The modern CMO is expected to deliver certainty in a business environment that offers very little of it, predict human behaviour and still hit a quarterly number.
Somewhere along the way, the role stopped being just about growth and became something closer to corporate risk management. When the numbers wobble, marketing is first to explain why. When consumer confidence dips, marketing is expected to respond. When the board wants clarity in a volatile market, marketing is asked to provide it. Quickly. With data. Preferably yesterday.
No pressure.
The risk profile of the CMO role has quietly changed, not because CMOs forgot how to do their jobs, but because the job keeps changing.
Marketing performance is now inseparable from things no CMO controls. Interest rates. Cost-of-living pressure. Platform changes. Competitor behaviour. Weather. Geopolitics. Cultural moments that appear and disappear faster than a media review cycle. Yet CMOs are still assessed as if demand is stable, channels behave rationally and spend neatly maps to outcomes.
Other executives get context; marketing gets questioned.
Time doesn’t help. Marketing decisions are made today, but their impact often shows up months later. In the meantime, CEOs want momentum, CFOs want certainty, and boards want answers. CMOs end up explaining yesterday, defending today and guessing tomorrow. It’s not a feedback loop so much as a trust exercise.
Measurement adds another layer of risk. Most marketing measurement systems are very good at telling us what happened. They are far less useful at telling us what to do next. That leaves CMOs making forward-looking decisions with backward-looking tools. When those decisions don’t land, the failure is framed as poor judgement, not poor information.
Unsurprisingly, performance marketing has become the safety blanket. It feels reassuring because it is immediate and visible. You can see clicks. You can see conversions. You can point to something happening. But safety is relative. Over-reliance on performance creates its own exposure through diminishing returns, rising costs, brand erosion and a growing dependence on platforms marketers do not control.
Most CMOs know this. They also know that pulling back can feel dangerous in the short term. So they sit in the uncomfortable middle, choosing between short-term certainty and long-term exposure, fully aware that either choice could be career-limiting.
Compare that to other C-suite roles. CFOs operate within clear rules and guardrails. COOs manage systems they can largely control. CTOs build infrastructure with long runways and tolerance for iteration. CMOs manage human behaviour in volatile markets and are expected to do it with precision.
That asymmetry matters.
What makes the CMO role uniquely risky is not pressure - every executive role has pressure. It’s uncertainty. We’ve normalised language like “we think this will work” or “historically this channel performs well”. Those instincts aren’t wrong. They’re just not enough when millions of dollars, brand equity and board confidence are on the line.
The modern CMO is no longer just a brand builder or growth driver. They are a risk manager. Not in a defensive sense, but in a strategic one. Stress-testing decisions before money moves. Understanding downside as clearly as upside. Modelling trade-offs rather than relying on optimism.
Other parts of the business rehearse decisions before committing. Finance models scenarios. Operations plans contingencies. Marketing, too often, improvises and waits to see what happens.
If CMOs are being judged like risk managers, it might be time we give them tools built for risk, not hindsight.
The problem isn’t that marketing is risky. It’s that we keep asking CMOs to take those risks blind.
