August was a busy month for CMO departures, and some serious experience is walking out the door.

Microsoft AI CMO Andrea Mallard is stepping back just 6 months after joining from Pinterest, as she relocates her family to Europe to be closer to her ailing father. Microsoft does not plan to replace the role directly, instead consolidating Copilot marketing under Jared Spataro.

Kohl’s CMO Christie Raymond is leaving after 9 years, with the retailer replacing the CMO structure with a broader Chief Customer Officer remit spanning marketing, brand, loyalty, personalization and digital commerce. Dentsu’s Jeremy Miller is stepping down after 4 years as Global Chief Communications and Marketing Officer amid yet another reshuffling of the group’s global leadership (and we think it won’t be the last).

Then there are two genuinely long chapters coming to an end. Olivier François is stepping down as Stellantis Global CMO after more than two decades across Fiat and its successor companies, and 35 Super Bowl commercials along the way. Klarna CMO David Sandström will leave in early 2027 after 9 years helping turn a Nordic payments company into one of fintech’s most recognizable brands. In Malaysia, RHB Banking Group CMO Abdul Sani Abdul Murad has also stepped down after 9 years.

There is subtext: Microsoft isn’t replacing Mallard. Kohl’s has folded marketing into a Chief Customer Officer role. Stellantis appears to be shifting toward more regional marketing leadership. Dentsu is redistributing responsibilities across communications and brand.

Cue another round of “Is the CMO dying?”

We are not in quite that much of a rush.

Because while all of this was happening, companies announced 43 new Chief Marketing Officers in August. 23 were women and 20 men. Just 9 were promoted from within, while 34 were hired externally. Almost half (21 of the 43) are first-time CMOs. And only 5 are what we call “industry travelers,” making the rare jump into an entirely different vertical.

The U.S. had an especially busy month, with 33 CMOs appointed across 16 states. California led with 9 hires, followed by New York with 4. Georgia, Tennessee, Nevada, Texas, Florida and Missouri each added 2.

Outside the U.S., India appointed 4 new CMOs and England 2, while the Philippines, Canada, Cyprus and the Netherlands each announced one.

Tech, as usual, was the busiest sector. Restaurants had a surprisingly active month too.

So, no. We are not ready to write the CMO obituary.

What is true, though: the job is becoming less standardized. Some companies are folding marketing into customer, commercial or regional structures. Others are hiring a CMO for the first time. And 43 companies decided they still wanted someone with the title last month.

As always, we squint through 40+ CMO press releases to get past the congratulations and into the subtext, the confession, the problem.

Salesforce hired a field-marketing heroine because it cares about getting a real customer into a room. Wendy’s hired the Grimace guy because everybody knows Wendy’s and too few people are eating there. Flo has 80 million monthly users and hired a scientist-marketer to turn a period tracker into a relationship that survives the periods.

The appointment tells you who got the job. As always, we care more about why the job exists.

Salesforce has promoted an events marketer to President and Chief Marketing Officer after a decade of SaaS pretending that customers could be influenced without needing to meet them.

Erin Oles first worked on Dreamforce between 2009 and 2012, driving registration, audience growth and sales enablement. She returned in 2021 to lead brand experiences and events, moved through strategic events and executive marketing, and became EVP of Global Integrated Marketing in February. Six months later, now she owns global brand, product marketing, communications and events - the whole bundle.

So why does this unusual path to CMO make sense for Salesforce? 

SaaS demand generation is clinical. Email, webinars, paid digital, content and automated outbound ‘orchestrate’ beautifully. AI now lets companies produce more of all of it for cheap, almost nothing. The result is an inbox full of ever more “quick question” subject headers nobody asked to receive.

A SaaS CEO friend of ours, Mike at CrossChq takes the opposite approach. His preferred lead generator, “Chq’s on us,” is simple and intimate: get prospects together, buy dinner and give them a reason to open up about real business problems.

Our forthcoming analysis of hiring across AI-native companies suggests he is not alone. Among 70 AI-native B2B companies we studied, field marketing ranks 3rd by demand volume based on job listings.

Salesforce is putting serious money behind the same idea. In April, it advertised an EVP of Global Field Marketing at $489,000 to $554,000 base. The company has more than 740 employees with field marketing in their titles. Four months later, someone who built much of her career around customer experiences is in charge of Marketing.

Oles speaks plainly about events. She says Salesforce defines business goals early and kills work that does not contribute to them. Her team measures attendance, dwell time, and follow-ups. Nobody is deciding afterward that an activation was successful because everybody liked the ice sculpture.

Her career contains evidence. At Rodan + Fields, Oles helped develop a livestream capability that expanded event participation from around 10,000 to more than 60,000 people and contributed more than $100 million in incremental revenue.

Salesforce gives her a larger playground. Dreamforce brings around 46,000 people into San Francisco. The company has spent years turning fairly dry enterprise software into an ecosystem of customers, Trailblazers, mascots, elaborate environments, product demonstrations and Marc Benioff wandering through the middle of it talking about trust. Most B2B conferences feel like somewhere your employer sends you after a minor disciplinary offense. Dreamforce became somewhere people voluntarily want to be.

Oles is now using AI to make that enormous physical machine work harder. Salesforce is using Agentforce to make the conference selling Agentforce better at selling Agentforce. Peak Salesforce.

Enterprise AI is difficult to differentiate in words. Everyone has agents, orchestration, automation, productivity and transformation - copy won’t land it. Salesforce needs enterprise buyers to believe that its version will justify changing systems, budgets and operating processes.

Oles herself describes the market as moving from AI hype to delivery. She is right. Events give Salesforce somewhere to prove that delivery. Customers can watch the product work, speak to another customer using it, interrogate somebody from Salesforce and decide whether the promise survives contact with reality. Oles describes planning tasks that previously required several people and several days being reduced to roughly an hour with one person reviewing the output. At a recent event, AI-supported personalization helped deliver around a ten-point improvement in NPS.

Salesforce wants companies excited about digital labor while reassuring the humans inside those companies that the future remains wonderfully human. Marketing has to make this story palatable.

SaaS spent years finding cheaper ways to reach customers without meeting them. AI has made those methods cheaper still. Salesforce seems to think the scarce bit is now the meeting.

Wendy’s has hired the McDonald’s marketer who helped make Grimace famous. The job: get people back into Wendy’s.

U.S. same-store sales fell 7% in the second quarter. Traffic fell 12.5%. Global systemwide sales dropped 6.5%. Wendy’s withdrew its full-year outlook after 6 straight quarters of declining U.S. comps. Burger King has reclaimed the #2 burger spot.

Everybody knows Wendy’s. Fewer people choose it.

America’s President suggests we are in a Golden Age, not so for QSR bosses. Restaurant traffic is flat or falling across much of the category. Chipotle says customers are pulling back. Domino’s expects more pressure. Burger King’s U.S. president calls it a “zero-sum game.”

Who cares about the market? It is a Wendy’s problem. CEO Bob Wright has said the brand’s quality edge faded, its value offer weakened, and its marketing became too reliant on promotions and collaborations. Most importantly, it stopped driving enough restaurant visits.

Wendy’s created a title that removes any CMO wiggle room or space on the business card: Chief Marketing and Customer Growth Officer. Not chief vibes officer, not chief social-media personality - growth.

Hassan knows how McDonald’s turns culture into transactions. Adult Happy Meals, Famous Orders, Szechuan Sauce and Grimace were not just internet bait. McDonald’s used familiar brand assets, then fed the attention into its app, loyalty program and massive restaurant network.

Wendy’s has tried to do culture too. Remember when its social-media voice was once sharp and distinct?

Then every brand started posting like a hostile teenager and the advantage vanished. Wendy’s still gets attention – just not enough repeat visits.

This is Hassan’s job. Hassan can make the Baconator look good. He cannot make the drive-through move faster, fix a dirty dining room or give franchisees enough margin to improve their stores as building costs in America skyrocket.

Marketing can make the promise famous. It cannot keep the fries hot.

Wendy’s is at least rebuilding more than its ad strategy. It is closing weak stores, changing its value offer, refreshing menu items, restructuring parts of the business and replacing its media agency (Spark/Publicis) with WPP Media after about two decades.

That gives Hassan more room to work. Unfortunately, if traffic improves, everyone will claim credit. Regular CMO job hazard.

Wendy’s still has square burgers, Frostys and the memory of Dave Thomas. The problem is that memories do not drive traffic. McDonald’s sells nostalgia to people who already visit. Hassan has to manufacture nostalgia at a brand people stopped visiting.

Grimace sold a purple shake to customers who were already inside a McDonald’s. Hassan has to convince them to drive past one.

Flo, the women’s health app best known for period and cycle tracking, has 80 million monthly users and a problem that comes with the biology: eventually, its customers stop needing a period tracker. The company has hired Rina Hahn to make sure they do not stop needing Flo.

Hahn joins from Remitly, where she started as Director of Digital Marketing, became VP of Growth and eventually CMO. She built a 150-person global marketing organization spanning acquisition, brand and lifecycle across more than 170 countries, taking the business through its IPO. Flo makes a particularly revealing point in the announcement: Remitly was roughly Flo’s current size when Hahn joined. It has since grown beyond $2 billion in annual revenue.

That is about as close as a company ever gets to writing the CMO brief into the press release. Most tech CMO mandates we take on at Taligence follow this exact path. CEO asks “Who has done this exact stage-to-goal before with no hiccups”

Flo became Europe’s first purely digital consumer women’s-health unicorn in 2024 after General Atlantic invested more than $200 million at a valuation above $1 billion. The original period and cycle tracker is becoming something much larger, covering conception, pregnancy, sexual health, perimenopause and menopause. Hahn has specifically been asked to help Flo reach women over 40 and support further product expansion.

A period tracker has a natural customer lifecycle. Women age, their needs change and eventually the feature that brought them into the product fades. Flo can keep chasing younger women entering that lifecycle, or it can persuade existing users that the app should travel through it with them.

Doing both (the goal) requires a different kind of marketing from the one that gets somebody to download a cycle-tracking app.

Hahn comes from the science end of the modern CMO spectrum. Flo CEO Dmitry Gurski specifically called out her “quantitative rigor” alongside her brand instincts. She has a degree in Applied Physics.

Science might not solve some lingering trust issues. In 2021, the company settled FTC allegations that it had shared sensitive health information with outside analytics providers after promising users that the information would remain private. The FTC required Flo to obtain consent before sharing health information and submit its privacy practices to independent review

By way of response, they built Anonymous Mode, which separates health information from PII and open-sourced the technology. Rather neatly, the day before announcing Hahn, Flo said its latest independent ISO privacy and security audits returned zero findings.

So Flo’s CEO is looking for more than the next 20m downloads. He wants somebody who can combine growth with enough credibility that women continue handing Flo extraordinarily intimate information as the product expands into more sensitive parts of their lives.

When General Atlantic invested in 2024, Flo had nearly 70 million monthly users, close to five million paying subscribers and expected annual gross bookings above $200 million, growing around 50%. The investor explicitly identified perimenopause and menopause as areas for the next phase of growth. Two years later, Hahn is arriving to commercialize that next phase.

Hahn has already helped take one digital company from growth-stage acquisition machine to global, public business. At Flo, the expansion is less about geography than time.

Flo has already won the download. Hahn’s job is to give the same woman a reason to keep opening it for the next 20 years.