For most of the last three decades marketing leaders operated in what you might politely call a peacetime environment.
Markets moved slowly enough that annual plans made sense, media channels were reasonably stable, and the biggest risks to a campaign were usually creative misfires rather than structural changes to the system itself.
Experience carried enormous weight in that world because the world itself behaved in relatively predictable ways.
That environment has quietly disappeared.
What has replaced it is something far less comfortable. Not chaos exactly, but a kind of structural instability that has crept into almost every layer of modern marketing. And that is that the economy is moving way faster.
All the while, the platforms governing distribution change their rules with alarming frequency, and the media landscape multiplies faster than most organisations can realistically manage.
None of this is theoretical. It is visible everywhere once you start paying attention.
The trillion dollar question
Global advertising spend now exceeds $1 trillion, which means marketing is no longer a secondary cost centre but one of the largest discretionary investments inside most companies.
When an investment category becomes that large, the tolerance for guesswork declines rapidly – and expectations of confidence-levels increases.
At the same time the infrastructure marketing relies on has become astonishingly fragile. Apple introduced its App Tracking Transparency framework and within months Meta warned that the change alone would reduce its annual revenue by roughly $10 billion, simply because advertisers could no longer track behaviour the way they previously had.
That’s one (little) change that had an effect upward of $10 billion!
It is difficult to imagine a more elegant demonstration of how little control many companies actually have over the systems their marketing strategies depend on.
Then there is the media landscape itself, which has become so fragmented that it is starting to resemble financial markets more than traditional advertising.
Twenty years ago a national campaign might involve television, radio, print and outdoor. Today large brands routinely operate across twenty or thirty distinct environments, many of which did not exist a decade ago.
Retail media alone is projected to reach roughly $176 billion globally and surpass television advertising revenue, a statistic that would have sounded absurd not long ago – fuck it, even 3 years ago.
A new ball game
The result of all this is uncertainty – and like many markets, marketing is not prepared for it.
And this uncertainty tends to change the behaviour of serious operators.
When the environment becomes unpredictable, leaders start looking for tools that allow them to reason through complexity rather than simply react to it.
In marketing that search has increasingly led CMOs into disciplines that historically sat well outside the profession. Econometrics. Experimental design. Statistical modelling. Occasionally even mathematics itself.
Not because they suddenly aspire to become mathematicians – even though I believe that everyone should (or at least aspirational).
But because mathematics is one of the few languages humans have developed that is actually capable of describing complex systems.
Spend enough time speaking with modern CMOs and you start to notice something interesting. Many of them have become quietly fascinated by the mechanics of measurement and modelling. They read about causal inference. They discuss incrementality tests. They ask surprisingly technical questions about how systems behave under different conditions.
This is sometimes misinterpreted as marketing turning into a quantitative discipline.
It really isn’t.
The people asking these questions are not trying to replace creativity with equations or numbers or a model. They are trying to understand the terrain they are operating on – and know more about the battleground that has wounded (and killed) many before.
Preparedness vs predicition
In unstable environments, preparedness becomes more valuable than prediction.
No serious marketing leader expects perfect foresight. The world does not work that way. What they want instead is a clearer sense of how decisions behave under different conditions. What happens when demand softens. Which channels collapse first when budgets tighten. Whether a marketing strategy still functions when the economy stops cooperating.
I wouldn’t call these marketing questions – or at least traditionally – but they are most definitely strategic.
And once you start seeing marketing through that lens, the shift in the CMO role becomes easier to understand.
Campaign leadership made sense in a stable environment. Wartime environments reward something different. They reward leaders who understand systems, who can navigate uncertainty without overreacting to it, and who know how to make decisions even when the underlying information is imperfect.
Creativity has not disappeared from this picture, nor is it likely to. The campaigns people remember were never produced by statistical models, and they never will be. Ideas still drive attention, shape brands and move culture in ways that spreadsheets cannot replicate.
But let’s be real – creativity benefits enormously from decision clarity.
Consider a CMO who knows – with statistical confidence – that their brand investment has a 12-month payback horizon, holds its value even when paid channels are cut and has latent-effects through other channels. That CMO can greenlight an ambitious campaign without needing short-term conversion metrics to justify it.
Rise of the wartime leader
When marketing leaders understand the mechanics of the system around them they gain something extremely useful: confidence. Confidence to defend brand investment when short-term metrics wobble. Confidence to resist fashionable but ineffective channels. Confidence, perhaps most importantly, to take creative risks without feeling as though they are flying blind.
History tends to produce the same lesson repeatedly (and over and over and over again). Certain environments reward certain kinds of leadership.
Winston Churchill was famously not considered the ideal leader for Britain during peacetime. But when the environment turned hostile, his particular style of leadership suddenly became not only useful but necessary.
Marketing leadership is beginning to experience a similar shift – and I am seeing the pattern already.
At a recent Prophet House event I spent hours with Leandro Perez, CMO of Salesforce. He is colourful, creative, culturally sharp – everything you’d expect from a top-tier marketing leader. He also holds a degree in computer science. That combination is not a coincidence (otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this article). When I pushed him on how he defends brand investment internally against short-term performance pressure, his answer was entirely structural – he talked about measurement architecture, not creative conviction.
He is not alone. Chris Nolan at PMG is a mathematician by trade who can flip mid-conversation from decades of media strategy insights to causal inference without breaking stride.
The stable environment that rewarded campaign operators is fading. The modern environment rewards something closer to strategic navigation.
And that is why the modern CMO is starting to look a little less like it did before, and a little more like a wartime leader.
Not because creativity matters less, but because preparedness suddenly matters more.
