The CMO Crisis
Why marketing got smaller without feeling smaller
JD Prater
Coming Soon
For whoever runs marketing, whatever the title. Early access goes to subscribers of Open Folders, my free weekly newsletter. They read the book before anyone else.
Subscribe →In late 2016, Forrester predicted that CEOs would fire a third of their CMOs in 2017. Ten years of headlines followed, from the shortest tenure in the C-suite to the death of the CMO. Meanwhile the people kept landing: most CMOs who leave are promoted or move to a job as big or bigger, on Spencer Stuart's 2026 numbers.
The obituary was written about the wrong thing.
For ten years the trade press has been announcing the end of the chief marketing officer. It keeps pointing at the people, and their careers are fine. What's changing is the title and the role. On Spencer Stuart's count, a third of the S&P 500 has no chief marketing officer, and elsewhere the role goes by growth, or commercial, or customer.
I think the title came loose because the job underneath it got small first. This book is about how that happened.
Digital and mobile made one slice of marketing measurable in real time, at a scale direct mail never had. Impressions, clicks, conversions, a customer journey you could follow all the way to the purchase. Free tools measured that slice and multiplied it, and a generation of marketers trained on those tools until the measurable slice looked like the whole job.
From there the loop ran on its own. The slice was the easiest thing to trust, teach, hire for, promote, and defend in a budget meeting, and each turn narrowed the job a little more. I call that the Sliver Cycle. None of it felt like shrinking. The work got busier and the dashboards got better, while brand, buyer psychology, category strategy, and the commercial floor underneath all of it stopped being anyone's job to defend.
The narrowing turns up in other people's numbers too.
“The modern CMO is winning the relationship and losing the argument.”
Boathouse, Fifth Annual CEO Study (150 US CEOs), January 2026. The CMO Survey, January 2026.
This book is for the marketer who came up running one channel and got handed the whole function, and for the one getting ready to be. The role arrives before the influence does, and knowing the evidence won't earn it, because the room is rational: it trusts what it can audit, on a clock your best work doesn't keep.
The book shows how we got here and what the whole job is, then works through what's yours to do when you're right and the room still doesn't move, and names what isn't yours.
By the end, you'll be able to:
- Answer the CFO’s “what if we spent 50% more, or 50% less?” before anyone asks it.
- Know which questions your measurement can’t answer, before someone asks you one.
- Count the deals you lost to a shortlist you were never on.
- Find out what the person who decides would need to see, and build the test around it before you argue the case again.
- Agree in writing how your work will be judged, before the next role or the next big campaign.
I can't control who gets hired at the S&P 500, so this book won't fix the crisis. I can give you the whole job, and the part of it that's yours.
Who is making this argument
JD Prater
3x VP of Marketing. Operating Partner at Diversis Capital.
I came up inside the Sliver Cycle thinking I was doing all of marketing. I was doing one slice of it well enough to keep getting promoted: I led marketing four times, three of them as VP, and never held the title on the cover of this book. I built the dashboards this book takes apart.
Then I went looking for the rest of it and found it in research the job had never put in front of me. I wrote this for whoever is coming up the way I did, so it arrives sooner. Marketing grows a business when someone can carry what the market knows into the decisions that spend the money.
15+ years in marketing · Five companies I worked at were acquired, one by Microsoft
A taste of the argument, from the newsletter
"Digital marketing is a channel. Marketing is a discipline and a field. A channel has tools. A field has science."
from "Most of Marketing Was Never Opened" →"The measurable thing becomes the manageable thing. The manageable thing becomes the rewarded thing."
from "Marketers Mastered the Platform" →Get Early Access
The book is in progress. When the manuscript is ready, subscribers read it before anyone else.
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Subscribe →Or start with the newsletter series the book builds on: The CMO Role Is Vanishing Before You Get There →