January isn’t just about fuzzy heads and fading resolutions. It’s also, rather reliably, when the marketing merry-go-round picks up speed. In the first two weeks alone, 30 new CMOs were announced globally: 19 women vs.11 men. 7 were internal promotions, while the remaining 23 came from outside the firm. Last January sang the same tune, with about a quarter of CMOs rising through the ranks. Apparently, CEOs do remember their “talent pipeline” promises - just in time for New Year’s.

Interestingly, over half of these appointments (17 to be exact) are first-timers, stepping into the C-suite for the very first time. As for those crossing industry lines (industry travelers)? Still a rare breed: just 5 made the leap from one sector to another.

The U.S. had a particularly active start, notching up 23 CMO appointments across 12 states. California was miles ahead with 11, followed by Pennsylvania with 2. Elsewhere, England and India each named 2 new CMOs; Germany, Israel, and Sweden added one each to the tally.

By industry, Tech continues to dominate with 13 new CMOs. Restaurants and Financial Services tied with 4 apiece. Professional Services and Media, Sports & Entertainment made 3 hires each.

CMO Appointments by Industry:

So perhaps this is the year marketing stops politely asking for a seat at the table and simply grabs the wheel?

Need proof? While Wall Street argues over GPUs, gross margins, and “Silicon Divorce,” NVIDIA made an (overdue) power move: it hired a CMO. Not to fluff the brand, but to rewrite the very OS of trust, the kind that could determine who wins the $500B AI gold rush: the toolmaker or the empire builder.

Meanwhile, Coca-Cola is blending “brand love” with “buy now” into one bubbling cauldron of data, Disney is enchanting its streaming strategy with theme park fairy dust, and G2 is teaching AI agents to browse the web before humans even blink.

4 hires = 4 radical rewrites of the CMO job description.

NVIDIA has finally appointed its first‑ever Chief Marketing Officer - and a first‑timer CMO - Alison Wagonfeld, effective February 2026. Before NVIDIA, Wagonfeld spent nearly a decade at Google Cloud, where she helped build its marketing engine, guiding the business from a startup to a $60 billion run-rate juggernaut with significant profitability. Reporting directly to CEO Jensen Huang, she will consolidate marketing and communications functions previously scattered across multiple executives.

Wagonfeld’s approach to the AI era has been one of aggressive operationalization. She argues for "using AI to run our strategy" rather than maintaining a distinct AI strategy side-car. At Google, she championed "agentification," envisioning org charts where AI agents sit alongside humans to handle tasks like asset generation via prompting. She focuses heavily on broad-based "AI literacy," rejecting the model where only a few "spiky parts" of the team understand the technology.

During her time at Google, she owned a complex portfolio ranging from infrastructure to workspace apps, positioning the brand against entrenched rivals like AWS and Microsoft. She operationalized this through initiatives like "AI boost bites" weekly 10-minute challenges that drove her team’s AI adoption from weekly to daily usage within a single year.

At CES 2026, Jensen, the 62‑year‑old CEO, again dismissed retirement speculation, saying he would stay ‘as long as I deserve it’ and doubling down on his front‑foot role. Far from stepping back, he’s ramping up his role, actively fighting ‘doomer narratives’ and framing AI fears as a distraction from the "Gold Rush" reality. We’re watching to see how she shapes his role as the front person in 2026, or shares it with him.

She’s not there to defend stock price amidst some AI doubters. Jensen effectively put a floor under the valuation by pointing to a roughly $500 billion AI infrastructure demand outlook for 2025–2026 that he characterizes as highly visible and largely locked‑in.

His CFO, Colette Kress, doubled down, noting that visibility has "definitely gotten larger" since October, driven by orders for the next-gen Rubin architecture which launched Jan 5, 2026.

The elephant in the room is the "Silicon Divorce": Google is deploying its Trillium TPUs, and Meta is ramping up its MTIA v3 chips. NVIDIA’s defense is that while hyperscalers build custom chips for inference (running models), NVIDIA retains a chokehold on training (building models), where analysts still peg NVIDIA at roughly 80-90% market share. Jensen argues custom chips are "scalpels," while NVIDIA’s architecture is the "Swiss Army knife" needed for the next frontier of agentic AI and physical AI.

As we see it, the job to be done with her 700-strong team is to turn NVIDIA from “the company that sells the picks and shovels” into “the operating standard for AI infrastructure,” and defend that position with trust.

In plain terms, that means: one narrative that works for every audience - (enterprise CIOs, developers, regulators, investors, partners), which is already how NVIDIA sees itself. Convert the brand from “AI boom symbol” into “boring reliability,” with crisp customer outcome stories, deployment playbooks, and credibility around responsible use and energy. And Partner-aligned positioning. NVIDIA’s GTM depends heavily on the partner ecosystem who need to amplify NVIDIA without NVIDIA looking like it is just drafting behind them.

If she nails that, NVIDIA becomes much harder to displace even when alternatives get cheaper or ‘good enough.’ If she doesn’t, NVIDIA risks staying ‘just chips’ - a category that eventually gets competed, regulated, or designed around.

In a move that feels like the final piece of Bob Iger’s restructuring puzzle, Disney has named Asad Ayaz its Chief Marketing and Brand Officer. This is a massive consolidation of power. Ayaz, a 20-year Disney veteran who was already serving as the company's first Chief Brand Officer and President of Marketing for Walt Disney Studios, will now oversee a newly created company-wide marketing organization. The mandate is explicit: smash the silos. Ayaz is tasked with developing a coordinated approach that draws together the historically separate fiefdoms of theme parks, studios, sports, and consumer products, a gargantuan task.

For years, Disney’s divisions have operated with a degree of autonomy that Iger now views as a liability in the attention economy. CEO Bob Iger framed the appointment as a necessity, stating, "It’s clear that we need a company-wide role that ensures brand consistency and allows customers today to seamlessly interact with our wonderful products and experiences". This is about leverage. The goal is to ensure that a hit like The Mandalorian is a cultural event that seamlessly drives merchandise, park visits, and subscriptions.

Ayaz is the ultimate insider, having spent the last eight years driving the campaigns for some of the biggest films in history, including Black Panther, Avatar: The Way of Water, and Frozen 2. He also led the marketing for Disney+, overseeing the launch of The Mandalorian, Andor, and the Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour film. His recent stint as Chief Brand Officer saw him orchestrating the massive "Disney100" centennial campaign, proving he can handle the weight of the entire corporate narrative.

Ayaz’s promotion conveys a transition from "franchise management" to "ecosystem orchestration." He is now the guardian of the brand voice across every touchpoint. By placing a single executive at the top of the marketing ladder for studios, parks, and products, Disney is betting that the best way to win the streaming wars is to weaponize its physical and consumer assets in a way no pure-play streamer can match. Ayaz has been selling the magic for two decades; now he owns the entire map. The hard part will be aligning the tribes.

G2, the software marketplace known to many as the "Yelp for B2B," has tapped Alexandra London as its new Chief Marketing Officer. This move suggests a leveling up in G2’s operating logic as it gears up for an era where the software shoppers are AI agents. London, a first-time CMO, joins from Zoom, where she served as Head of Digital, leading full-funnel performance marketing and experimentation for one of the world's most ubiquitous PLG engines.  Before that, she spent 5 years at Expedia Group, launching their customer data platform among other major achievements.

G2’s last CMO appointment, Sydney Sloan - who previously held senior roles at Salesloft and Adobe - was more of a classic category creator and community builder. London, by contrast, is a performance heavyweight and a data strategist. The mandate here is quite clear: G2 wants to go beyond brand affinity; they are engineering for "algorithmic trust." London’s philosophy on the future of B2B buying is refreshingly technical. She argues that "software buying is shifting from decisioning to browsing," and that the "winners will be the sources AI can trust."

While many competitors treat AI Engine Optimization (AEO) as a content volume race, London wisely prioritizes "governance, data hygiene, and building durable systems."

We got some time with London and learned that the search was led by a boutique executive search firm, a process London described as a "true partnership" rather than a transactional placement.

It culminated in a "full-day on-site meeting" with President of GTM Eric Gilpin and CEO Godard Abel, where the conversation wasn't about creative campaigns, but about "how to translate vision into revenue" and scaling demand with accountability. London noted that she chose G2 because she wanted to ensure she was entering a "growth engine" environment, not a "service function" one.

From her Zoom days, London brings a rigorous experimentation philosophy, arguing that some CMOs treat testing as a collection of one‑off tactics rather than a durable growth advantage; her system depends on clean data and the confidence to abandon what’s not working as fast as you scale what is. For aspiring CMOs, her advice is: "Operate like a CMO before you have the title."

That means moving past "owning channels" to "owning outcomes" and understanding the P&L better than the creative brief. G2 is already important. We at the Ladder think that the rise of AI and vibe coding will guarantee a perpetual SaaS explosion, and their role of public proof will become even more critical for buyers. We are big fans of G2 as we are in the same business in a way – connecting dots - and we wish Alex all the success as she sits atop the CMO Ladder.

Coca-Cola is shaking up its C-suite with a massive reorg designed to bridge the gap between "brand love" and "buy now." Global CMO Manolo Arroyo is getting a major remit expansion, adding "Customer Commercial Officer" to his title effective March 31. This shifts customer and commercial leadership responsibilities out of the President & CFO remit and directly into marketing.

It’s a consolidation that aligns perfectly with Arroyo’s "modern media" playbook - a data-led strategy that treats consumer, shopper, and retailer data as ingredients in a single "massive boiling pot" to drive ultra-segmented execution. Arroyo has already consolidated agency partners and shifted the media mix to 70% digital; now he owns the commercial execution to match.

These moves (and a CDO appointment, Sedef Salingan Sahin) are the opening gambit for incoming CEO Henrique Braun, who takes the helm on March 31. Braun is explicitly betting on "bigger and bolder innovations" and using technology to get closer to consumers. By uniting marketing with commercial execution under Arroyo and elevating digital infrastructure with a new CDO, he is dismantling the silos that slow down giant CPGs. The goal: a faster, smarter Coke that can be executed with precision and speed in every market.