Interview
The Gist
- Essential Skills. Some of the key skills CMOs need to stay effective include data fluency, martech literacy and storytelling expertise.
- ROI Pressure. CMOs report increased demands for results from leadership, but many still rely on basic metrics and lack the data infrastructure or analytical skills to track meaningful business impact.
- GenAI Adoption. While generative AI adoption is rapid, few marketing teams have developed formal guidelines or tapped into more transformative uses.
In this episode of The CMO Circle, CMSWire's VP of Research Sarah Kimmel unpacks the top findings from the 2025 State of the CMO Report. She uncovers how CMOs are adapting to rapid technological shifts, why balancing creativity and data skills is more important than ever and how generative AI is transforming — not just accelerating — marketing workflows.
With new expectations around ROI and optimistic (yet cautious) budget forecasts, this episode offers a candid look at the evolving role of marketing leadership today.
Check out the free executive summary of the 2025 State of the CMO Report here. Or access the full report on the SMG Shopify store here.
Table of Contents
- Transcript
- Essential Skills Marketers Can't Ignore
- Budget Outlook and the Growing Weight of ROI
- Rising to the GenAI Challenge
- The Benefit of Embracing the Cutting Edge
Transcript
Michelle Hawley: Hi everybody, Michelle Hawley here, Editorial Director at CMSWire with the latest episode of The CMO Circle. And with me is my colleague, Sarah Kimmel, VP of Research at CMSWire. Sarah, thank you for being here.
Sarah Kimmel: Thanks for having me, Michelle. Super excited to talk about research today.
Michelle: Yeah, so you're going to tell us about some of the key findings from the 2025 State of the CMO Report. Before we get into what those findings are, can you tell me a little bit about what goes into the process of creating the report?
Sarah: Sure. So this is our second study concentrating on the role of the chief marketing officer for CMSWire. So three years ago, it became really clear that there was almost no senior level role that was evolving as fast as chief marketing officer was. And it's also like a really critical role for digital customer experience, which is kind of the central domain for CMSWire.
And so we wanted to get a better understanding of the changes that were impacting the role of the chief marketing officer and also what that meant for digital experience. And so the first study that we did gave us a lot of information about who CMOs were, what their backgrounds were, how they thought about their role and where the disruption was kind of coming from. And this time we dug in to those areas of disruption to get a clearer picture of what changes for CMOs look like on the ground.
So how are they responding to those changes? And where do they feel like they have gaps? Where do they need development? What's kind of missing right now?
So we surveyed more than 500 people who lead the marketing function at their organization. And we got a kind of a broad sample across industries and organization sizes. And almost all of this data was collected in December and January. So we're sort of hot off the presses here.
Michelle: Where can people find the report if they want to read it?
Sarah: Right. So the free executive summary is available on CMSWire (find it here). I think we'll give a link so people can get to it if they want to. And the full report is available on the SMG Shopify store (found here) with a 30% discount for anyone who is watching the show here today with the code CMOSHOW. So we'll also link to that.
Michelle: Yeah, marketers definitely go check out the report. There's a lot of great information in there. You'll to want to dig into the details. Today, though, we're going to give you a sneak peek of what the top findings were for the year. And first, right off the bat, is technology.
Essential Skills Marketers Can't Ignore
Michelle: The skills of the modern marketer are expanding. And today, CMOs need to have an increasingly expanded knowledge of technological expertise. So Sarah, what skills do marketers need today to stay ahead?
Sarah: Right. So the skills that are critical for marketing leaders now are kind of in three distinct buckets. They're related to each other, but they are distinct from each other.
The first is skills related to data aggregation, data integration and analysis. And the second is skills related to kind of advanced marketing technologies. So that could be your DXP or your CMS, but it could also be emerging technologies like GenAI. And the third is what I'm going to call creative thinking or storytelling, or you could think of it as kind of core marketing skills.
So for the first one on data aggregation, so data is really critical for ROI. And ROI is becoming even more necessary than it's ever been as marketers are more likely to be held accountable for all of their spending than they've previously been. Data hygiene and data savviness are also really critical for more sophisticated uses of marketing technology, like anything to do with personalization or AI. So data integration and hygiene for marketing, it's kind of the keystone to unlocking advanced capabilities and leveraging emerging technology. So without the data, you're not going to get very far.
Secondly, there's that technology itself, right? 98% of the marketing leaders in the survey agreed that the execution of their organization's marketing strategy requires more advanced technological skills every single year. And 63% of them strongly agreed. So it wasn't just like, yeah, we need more technology. It was like, no, no, we really, really need more technological capabilities.
And the technical skills that have become critical are both for making the most of the capabilities of the modern martech stack, you know, for things like advanced personalization, omnichannel delivery, but they're also critical for things like LLM literacy, savvy prompting on your GenAI tools, workflow automation, you know, things like that.
But all of that said, marketers still need to be able to brand effectively, communicate their value proposition, speak to customer needs, understand the customer journey at their organization. So the basics of marketing haven't gone away. And in fact, there's a case to be made that without that piece of it, I mean, it's the kind of, you build it, will they come? Like, no, they won't. Without all of the kind of marketing basics underneath the technology and the data, what you have is technology and data and not an effective marketing strategy. So you kind of have to put all of these things together. And that's a lot to ask. That's a big ask for marketing professionals and marketing leaders. But they are definitely in a space where they need skills acquisition for the future.
Michelle: I've heard a few different marketers say on this show that marketing is this blend of art and science, and it sounds like that's still kind of the case, but do you see the science aspect of that starting to outweigh the art side?
Sarah: I think it's more that. So that first study that we did when we were trying to figure out who the marketers think they are and what do they think is the most critical parts of their role — what we found was that, for them, the way they think of themselves is they think of themselves as creative thinkers and creatives, right? I'm the storyteller, I'm the person who puts all of this together into a narrative. I'm the person who communicates out to the world of what we're about and who we are and why you should do business with us. That's the piece where they feel really secure and they feel really solid. And it's having to transition into all of the technology and the data side of it where they're a little bit less familiar. This is like an engineer becoming a manager. It's a stretch. It's a stretch. It's something new that they kind of have to add in to their understanding of who they are.
Budget Outlook and the Growing Weight of ROI
Michelle: Well, one ray of sunshine that came out during the report is around budgets. Pre-pandemic marketers had these bigger budgets to work with. Pandemic hit, budgets got slashed, not just for marketers, but for lot of departments. And now suddenly they had to learn how to still do what they were doing and prove value, but with a shoestring budget. But it sounds like that's starting to change, right?
Sarah: A little bit. So there is some room for optimism here. Two-thirds of the marketing leaders in our studies say that the marketing budget that they had increased over the last year. Although only 44% of them said, oh, it was only a slight increase, right? But not a really significant one. But even better, 84% of them said that they expected their marketing budget to increase in 2025. And a third expected it to be a very significant increase.
It's great. But here's the caveat. We collected this data mostly in December and January. And over the last month, we've seen some considerable instability in the market that is making companies more cautious about their spending, more confused about how they should be investing. So it remains to be seen if there's more volatility coming.
Those budgets may be baked in. A lot of the process of creating those budgets happens very early in the year. And if the market becomes increasingly volatile or disruptions to supply chain or disruptions to customer behavior, that calculation may change at a lot of organizations. But what I can tell you is that at the beginning of the fiscal year, companies and CMOs were feeling quite optimistic about this year.
Michelle: You touched a little bit on ROI just a second ago, proving return on investment is still the biggest hurdle for marketing teams. And it's never been more critical. In the report, you found that 69% of CMOs are saying that leadership demands measurable results for everything they do. And that's up 59% from two years ago. So that's a big jump.
Sarah: Mm-hmm. Yeah, there is an increasing expectation of accountability for marketing spend. ROI is hard. And the difficulty of measuring ROI is the number one roadblock cited by marketing leaders to improving the customer experience. So more than one in three marketing leaders say that the difficulty of measuring ROI is a challenge for them, and 95 % agree that their marketing team has been under pressure to demonstrate return on marketing investments. 65% of them strongly agree. It is this kind of conundrum there. Here we're back to that sort of skills argument and that data argument again.
ROI is increasingly expected or at least being able to demonstrate return on marketing spend, but at the same time, they don't always have the data to do it. They don't always have that data organized. They don't always have the skills needed, you know, with metrics or so forth in order to really be able to demonstrate the return. So that is an area that's kind of under construction, if you will.
Michelle: I've heard some marketers talk about how, to be successful, they need to achieve this balance between short-term strategies and long-term strategies. And of course, know, short-term strategies, can see the payoff right away. Long-term, you're going to need to wait a little bit more for that to become apparent. So it sounds like with this need for ROI to be proved, you know, more and more, achieving that balance is just going to get harder.
Sarah: Maybe, maybe not. You know, like if you can show some return in the short term side, sometimes you can gain yourself some wiggle room and certainly make that argument for what the longer term payoff will be. With a lot of things, it's also setting expectations, right? Like when are you going to have that evidence of the return on investment? Is it going to be right away or is it going to be a little bit further down the line as well?
So it's important with metrics, you don't always know what the outcome is going to be and you don't always know when that outcome is going to eventuate. Maybe that's more of a setting expectations kind of an issue. What I can tell you is that on the metrics side, marketing does need to kind of up its game. The metrics that they use to demonstrate experience improvements or to demonstrate return on investment, those metrics tend to be pretty basic. A lot of customer satisfaction, a lot of lagging indicators, not necessarily things that show business impact. So that's the other thing that needs to happen here, the metrics that are being tracked need to catch up with business priorities and with business expectations.
Rising to the GenAI Challenge
Michelle: One tool that's on every marketer's radar right now is generative AI. And you mentioned marketers are kind of using that right now to fill in the gaps. They're using it to hit goals related to personalization, real-time omni-channel experience, deeper customer relationships. And when I was at Adobe Summit earlier this year, a big talk was we can finally use generative AI to achieve true one-to-one personalization. I'm a little skeptical that's going to happen, but we'll see.
But it's not a plug-in and instantly get results technology. There's still some pretty important fundamental skills that marketers need to learn first. And it's going to be a while before it reaches its full potential. One key finding in the report was 30% of companies still lack formal guidelines and content creation dominating use cases, which I'm actually surprised the number is that high. But there's still a big opportunity to go strategic.
Sarah: Yeah, on the one hand, generative AI has seen one of the fastest adoption cycles of any new technology ever, period, right? And on the other hand, marketing teams have barely scratched the surface of what its capabilities are and what it can be used for in the marketing functions. So 68% of the marketing leaders in the study say that their teams have used generative AI for marketing in the past year. And another 23% say that they're going to adopt it and use it for marketing in the next year.
That's way up there. It's 87% of people just in a couple of years. That's kind of unheard of for technology adoption. And 52% of marketing leaders say that the growing use of AI in marketing has had a major influence on their marketing strategy over this past year. And 66% say that using AI more strategically is a priority in the coming years. So that's the number one answer. Both of those, by the way, are the number one answer. The biggest impact was generative AI and the biggest projected priority is also using generative AI.
So what are they using it for? 80% say that they're using it for content generation. Makes sense, right? 77% for social media marketing, 72% for chatbots, 71% for personalized marketing. Now we're really kind of getting somewhere, but they're much less likely to be using it for process or workflow automation or localization or translation. I mean, those things, they're coming, right?
Now, when GenAI really hit big in 2022, we started asking organizations whether they had guidelines for employees using it. And we've seen a steady increase in the percentage of organizations who do have formal guidance for their employees using AI. But nearly one in three organizations still don't have any formal guidelines. It's just really, it's a wild west. Do whatever, or we're kind of looking the other way, or maybe leadership is like, hey, yeah, go find out, but we don't have any guidance for you on that, which is a little shocking, especially given the risks. And people are worried about those things. They're worried about information security and so forth.
It is maybe this not having any formal guidelines. Maybe it's about like organizations not knowing what they don't know, right? So one of the interesting conversations that we've been having on my team is to think about how a new technology like generative AI doesn't just impact productivity and save time, although it definitely does, right? But it also leads to much more radical changes in workflow, or it can, right? It leads to absolutely transforming what the job means into something else.
So for example, and you were talking earlier about, I don't think we're really there, but okay, so for example, say you upload an outline of your marketing strategy and your branding guidelines into a generative AI sandbox. You can use that as the starting point for a flow of content creation that is optimized for omnichannel delivery and then using agentic AI, the content creation cycle could trigger automatic actions that prompt oversight review. And then you could have an automatic handoff to your creative team to start graphic design on new assets. And then what if rules for personalization are baked into the process, leading to automatic localization or customization of the content that aligns with customer personas or geographic areas, and you could tie all that together with your CDP, your customer data platform. And I'm not saying that that's easy, okay, absolutely not saying that that's easy, but it's also not science fiction either. We're actually like, the future is here.
Michelle: As far as regulations and values around the use of AI go, do you get the sense that CMOs have that on their radar? Is that lower down the priority list?
Sarah: It's not. Regulation is something that they are acutely aware of. And one of the really interesting things that we found is that organizations that are optimizing for regulation are also a little bit further ahead. It's almost like a plant that's grown in a challenging soil, it's like having to account for regulation has led to some complexity and sophistication in how they go about their marketing strategy that actually serves them pretty well for other more sophisticated capabilities down the line. So it's one of those weird unintended consequences.
I wouldn't say that organizations that are under a lot of regulation are like, no, they're behind or they're like unable to, nope, that's actually not true. They're actually ahead and are a little bit more sophisticated with their martech stack, probably because of the requirements of that regulation, interestingly enough.
Related Article: CMO Circle: From Classroom to C-Suite With Jonathan Copulsky
The Benefit of Embracing the Cutting Edge
Michelle: One key finding that came out in the report that I think all marketers should hear is that if you want to stay relevant, you need to embrace the cutting edge. So for CMOs, adopting emerging tech is a top priority for the next two years. Experimentation is valuable, yes, but what's more important for top leaders, they're going to be the ones that know how to separate the wheat from the chaff and can spare their teams from all this distraction that's out there.
Sarah: Yeah. We are definitely in a very experimental space right now. You know, that conundrum of not knowing what you don't know or not knowing how to use things that are emerging and things are emerging so fast that it's hard to keep up. Right? Nevermind stay like, you know, way out on a cutting edge. But one of our interesting findings is that organizations that are facing more pressure to show results from their marketing spend are actually more likely to be experimenting with emerging technologies. They are looking for ways to get those results out of new technologies, emerging technologies. They are looking for opportunities. And additionally, organizations with more advanced marketing technology stacks are also more likely to be experimenting with emerging technologies. So there's a lot of motivation out there to use technology to advance marketing practices and to demonstrate impact for the business with that new tech. And we see this in the priorities of marketing leaders.
So it's not just AI, but you know, marketing leaders are focused on all kinds of emerging technologies like internet of things, influencer marketing platforms, VR and AR, voice search optimization, et cetera. So two of the top four outcomes that marketing leaders are prioritizing in the next two years involve emerging technologies. So using AI more strategically is the number one answer.
The other one is adopting more emerging technology. As with GenAI, there's a steep learning curve on adoption of technology. And for many emerging technologies, they are first used in really basic ways. And that's what we're seeing right now with GenAI until the value becomes clear or the affordances or the capabilities kind of emerge from lots of people experimenting with them.
So marketing is one of those disciplines where there's a pretty heavy hype cycle for new technology. And it's easy to get caught up and to get distracted and to think that this new thing is going to solve all our problems and it never does. So it's important to look for ways that emerging tech helps to achieve outcomes that really align to those business priorities. You remember when at the beginning of our discussion, I said that like, yeah, they need to learn about data and they need to learn about emerging technology, like they need to combine that with the basics of marketing. If you don't understand your customer journey, can't meet customers where they are, can't put compelling narratives or compelling stories together about your product and service and why it's valuable. It doesn't matter how much technology you have, and it doesn't matter how much data you've aggregated together. It won't serve your purpose.
So it's a three-legged stool. You need all of those things working together in order to really kind of unlock the potential of what's possible now, which is more than has ever been possible before for marketing, which is kind of optimistic, sort of the good news.
Michelle: I mean, that sounds like a real challenge. With generative AI alone, which of course it goes into all these other areas, but it's every single day there's new announcements, new advancements. I think it's important to pick and choose what's important to listen to and pay attention to. I've heard it referred to as the information tsunami. So if you don't do that, you're just going to get swept away.
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So one more time, can you share with people how they can access the State of the CMO Report?
Sarah: I like that. Yeah, no, accurate, accurate.
Absolutely, so the executive summary is is available for free on CMSWire (find it here). The full report is available on our Shopify store (get it here). Remember that there's a 30% discount for anyone watching the show Today with the discount code CMOSHOW.
Michelle: Sarah Kimmel, VP of Research at CMSWire. Thank you so much for being here today and sharing some insights with us on the State of the CMO. We really appreciate it.
Sarah: Thanks for having me, Michelle. My pleasure.
