We just dropped our annual CMO Moves report for 2025, and the results tell a very different story from the usual hand-wringing over the so-called “death of the CMO.”

In reality, CMO hiring is on the rise. But before we start celebrating a marketing renaissance, it’s worth noting that companies are still playing it safe. Boards are overwhelmingly appointing leaders with deep roots in the category (often poached directly from competitors) rather than backing bold new bets.

And while the role itself is expanding, the authority isn’t. CMOs are being asked to operate like General Managers, responsible for brand, growth, and performance, yet it’s not always clear that they have full control over all commercial levers.

Internal succession remains a sore spot. Almost 84% of new CMOs were hired externally in 2025, suggesting that internal pipelines are still more wishful thinking than a working system.

First-timers are making it through the door, but mainly at mid-sized firms. The bigger players continue to favour those with prior CMO experience - comfort, it seems, still beats curiosity.

Meanwhile, the era of the “remote CMO” is drawing to a close. More and more companies now expect their top marketers to be physically present alongside the rest of the executive team.

Despite the rhetoric about transformation and transferable leadership, category experience remains the dominant filter. Cross-industry hiring dropped again in 2025, reinforcing a preference for familiarity over a fresh perspective.

Experience levels, too, are creeping upward. Large enterprises, in particular, are skewing toward more seasoned hires.

Fractional CMOs are gaining some ground. Nearly 9% of 2025’s newly appointed CMOs previously held fractional roles, suggesting that short-term advisory gigs are becoming a viable stepping stone to the top job as well as a way to try-before-you-buy on both sides of the equation.

Now, if you're wondering how this stacks up against Spencer Stuart’s tenure report, here’s the key difference: they’re looking at current CMOs in S&P 500 firms: a snapshot of who’s already sitting in the seat as of mid-2025.

Our report focuses on new appointments across all companies with 200+ employees, tracking who’s being hired, where, and with what profile - across the entire calendar year.

We also analyze job postings (the demand side) in depth, and they do not. Postings show what companies think they want and say they need. Appointments reveal who they actually choose. The gap between the two? That’s where the insight lives.

In short: if you want a forward-looking view of the CMO role - not just who’s in the chair, but how they got there - the CMO Moves report is the one to watch.

Now, a quick look at January:

Globally, 44 Chief Marketing Officers were announced this month: 30 women vs. 14 men. Of those, 11 were internal promotions, while the remaining 33 were hired externally.

25 of these new CMOs are stepping into the role for the first time, but when it comes to industry background, companies continue to play it close to home: only 5 of the new hires came from entirely different sectors.

Geographically, 35 of the appointments were in the U.S., spread across 12 states. California led the pack with 16 new CMOs, followed by New York and Washington with 3 each. Georgia, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Virginia all saw 2 apiece, while Connecticut, Missouri, Ohio, and Oklahoma each had one.

Outside the U.S., England announced 3 new CMOs, India added 2, and Germany, Israel, Singapore, and Sweden each made one appointment.

In a market where many boards retreat to the reassuring safety of category insiders, JFrog has made a move that should have every CMO aspirant taking notes. By naming Genefa Murphy as its new Chief Marketing Officer, the “Liquid Software” company with the cutest mascot in B2B SaaS has signaled that its next chapter, particularly in the furnace-hot, AI-driven software supply chain, demands a leader who can merge technical roots with unconventional commercial judgment.

When we sat down with Genefa, earlier this week, we wanted more than PR polish. What we found was a dynamic, fun, and modern builder who balances the analytical precision of a PhD with a self-admitted TikTok habit, used not for entertainment, but to understand how people actually consume content in 2026.

Our conversation turned to the Medici Effect, the belief that real innovation happens where opposing disciplines collide. That mindset has guided her from the global matrix of HPE to scale-up disruptors like Udemy, and now to the heart of the DevOps arena at JFrog.

Our recent analysis shows that in 2025, most boards still default to "safe" candidates in familiar industry lanes when hiring for a CMO. Genefa broke that pattern by reframing her path as a portfolio of calculated risks. She’s scaled teams to billion-dollar benchmarks but credits her Udemy tenure for sharpening her fluency in direct-to-consumer dynamics - an edge few enterprise B2B marketers can claim. Her message to peers: it’s not enough to have seen scale; you must show the nerve to challenge it.

Genefa offered valuable advice for the more tenured marketing executive. She energetically re-educates the room during the interview process, putting upfront how SEO is evolving into GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and why influencers are the new B2B gatekeepers. She keeps her learning muscle active through Stage 2 Capital, immersing herself in startup ecosystems to keep her strategy sharp and current.

Her defining moment in the interview process came from a deceptively simple question from CEO Shlomi Ben Haim: “Who is your most important partner?” Genefa didn’t give the safe "collective" answer. She named Tally Shemer, the CRO - and when pressed to choose between Revenue and Product, she didn’t blink: Revenue. In a public company, she argues, marketing’s credibility lives or dies by pipeline efficiency and ROMI, not by clicks or “brand vibes”.

While a third of new CMOs hold MBAs, Genefa’s PhD in User Acceptance of New Technology from the University of Wales adds a unique psychological lens. Her academic training instilled healthy data objectivity, the discipline to validate insights from multiple angles, and confidence to create something new. It’s a pure “math before metaphor” mindset: she doesn’t just model behavior; she studies the psychology of tech adoption itself.

We addressed the failure in marketing's talent pipeline, noting that only 16.4% of CMO appointments are internal promotions.

Her advice to those interviewing for roles at the top of the CMO ladder: know your narrative before you enter the room, and don't be afraid to be provocative. For those coming from massive public companies, she recommends engaging with early-stage ventures to understand what’s required in a house with fewer layers.

As she settles into her new office in Sunnyvale, sporting a West Midlands accent that she admits was even stronger on day one from a recent UK trip, Genefa hinted she might soon be recruiting senior leadership talent to join her mission - so keep your notifications on.

In 2026, the new marketing pedigree isn’t scale alone, or even a PHD. It’s breadth, curiosity, CRO focus, and the courage to stop playing it safe.

We make no apology for continuing to worship at the temple of Canva. Their products (especially Flourish, which shows up in ALL our reports) have always made Taligence look good - even in a pinch - but what truly sets them apart is their people. However, behind the inclusive culture and rizz lies a fiercely ambitious decacorn giant that has just signaled its next major evolution.

Canva officially named Meghan Gendelman its first-ever Chief Marketing Officer for B2B, following a search we first flagged in mid-2025. Gendelman joins from heavyweight leadership stints at DocuSign and Salesforce, bringing exactly the "enterprise weight" required to lead a global strategy across complex workplace environments. Her mission? Convert Canva's staggering ubiquity and user love into deep, enterprise-grade commitment.

While Adobe still holds ~70% of creative software, Canva's snuck up and taken 10% overall, and won the "Boardroom Battle" outright. Canva now occupies a commanding 46% client share in presentation software, effectively doubling Microsoft PowerPoint's 23%. Enterprise adoption is moving well beyond "quick social posts" and into the core workflows of giants like FedEx, Salesforce, DocuSign, OMD and Keller Williams, as Canva Enterprise becomes a standard part of their visual communication stacks.

Gendelman is uniquely qualified for this "deal-speed" transition. In her prior life at DocuSign, she championed a "pipe gen, pipe win" mindset and built a reputation for treating data as the organizing principle of go-to-market. DocuSign is notorious for making it simpler for sales to work with departments like legal and procurement to get deals done faster, so we may see the same approach to deal velocity at Canva. She brings that same "Advocate and Strategic Ally" philosophy, where the ease of use that once made it feel like a "shortcut" is being rebranded as enterprise efficiency.

In 2025, Canva continued to scale Canva Enterprise, backed by ISO 27001 and SOC 2 certifications that help it pass the "CIO Test" in security-conscious environments. Canva is now trusted by 95% of the Fortune 500 and is deeply embedded in the workflows of thousands of large organizations looking to streamline design, collaboration, and brand governance on a single platform.

If Gendelman can successfully position Canva as a Creative OS that non-designers rely on at scale, Adobe and Microsoft may find their enterprise moat evaporating. If Canva seeks an IPO, it’s not just about powering decks; it's ultimately about who owns the most desks.

Having unveiled yesterday that OpenAI has been a profitable bet for them, Microsoft appears intent on building a dedicated AI empire and has just hired a brand heavyweight to lead the narrative. Andréa Mallard, who spent 7 years architecting Pinterest's global marketing engine, has officially joined Microsoft AI (MAI) as its new Chief Marketing Officer. Reporting directly to MAI CEO and DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman, Mallard steps into a role at the epicenter of the company’s most aggressive pivot in decades. She now leads marketing for the dedicated research and consumer products lab, which is responsible for the unified Copilot family, Bing, Edge, and GroupMe.

Although moving from tech to tech, Mallard is trading the inspiration-driven economy of Pinterest for the infrastructure-heavy world of pipes and B2B. At Pinterest, she was a true category creator, building the global marketing function from scratch and steering the brand through its IPO and the pandemic while helping scale it toward 600 million monthly active users. Crucially, she repositioned the platform as a “positive” oasis in a toxic social media landscape (in which we sadly remain), sharpening its cultural relevance among Gen Z. Microsoft is now betting she can do for AI what she did for the “Pin”: make it human, make it trustworthy, and make it essential.

What makes Mallard a standout is her “whole brain” approach to the C‑suite. In a recent interview with Forbes, she described the hardest part of the role as moving from science to art, noting that on an ordinary day, she might shift from discussing ordinary least squares regression analysis to an edit session to make a film spot funnier. For Microsoft, this is an “accountability first” play. Mallard rejects the idea of being the “elected official of the country of marketing,” believing instead that the CMO’s first team is the executive leadership. She treats brand as a strategy to drive growth, not a religion, once saying, “I want you to grade my homework… let’s have bizops help co-author this model with us”.

Mallard joins a growing wave of “first-ever” AI CMO appointments in grand seats, including NVIDIA’s Alison Wagonfeld and OpenAI’s Kate Rouch; as tech giants stop treating marketing as an engineering afterthought. The job to be done in Redmond is to turn AI from a utility tool into a trusted companion by leveraging Mallard’s deep understanding of the architecture of emotion in decision-making. While competitors like Gemini, Claude, Kimi, and Perplexity continue to impress me more, Copilot lives inside the box many of us use all day long: Microsoft, and that’s a non-trivial advantage.

By differentiating between lizard-brain impulses and inspired decisions rooted in hope and potential, Mallard is uniquely positioned to build an AI narrative that avoids the trap of making users feel individually inadequate.

The Ladder view is clear: Microsoft AI hired a trust specialist with a P&L brain. In an era of “Silicon Divorce” and OpenAI bringing ads to ChatGPT, Mallard is tasked with ensuring the Copilot experience doesn’t feel like a disjointed byproduct of a siloed org chart, proving that the most powerful growth engine is a brand that keeps its promise of human potential.

One out, one in! It’s Pinterest up next!

The vibe at 651 Brannan Street shifted overnight on January 27, 2026. Just six days after naming Claudine Cheever its new CMO, Pinterest announced it is laying off nearly 15% of its workforce, approximately 700 employees. The move is part of a global restructuring plan designed to "reallocate resources" toward specialized AI roles and team efforts that drive AI adoption. The restructuring, which includes office-space reductions, is expected to be completed by late September 2026.

Reporting to CEO Bill Ready, Cheever is joined by Lee Brown, who steps into the newly created role of Chief Business Officer. Brown, formerly of DoorDash and Spotify, will consolidate sales, programmatic, and customer-facing operations under a single banner to accelerate Pinterest’s evolution from a digital mood board into an AI-powered "shopping assistant".

The internal reshuffle arrives as Pinterest shares trade near their three-year low of $23.41, following a punishing 30% drop over the last 12 months. Despite hitting user growth records, the company is fighting an "AI-loser narrative" as it faces increased competition from AI-enabled platforms like Meta and Snap.

The pressure point is clear (if you’re an analyst or $PINS bagholder). Late 2025, Pinterest missed its Q3 EPS expectations ($0.38 actual vs $0.43 expected) and issued a disappointing revenue outlook for the crucial holiday quarter. Ad pricing has come under pressure even as impressions soar, prompting management to focus on a leaner organization capable of scaling AI-led products.

Cheever, a 10-year veteran of Amazon who led marketing for the world’s largest online retailer, is the personification of this strategic pivot. The mandate is to bridge the "inspiration-to-intent" gap using Pinterest's new AI-powered tools:

Pinterest Assistant, a multimodal conversational tool, serves as a personal stylist, transforming vague user inspiration into actionable shopping results. This consumer experience is anchored by Pinterest Performance+, an AI advertising suite that automates campaign setup to deliver significant ROI, and the strategic acquisition of tvScientific, which integrates connected TV (CTV) into its ecosystem to provide a unified, measurable performance solution across search, social, and television.

This all sounds well and good… but Pinterest is no longer marketing "Joy" as its primary product; it is marketing "Conversion Lift." By hiring an Amazon brand architect and a DoorDash revenue leader, CEO Bill Ready is making a high-stakes bet that leaner operations and algorithmic discovery can turn a 600-million-user "oasis" into a high-margin discovery engine. With the next earnings reckoning scheduled for February 12, 2026, the new leadership team has exactly zero weeks to prove that their AI-first strategy is more than just "AI-washing" + routine cost-cutting.

While the broader market remains "allergic" to promoting from within, outsourcing ambition to external hires a staggering 84% of the time, Prophet has bucked the trend by naming Mat Zucker its permanent Chief Marketing Officer. After serving 18 months as interim, Zucker’s elevation is a rare data point in a year where only 16.4% of the 501 CMOs appointed in 2025 were internal promotions.

Zucker, who recently relaunched the firm as “The Uncommon Growth Company,” earned the seat through aggressive operationalization. Under his interim tenure, Prophet grew two priority target databases by 95% and 144%, and generated approximately 20% more opportunity dollars than in 2024. He’s a proponent of the "Math before Metaphor" ethos, deploying an ABM approach tightly integrated with commercial teams.

In an exclusive Q&A with the Ladder, Zucker broke down why the "CMO" title hits differently than "SVP":

"The CMO title signals how an organization views marketing: it positions you as a peer in the C-suite rather than just a functional lead. While an SVP title recognizes personal seniority, the CMO title recognizes the strategic weight of the marketing function itself."

For 2026, Zucker’s mandate is "supertight alignment," mapping the marketing plan directly to the business plan while modernizing the stack "while the plane is in the air." It’s a delicate balance of maintaining momentum while changing the engine, a philosophy shared by many CMO peers.

Zucker’s move proves that longevity in the "interim" seat can be a masterclass in executive auditing. By proving the duality of "brand and demand" (which Mat calls his personal "love language"), he has shifted marketing from a "service department" into a primary growth engine for the firm.