. Managing the relationship between global and local teams is an age-old marketing problem, however, this year saw some interesting shifts in dynamics.

Kirkham, who oversees a portfolio that spans Pepsi, Lays, Lipton’s Ice Tea and many more across 170 counties, offered his insights on how to manage a global team of marketers. “I have to get close to marketers in different parts of the world, understand their backgrounds, passions and ambitions from both a career and a personal standpoint,” he said.

Ikea makes flatpack furniture designed to suit every home around the globe. Its products might be homogeneous, but as Ikea’s global communications director, Belén Frau-Uriarte, told us, its marketing doesn’t have to be uniform.

“Ikea wants to keep one brand identity which is playful, inclusive, simple but we believe there is a lot of value in giving space for different minds and different countries to evolve the brand,” she explained.

6. Stay true to the brand

The trend cycle is getting shorter and shorter putting marketers under pressure to bend their brand guidelines to jump on the bandwagon of any viral moment. CMOs have been busy putting structures in place and signing up agencies to help them be part of a cultural moment without abandoning their brand in the process.

Outdoor company Yeti owes a lot of its success to staying true to its brand. Former chief marketing officer Paulie Dery told The Drum he is extremely cautious not to “pander” to trends for a quick buck and risk damaging the brand in the long run. “If you are at the whim of influencers, TikTok or celebrities, you are not 100% controlling the narrative of your brand – and that is terrifying. I love that celebrities love us and that they want to do stuff with us, but is that good for us long term? No, I don’t think so.”