As legacy brands confront the need to become platform‑first, they’re reshaping how they create value.

This month, in three very different categories - parenting, luxury EVs, and Black‑owned media - CMOs are being asked to do the same thing: turn vague influence into mountains that can be measured.

At Babylist, Jill Cress is tasked with transforming a top‑share registry into a parenting OS that outlives the newborn phase. At Cadillac, David Mogensen must convert cutting‑edge EVs into a cultural signal strong enough to eclipse Tesla’s halo. And at Sundial Media & Technology Group, Amanda Butler is being asked to rebuild ESSENCE, Refinery29, and AFROPUNK as a unified human connections platform that monetizes cultural influence directly.

Across all three, a single line of thinking emerges: marketing is no longer the bodywork; it’s the wheels.

At the same time, the CMO role itself is in flux. Over the past two weeks alone, there have been departures at OpenAI, The Trade Desk, and Cars Commerce, alongside new openings at Unilever ANZ, McDonald’s UK & Ireland, and MrBeast, which is hiring its first-ever CMO.

Hiring, however, remains active. 22 new CMOs have been appointed globally in that same period, evenly split between men (11) and women (11). Only 2 were internal promotions, with most companies opting to bring in external candidates. While 9 of these hires are first-time CMOs, just 3 moved across industries.

The U.S. continues to lead, with 16 of those hires spread across 11 states. California saw the most activity (4 hires), followed by Massachusetts (2) and New York (2). Internationally, new CMOs were appointed in Brazil, Australia, England, Israel, Greece, and India.

By sector, Tech continues to dominate hiring (8), followed by Media, Sports & Entertainment(4). Healthcare-related industries (2) and Professional Services (2) also saw steady activity.

General Motors has filled Cadillac’s top marketing seat after an eight-month vacancy, naming former Uber VP of Global Marketing David Mogensen as Chief Marketing Officer. The move underscores GM’s leadership mindset: digital-native brains over traditional industry lifers. By recruiting from the likes of Uber, Google, and top Agencies, GM is treating the vehicle as a software-driven mobility platform rather than just sheet metal.

Mogensen is a rare hybrid - an “Industry Traveler” who spent 9 years at BMW of North America before a decade of re-education split between Google and Uber. He joins after 4 years as Uber’s VP of Global Marketing, where he led marketing across 30+ countries and oversaw the explosive acceleration of Uber Eats. His appointment comes at an important moment, with a mandate to close the brand lag by turning Cadillac’s technical EV superiority into a global cultural signal.

Cadillac’s engine is already humming. The brand has posted 12 consecutive quarters of growth and an EV mix that outpaces most luxury peers in the U.S. market. Yet the diagnostic shows a brand still wrestling a legacy-era luxury ghost in the machine. Mogensen is tasked with pushing the all-electric portfolio…including LYRIQ, OPTIQ, VISTIQ, and the ultra-premium CELESTIQ - from being a “strong alternative to Tesla” to being an aspirational category leader.

What makes Mogensen an intriguing hire is his unfiltered philosophy on “overly polite” marketing. He is a vocal critic of marketers who are “embarrassed to sell,” arguing the industry often settles for “beautiful work” that is too afraid to ask for the transaction. At Uber, he championed the idea that “selling can be entertaining and entertainment can sell”. At Cadillac, expect him to strip away the vague lifestyle poetry of traditional luxury and replace it with a narrative that is blatantly overt about software-driven superiority at a moment when Tesla’s brand halo is straining under tens of thousands of unsold Cybertrucks and Elon Musk’s companies buying them up to keep the numbers looking good.

Mogensen inherits an engine painstakingly modernized by outgoing CMO Melissa Grady Dias. During her tenure she lifted Cadillac from 7th to 4th in U.S. luxury and turned the division into one of GM’s most engaged internal cultures. She built the data plumbing; Mogensen must now build global sales velocity.

The timing is ripe to capitalize on Tesla’s softening favorability and Elon Musk’s non-automotive distractions. While competitors like Honda step back from pure-EV pipelines, Cadillac is doubling down on its “American luxury EV” narrative, with roughly 80% of its EV buyers new to the brand and a notable share of Tesla switchers.

Mogensen’s immediate challenge will be navigating the dealer-service friction baked into the legacy automotive model. Reporting to a tech-first leadership lineup led by Lin-Hua Wu (Chief Marketing & Communications Officer) and Mark Reuss (President), the mission is to prove an American legacy brand can be both a software platform and a cultural icon.

Babylist has evolved from a stealthy registry powerhouse to a pre-IPO contender. Founder Natalie Gordon's masterstroke: appointing award-winning CMO Jill Cress, the company's first, as they eye $1B revenue in 2026 and a 2027 IPO. The fundamentals Gordon built are staggering: 2025 revenue hit $750 million with a 45% YoY growth rate, marking an 8^th consecutive year of profitability.

Babylist is betting that Cress…an Industry Traveler whose pedigree spans Mastercard, National Geographic, and H&R Block…can bridge the gap between being a category king and a household name. While Amazon wins on the raw transaction and Target or Walmart dominate distribution, Babylist is engineering for the entire parenting relationship. They are effectively attempting to collapse the distance between being a ‘registry event’ and a ‘parenting OS’ by scaling Babylist Health (growing 64% YoY per recent Babylist Health reports) and Babylist Money, which integrates children’s savings accounts directly into the registry flow.

The infrastructure of trust here long preceded the marketing chief hire. We sat in the room at Ad Age’s Business of Brands in Chicago last year as the team detailed their high-velocity relief efforts during the LA wildfires…mobilizing 160 brand partners to distribute $2.3 million in aid in just 48 hours. That work, which earned them Purpose-Led Campaign of the Year, proves that Cress isn't walking in to find a brand soul; it is already present. She is a "Teach vs. Defend" leader who would rather "die on the sword" to educate a CFO in their own language than defend a creative brief.

Cress’s top challenge might be ironing out the friction in their meta-retailer model. Guest experience friction - specifically older relatives struggling with digital registry flows - remains a persistent lag. Her success hinges on moving from high-intent harvesting to broader cultural dominance at a time when the TAM is shrinking. With the U.S. fertility rate at a provisional all-time low of 1.58, the mandate for Cress is to turn their 40% market share among first-time parents into a lifetime value engine that outlives the newborn phase. If she pulls it off, the 2027 IPO won't just be a debut; it will be a coronation.

SUNDIAL MEDIA & TECHNOLOGY GROUP

Sundial Media & Technology Group (SMTG) has appointed Amanda Butler as its first‑ever Chief Marketing Officer, signaling a pivot where marketing shifts from a downstream support function to the company’s primary strategic infrastructure. By installing a leader with deep tech‑native roots from Netflix, Spotify, and Beats by Dre, CEO Kirk McDonald is betting that the path to reclaim media’s lost margins lies in the “platformization” of heritage brands.

SMTG, parent of ESSENCE, Refinery29, AFROPUNK, and experiential franchises like 29Rooms and ESSENCE Fest, is no longer positioning itself as a publisher but as a “human connections platform” where cultural influence is converted into scalable data and commerce.

Butler brings nearly 20 years of experience navigating the intersection of entertainment and technology. As global Head of Music Marketing for Netflix, she built the company’s in‑house music‑distribution and music‑business functions from the ground up, delivering 20+ industry‑first programs across features, series, and live content. That “business‑within‑a‑business” instinct is essential for SMTG as it attempts to bridge the gap between legacy brand trust and a modern tech‑stack.

Her prior leadership at Red Bull, Spotify, and Beats by Dre, where she drove billions in revenue and triple‑digit growth across global markets, offers the high‑velocity playbook required to monetize SMTG’s massive physical footprint, including the ESSENCE Festival of Culture.

The diagnostic for this hire is the transition from “vague influence” to “measurable ecosystem.” ESSENCE and Refinery29 have historically dominated the cultural conversation, but the revenue model for media has been cannibalized by the very social platforms she helped scale at Netflix, Spotify, and Beats.

McDonald’s wise strategy relies on Butler’s ability to connect audience intelligence directly to revenue streams, effectively turning storytelling into a proprietary operating system. If she successfully integrates these disparate assets into a unified growth engine, SMTG stops competing for remnant ad dollars and begins competing for the high‑margin data currently owned by social ecosystems.

The immediate challenge for Butler is the “heritage vs. tech‑stack” tension. Modernizing a 50‑year‑old brand like ESSENCE requires more than digital polish; it requires a structural overhaul of how content is produced and sold. By hiring a CMO who has operated at the center of the world’s most valuable tech brands, SMTG is signaling it is done defending the past and is ready to architect a standalone cultural giant.