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2026 has been a busy year for CMO hiring, and after a slight dip in May and June, the market is picking up again. In just the first two weeks of July, we've tracked 26 CMO appointments worldwide: 17 women and 9 men.

Companies are still favoring fresh perspectives over familiar faces. Just 7 appointments came through internal promotions, while 19 leaders were hired from outside the business. It's also proving to be a breakthrough year for first-time CMOs, with 15 executives stepping into the top marketing job for the first time. Meanwhile, only 3 hires crossed into an entirely new industry - boards are still placing a premium on category expertise.

The U.S. continues to lead, with 16 appointments across 11 states. California and New York top the list as usual with 3 new CMOs each, followed by Massachusetts with 2. Elsewhere, India and France each announced 2 appointments, while Iraq, England, the Netherlands, South Africa, Germany and Australia each welcomed one new marketing chief.

Technology remains the busiest sector, accounting for 8 appointments. Retail follows with 4, while restaurants recorded 3. Professional Services, Financial Services, Manufacturing, and BioTech, Pharma, Healthcare & Wellness each welcomed 2 new CMOs, showing that demand for senior marketing leaders remains broad across industries.

CMO Appointments by Industry

This week we feature 3 CMOs, 3 different companies, one connecting problem: they’ve all been hired to sell discipline in markets that no longer fully believe the story.

ANZ hands Sian Chadwick a role where proving brand pays is only step one. Meta gives Denise Moreno the mandate to keep a deeply distrusted system alive for longer, even as its growth tactics are under legal and public fire. Whoop bets on Dirk‑Jan van Hameren to turn a niche, subscription‑based wearable into something people are willing to keep paying for long after the novelty wears off.

None of these hires are wrong. Each one is a confession.

^{Our disclaimer here as we fear the long arm of big tech legal teams.}

ANZ, one of Australia's big four banks, has made Sian Chadwick its chief marketing officer because she did a brave thing: she proved that brand investment pays for itself.

She made that case running marketing for ANZ's Australian retail bank. When the bank cut brand investment in 2023, Chadwick used commercial mix modeling (statistical analysis that links marketing spend to business results) to win the money back in FY24. She expanded it in FY25. Then she volunteered her own function for zero-based budgeting in FY26, meaning the budget is rebuilt from scratch each year rather than rolled forward. Every marketing dollar now needs a business case. She set that test and agreed to live under it.

Her promotion takes the same discipline group-wide: brand strategy, identity, marketing effectiveness, investment governance, coordination across the bank. What it doesn't include is ownership of any business unit. Her job is to set standards and police spending; the profit and loss sits with others. Governance roles at big banks are usually where marketing careers go to be buried. Hers will have real power only if she keeps control of the budget approvals she created.

The inheritance is a bit awkward. Her predecessor, Astrud Burgess, left the group CMO seat after 3 years to run customer propositions - the products and offers business - in New Zealand. When the group marketing chief prefers a divisional job, it tells you something about where the power sat. Burgess also rolled out ANZ's new brand identity, so Chadwick now stewards an identity she didn't commission while holding a mandate to audit the money behind it.

And a great deal lands at once. Suncorp Bank, the Queensland-based lender ANZ acquired in 2024, brings 1.2 million customers and a decision ANZ has been postponing: keep the Suncorp brand, or fold it into ANZ. ANZ Plus, the bank's digital platform, has reached 880,000 customers and A$16 billion in deposits, with new customers reportedly costing 45% less to acquire than traditional accounts. That is exactly the kind of number used to argue money out of brand advertising and into the product itself. The CMO who proved brand pays now owns the comparison that could defund it. At the same time, ANZ is reviewing its media agency arrangements, deciding who plans and buys its advertising, and its biggest rival, Commonwealth Bank, keeps extending its lead in banking technology.

The media review is the first public test of her remit. Run properly, it collapses duplication between Australia and New Zealand, tightens measurement, and ties agency pay to the effectiveness standards she set. Run the usual way, it produces another layer of agency structure over the same internal compromises, and confirms the governance mandate was decoration.

Her CV - American Express, Westpac, IG Group, ANZ - spans loyalty, digital, product and customer acquisition. The credential that counts is simpler: when budgets were being cut, she persuaded the finance team to fund brand anyway. Most group CMOs inherit a budget, Chadwick inherits the requirement to re-earn it every year, because she wrote that requirement herself.

ANZ has handed her the scoring system. Market share, ANZ Plus customer growth, and how many Suncorp customers stay through the migration will show whether she can live up to the standard she set.

Meta just promoted a 17-year operator of the system it is now struggling to defend.

Denise Moreno knows how Meta gets people to click, and how Mark works. She joined in 2009, helped build the notification systems that turned usage into deep habit, and most recently ran consumer marketing and product growth across WhatsApp, Threads, Meta AI, and smart glasses. She helped push WhatsApp past 100 million U.S. users and supported Threads' run to 500 million. She is very good at making people use things.

Making them trust Meta is a different problem.

Meta has a pattern of conviction outrunning evidence. The company spent years and more than $80 billion building the metaverse, renamed itself around the idea, and is now shifting consumer attention toward AI glasses instead. It positioned Llama as an open alternative to closed AI systems, then moved toward proprietary models and paid access as the strategy faltered.

The most recent example came in May, when Meta cut thousands of jobs in the name of AI efficiency, then admitted the transition was messier and slower than expected. Around the same time, former employees alleged that Meta used AI-assisted productivity measures when deciding who to dismiss, including data that may have disadvantaged workers who had taken medical or family leave. Meta disputes the claims.

The company is asking people to trust its judgment while repeatedly demonstrating how quickly that judgment reverses.

Moreno's promotion clarifies how Meta plans to operate. Alex Schultz becomes Chief Data Officer, owning measurement, experimentation, research, and intelligence. Moreno owns brand and getting products into people's hands. Both report to COO Javier Olivan.

Meta has around 3.5 billion daily users and an advertising model that keeps growing whether people like the company or not. Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook are used through habit, network effects, or necessity. The Meta name usually appears when something has gone awry.

The lawsuits attack the very foundations of Meta's growth model: notifications, recommendation systems, infinite feeds, and behavioral experimentation. They raise an uncomfortable question for a CMO whose career was built around increasing product usage. At what point does successful growth become evidence of public harm?

Moreno has a narrow path. She must keep Meta's products feeling essential while the parent company behaves in ways people increasingly question. She has spent her career inside this system. Among Meta's leadership, that is normal. Most have been there well over a decade.

When almost 80% of companies pick global CMOs from the outside, Meta did not choose a reset. It chose continuity, not succession. The job is preservation.

Whoop just hired a 30-year Nike veteran to make a subscription wearable sound bigger than it is.

Dirk-Jan van Hameren spent decades inside one of the most powerful brand machines in sports, rising from the mailroom to CMO and helping shape campaigns and product franchises that defined Nike’s global reach. At Nike, the work is about building desire at scale and riding a brand people already want to believe in.

Whoop has a different problem. What matters here is whether people keep wearing it.

The company has credibility with elite athletes and performance obsessives, which is useful right up until it tries to sell itself to everyone else. Apple wins by being the device people already need. Garmin wins by being the thing serious athletes trust. Whoop sits in the awkward middle: a single-purpose strap that asks users to care enough to keep feeding it data.

Van Hameren brings real strengths to that problem. What he does not automatically bring is subscription discipline, retention instinct, or any obvious reason non-athletes should care.

That is the gap. Whoop needs people to stay, and that is a much harder sell.

The real question is whether a man who spent 30 years at Nike can make people pay every month for the privilege of being judged by their own wrist.