Why the CMO-CIO alliance will define the future of marketing

Headlines forewarning the “death of the CMO” have been appearing periodically for more than a decade. While the concept has become a rueful cliche in recent years, the existential crisis that informs it—in particular the turf war between organizations’ marketing and tech teams—remains. Research from TCS Interactive shows that the relationship between the chief marketing officer and the chief information officer is often seen as the least effective within the C-suite. (Register here to download a copy of the report.) However, by working together in a genuine spirit of collaboration, these two functions can create value for both the organization and the customer. To get to the bottom of this vital and pressing issue, Dan Peres, president of Ad Age, and Andrew Essex, senior managing partner at TCS Interactive, convened a roundtable of marketing VIPs—including featured speakers Kasha Cacy, chief media officer at Known, and Francine Li, CMO at Ipsy—on the VaynerX yacht at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity. After the gathering, Essex shared his top takeaways from the conversation with Ad Age Studio 30. Ad Age Studio 30: Why is the partnership between the CMO and the CIO difficult? Andrew Essex: I have dealt with CMOs for more than two decades now. It’s no secret that the job is arguably more difficult than ever. Typically, that difficulty was focused on the CMO explaining the value of marketing to the CEO or the chief financial officer. How are you creating value? How are you driving growth? How are you creating superior experiences? Though there are many reasons why these questions are hard to answer, perhaps the most pressing is the complicated relationship between the CMO and the CIO or the chief technology officer. Beyond the functional differences between the two jobs, what are the friction points? An inability to understand the underlying technology is a huge impediment; few marketers are willing to admit this. Conversely, a lot of marketing technologists think that they could do the CMO’s job. There’s a lot of frustration and friction on both sides. I think marketers are willing to stand up and say, what I do is important. I am in control of the customer. I admire your tech IQ, but you must respect my customer EQ. It’s a combination of pride and a plea for help: I need support and I need teamwork. What could be done to align goals for the CMO’s and the CIO’s mutual benefit? Can silos be overcome? The good news is there’s an increasing willingness to admit that tech IQ is mission-critical to creating better experiences that drive growth. TCS is a technology company. We pioneered information technology in India, and we understand systems at a very high level. Unrivaled systems knowledge can amplify more impactful stories. The fusion of poetry and plumbing work hand in glove; true harmonization allows you to actually reach the customer and create more seamless experiences that drive growth. It’s a lot to ask for any marketer to have an encyclopedic understanding of today’s underlying martech. Everyone wants a single source of truth, but with so many different stacks and so much technology interposed between the marketer’s idea and the distribution of those ideas, it’s a minefield. Who can navigate that minefield? We’ve been hearing for a while now that CMOs need to be more like CIOs or CTOs. But to ask one person to be the chief marketing expert and the chief technology expert is a lot to ask of one human being for larger companies with tens of thousands of employees or more. How can the CMO and CIO work together to create value for the organization and the customer? I think you need implementation people to get together with ideation people. First, the C-suite can mandate that the CMO and CIO work together. If the marketer is tasked with the relationship with the customer, then they must be empowered to have some dominion over the technology. I believe it’s the CEO’s role to create commonality. We know about the cliche of the 18-month life cycle of the CMO, but what is creating that dynamic? If you are expected to communicate with a customer and don’t understand the underlying systems you’re in a very difficult place. You want a team that’s aligned on these goals, but someone has to referee that. I think the change here is empowering marketers with teams that help them understand the technology and recognize that their storytelling skills are just as important. The goal is stories, strategy and systems coming together on equal planes, where one doesn’t have dominion over the other. I was particularly impressed by the team at Mondelēz, where you have a CMO and a CIO who essentially described themselves as Lucy and Ricky. They exist as a unit, they have shared KPIs, they present to the board together, and at the end of the day, the consumer wins. So the marketers can be tasked with growth, the technologists to test with distribution, and they should have unified goals. What is the future of the CMO-CIO alliance? What new value could it create? We’re in an era of peak complexity, to coin a phrase. From the cookie apocalypse to predictive analytics to generative AI, there’s always some new technology that you have to be privy to, and I think the level of complexity is the new thing. There’s an admission that it’s completely overwhelming and that this is not sustainable. There needs to be new teams to help one cut through all that complexity. I want to see more of CMOs and CIOs connected at the hip, a marketer and a technologist presenting as a team in an environment of incredible mutual respect. About TCS Interactive TCS Interactive is the digital services business of Tata Consultancy Services. We pride ourselves on the deep, often decades-long relationships we build with clients. These aren’t measured in quarters but in global shifts—information revolutions, new technologies and new economies. We don’t just use new technologies like generative AI, we build them. And through our partnerships, we earn unrivaled knowledge of our client’s business and systems, the kind of knowledge that makes transformation about genuine change, not just buzz.

Why the CMO-CIO alliance will define the future of marketing

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