The chief marketing officer role is caught in a squeeze. Marketing costs keep rising, budgets tighten, and the business still expects more growth. On a recent episode of Adweek’s Marketing Vanguard, host Jenny Rooney sat down with Jessica Apotheker, CMO of Boston Consulting Group, to unpack why that contradiction makes the role uniquely vulnerable—and what leaders can do about it.
The execution gap that ends careers
Apotheker’s core argument is deliberately unglamorous: strategy only matters if it survives execution. Big ideas matter, but if a CMO doesn’t understand how to build audiences, optimize campaigns, measure performance and change behavior on the ground, the strategy never becomes real. As she puts it, “without operational depth, all you have is a slide.”
For marketing professionals, that means the path to credibility runs through granular work, not just high-level narrative. The CMO who can talk specifics about performance and operations earns a different kind of C-suite respect.
Orchestration, art and science
Apotheker divides marketing into three buckets that should be managed differently:
- Orchestration: planning and portfolio management that connect marketing to business goals.
- Art: storytelling, creative and content.
- Science: analytics, insights, media and CRM.
The mistake, she says, is treating all three the same. Strong leaders know when to stay high-level and when to go deep, because these disciplines operate at very different levels of technical complexity.
CFO and CIO alliances come first
Asked why CMOs struggle, Apotheker is blunt: costs are rising, growth is harder, budgets are tighter, and the CMO is still expected to deliver more. Her answer is to build the right peer relationships early.
With the CFO, that means agreeing on a measurable growth equation. With the CIO, it means aligning around a technology-heavy marketing agenda. Ignore either relationship and a CMO risks being squeezed from both sides. This is practical career advice, not just theory—peer support often determines whether marketing gets funded as an investment or managed as an expense.
Reframe AI as a growth lever
Apotheker sees a trap in how CMOs let AI get framed. If the conversation stays on efficiency and cost reduction, marketing is on the defensive. The stronger move is to shift the question to growth: what new demand, revenue or customer value can AI unlock? That changes the debate from “how much can we cut?” to “what can we build?”
For CMOs facing budget pressure, this is the most immediate lever. It repositions marketing from a cost center to a growth function without dodging the need for measurement.
BCG’s broader shift also offers a lens: the firm now works across AI, digital, technology, enablement and implementation, and Apotheker describes it as a force multiplier rather than a traditional consultancy. Marketing leaders can borrow that framing—make the function a multiplier for business outcomes, not just a producer of campaigns.
Source: Adweek
