CMOs ‘shouldn’t fear rise of the chief growth officer’

Industry Contributor 1 Jul 2019 - 2 min read

CMOs ‘shouldn’t fear rise of the chief growth officer’

By Paul McIntyre - Executive Editor

Market Voice 3 min read

How to use generative AI beyond efficiency: Just talk to it for half an hour every week – OK Tomorrow founder Nilesh Ashra

By Nine | Partner Content

OK Tomorrow founder Nilesh Ashra is convinced AI can unlock the creative floodgates, and has some cracking examples covering customer, product and HR. But media and marketing appear to be running headlong for efficiency.

Market Voice 3 min read

Advanced Audiences: Nielsen makes synthetic, first-party data play as CMOs prioritise customer lifetime value, optimise marketing technology investments, and navigate changes in privacy laws

By Nielsen | Partner Content

Audience measurement company, Nielsen, is becoming a first-party marketing company, working directly with brands to build privacy-compliant customer segments – panel data that is synthetically overlaid with brands’ customer data platform (CDP) data.

Tags: CMO, marketing, chief growth officer, advertising, mobile apps, martech

Companies with a chief growth officer (CGO) in place tend to have larger marketing budgets, according to a new report, and they tend to be more mobile app and tech-focused. But CGOs can be an ally, not a threat, to chief marketing officers (AdWeek).

CGO is a hybrid, cross-functional role, part sales, part marketing
A report based on a survey of 700 marketers by marketing intelligence platform Singular suggests companies with CGOs in place have higher marketing budgets
They tend to play in tech heavy verticals and favour apps for value creation
The report says they are 65% more likely to be investing in new marketing tech, 48% more likely to be investing in AI and machine learning tools for marketing
“It’s more performance focused than the CMO,” said John Koetsier, vp of insights for Singular. “We don’t see this as opposition to [the] CMO, but working close with [the] CMO.”

CGOs are becoming ‘analytics masters’, investing in tech and automation solutions to react and get to market faster, according to Singular, the report publisher, which happens to sell those kind of solutions. But the increasing importance of tech and analytics cannot be dismissed. Many marketers admit privately that keeping up with tech is a major challenge. The report suggests that a chief growth officer can take that away from a CMO, while enabling CMOs to have greater input from process beginning to end result. But then Singular’s vp of insights John Koetsier, also says: “We see a trend of emerging of functions. An adoption of specific revenue topics, the focus on marketing and marketing tech, and that’s coalescing around the CGO.” Does that represent a structural shift? We're keen to hear marketers’ thoughts.