New CMO at the Crossroads Campaign Gives Marketing Leaders Guidance on How to Take the Right Route to Revenue in the Intelligence-Powered Marketing Era

Key Elements of CMO Council’s “Assess Where You Need to Progress” Initiative with Zeta Global:

• Helps chief marketers benchmark the level of marketing transformation and technology migration in their organizations.

• Provides an immediate audit result and performance scorecard for comparison with peers.

• Gives recommendations on how to accelerate GenAI-infused, data-driven marketing migration and best/next practice adoption.

The CMO Council  announced a new thought leadership program with Zeta Global aimed at engaging senior marketers in a benchmarking process to determine their company’s level of digital marketing maturity, organizational capacity and performance predictability.

“Assess Where You Need to Progress” is an AI-infused audit and prescriptive process that looks at where and how modular, progressive and selective investments in MarTech are improving marketing campaign effectiveness, market competitiveness, and overall business growth.

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According to Scott Brinker’s annual State of MarTech Report, the number of marketing solutions commercially available this year grew to 15,384. That’s up 9% from the 14,106 mapped in 2024. Most notably, 77% of the new products added last year were AI-native, notes the report’s author Scott Brinker.

“Generative AI is rapidly reshaping the marketing landscape. It changes the what, the how, and the who of the marketing jobs to be done. Marketers need a new operating model, one that will help the CMO, and their organizations, embrace these emerging capabilities to drive business advantage,” said Ed See, Chief Growth Officer at Zeta Global. “The modern CMO will be expected to lead their organizations, fueling profitable growth with the effectiveness and efficiency that AI technologies can provide.”

CMOs now find themselves at a crossroads, where success is measured less by brand stewardship—and more by their ability to drive profitable growth. According to research by the CMO Council, over half of marketing leaders (54%) are now expected to deliver on revenue growth, with a similar percentage (51%) being held accountable for operational efficiencies.

Included in this thought leadership initiative is the provisioning of an interactive online tool to scorecard MarTech readiness, as well as recommend optimal migration paths. The thought leadership initiative will also showcase best practices among early adopters and innovators, as well as provide marketers with templates and frameworks for making a stronger business case for MarTech spend in interactions with CIOs, CFOs, CPOs, and other management stakeholders.

Global marketing organizations are under pressure to become intensely technology, mobility, and connectivity driven. And, more importantly, security sensitive when it comes to protecting customer privacy, data, brand assets and marketing supply chains. This is placing a real burden on chief marketers to stay abreast of the latest marketing technology innovations and become more adept at evaluating, sourcing and implementing new applications that are relevant, usable and valued.

“New integrated customer data platforms and solutions that massively scale and personalize the customer interface bring new efficiency and effectiveness to multi-channel campaigns,” notes CMO Council executive director Donovan Neale-May. “CMOs are drawing on analytics and insights to make faster, better and more impactful decisions and are fast-becoming devotees and disciples of Big Data. Particularly, in the interactions with C-level peers where there is a need to lead and shape strategic and business outcomes,” he adds.

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