The CMO market has found its footing again after May’s brief downward wobble. In just the first two weeks of June, 23 new Chief Marketing Officers have been appointed globally: 11 women vs.12 men; 5 internal promotions vs. 18 external hires.

The biggest story, however, is how many are first-timers. 12 of the 23 are stepping into the top marketing seat for the very first time. Cross-industry moves remain rare, with just one "industry traveller" making the leap.

The U.S. accounted for 12 appointments across 7 states, with New York and California leading the charge on 3 hires apiece, followed by New Jersey with 2. Beyond American shores, the hiring pace has been equally lively. England and Canada each welcomed 2 new CMOs, while appointments were also announced in France, the Philippines, Germany, Sweden, the UAE, the Netherlands, and India. Interestingly, several of these global roles are being led remotely from the U.S., a reminder that the C-suite's locale matters a little less than it once did.

This week, we're zooming in on 4 CMO appointments spanning IT, pills and potions, toothpaste, and the open internet. Different industries, different challenges, but one question sits beneath them all: who is building the future, and who is being hired to manage the decline of a very valuable past?

Bayer Consumer Health needs to prove it deserves a seat at the pharmaceutical table. Zendesk needs to decide whether it is selling software or replacing the workforce that uses it. Colgate-Palmolive needs to modernize a habit before someone else does. TTD needs to confirm that its thesis still works.

All of them have new marketing leadership. None has been given more time.

_{Oh, if it’s your thing, our legal disclaimer.}

Samantha Avivi has been named Global CMO of Bayer Consumer Health. The PR calls it a leadership team reboot. The subtext though? Prove this division deserves to exist.

Bayer has tried to sell Consumer Health before. Investors keep asking why a pharmaceutical giant bothers with vitamins and allergy pills. Pfizer, Merck and the like trade at higher valuation multiples because of their high-margin, patent-protected drug pipelines. Consumer health divisions like Bayer CH, face lower margins, private label competition, and slower growth. When these businesses are kept under one roof, some investors argue the consumer side drags down the pharmaceutical side's valuation.

Avivi inherits one of the largest collections of consumer health brands on earth. Claritin. Aleve. Bayer Aspirin. Alka-Seltzer. One A Day. Berocca. Bepanthen. Canesten. Elevit. Most were market leaders before she was born. The challenge here is innovation and relevance.

One A Day illustrates the problem. Founded in 1940. Market leader for generations. Then AG1 arrived with one product, influencer marketing, and a subscription model, and built a billion-dollar brand in a decade while One A Day lost share to inconsistent marketing and packaging.

Bayer's answer is a well-trodden path: more data, more AI. Avivi talks about consumer insight, trusted brands, analytics and AI as parts of the same system. The company consolidated its global agency relationship with IPG, emphasizing personalization, efficiency and GenAI-enabled execution. Translated: here’s all our business. Now, do more with less, faster, using machines.

Bayer also appointed a Chief Data Officer and has spent years implementing Dynamic Shared Ownership - reducing layers, pushing decisions closer to local markets. The press release praises improvements in speed and resilience, but doesn’t explain how centralized data platforms and decentralized decision-making coexist peacefully. They usually don't. Somebody will win that tension. Somebody else might pretend they didn't lose.

The Miralax campaign offers a glimpse of what Avivi can do: 30 million views, 30% Amazon sales lift in a week. But Amazon is where brands go to accelerate their own margin death. Every CMO who celebrated Amazon velocity eventually discovered they were building Amazon's business. Even the wins are a trap. If Bayer's data-driven approach simply routes more volume through lower-margin channels faster, that’s going to erode pricing power.

Consumer health is a brutal category. Consumer behavior, retail execution, innovation and brand trust mash together daily, but the winners increasingly look like AG1 - founder-led, unburdened by compliance committees, built for feeds rather than shelves. Bayer's brands were built for an era when trust meant your doctor recommended it. Today's trust means your favorite creator uses it and doesn't disclose the sponsorship.

Avivi gets one of the largest marketing jobs in healthcare. The job is proving that a pharmaceutical conglomerate can build consumer brands in a world where the best ones are built by people with TikTok accounts and no general counsel.

The division has been given new leadership, new frameworks, new tools. What it has not been given is more time.

Zendesk has appointed Tifenn Dano Kwan as CMO. AI bookings more than doubled in fiscal 2026, are expected to more than double again in 2027, and management believes the company can surpass $400 million in AI bookings next year alone.

Zendesk already owns what a lot of software companies chase relentlessly - a category. For a generation of SMB and mid-market companies, customer support software was Zendesk. More than 100,000 customers, years of ticket history, embedded workflows, integrations and trained support teams create meaningful switching costs and a level of trust that newer entrants would love to have.

Meanwhile: AI begins to properly reshape customer service.

Unlike some of the more speculative AI stories in software (and there are many) Zendesk's narrative is credible. Voice agents, autonomous resolution, AI-powered service workflows and agentic support. Many customer service teams are redesigning whole operating models around them.

Tifenn's background feels well matched to the challenge. SAP (Ariba and Fieldglass), Dropbox and most recently Amplitude are all businesses that require marketers to explain complexity in easy ways for buyers. At Amplitude, she helped reposition the company around an AI-native analytics story while growing traffic and pipeline. Zendesk needs a lift translating the capability to value story.

Zendesk has built its reputation managing customer service. The industry, though, is moving toward resolving customer issues with as little human intervention as possible. The value moves from the workflow to the solve.

As customers, most of us couldn’t give a fig about ticket routing, queue management and escalation paths. We care about getting problems solved quickly. If an AI agent resolves the issue, few customers will notice what happened behind the curtain.

Salesforce remains the dominant enterprise platform and continues to benefit from CIO-level standardization efforts in closed reviews. ServiceNow is steadily moving deeper into CX workflows. Microsoft may represent the longer-term threat. If Copilot, Azure, Dynamics and Microsoft's broader AI stack become more tightly integrated (some will laugh at the proposition, given the track record!), the company gains bundling power that few can match.

Then there is a different class of competitor. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google are training buyers to think about AI as the interface. Today, companies purchase customer service platforms that contain AI. Tomorrow, they may purchase AI systems that connect directly to knowledge bases, order management platforms, CRMs and commerce systems. If that future arrives, software categories could begin collapsing into larger AI ecosystems.

That explains why Dano Kwan's own comments focus less on AI itself and more on trust, governance, industry expertise and proprietary data. Those are harder advantages to replicate. Zendesk's installed base, service history, workflows and customer knowledge may ultimately prove more valuable than any individual AI feature.

The question facing the new CMO is:

Is Zendesk selling customer service software? Or is it building the workforce that replaces it? The answer could shape the company's next decade.

Ram Raghavan has been promoted to Chief Marketing Officer at Colgate-Palmolive after nearly three decades with the company. Classic internal succession. Also: a bet that the next era of Colgate will be run by someone who has never worked anywhere else.

How do you grow a brand that has already conquered the world? Colgate claims to be the most penetrated brand globally. In many countries, toothpaste and Colgate are basically the same thing. Most marketers spend careers chasing awareness. Colgate nailed this generations ago. The challenge now is maintaining relevance, pricing power, and growth when almost everybody already knows who you are.

Raghavan's career path offers a clue. It’s a CEO Ladder, not a CMO Ladder, and a global one at that. India. China. Canada. Latin America. Asia Pacific. Enterprise Oral Care. It is the profile of an operator who understands how global categories are defended, expanded, and commercialized, not some creative wiz.

Colgate is still trying to convince billions to brush with its toothpaste rather than somebody else's.. Consumers still buy in supermarkets. Habit still matters. In fact, habit may be the entire game.

One thing about oral care: consumers don’t think about it much. Nobody wakes up excited about toothpaste. The category runs on routine, trust, and availability. A wonderful position when you're the incumbent but dangerous when tastes start to morph into new habits.

Premium challengers like Davids and Happier Beauty have chipped away with aluminum tubes and transparent ingredient sourcing. Nelson Naturals and Georganics have attracted fluoride skeptics with mineral-rich, plastic-free formulations. Bite and Denttabs have turned toothpaste into a subscription-friendly tablet. None of them have seriously threatened Colgate's position (yet). But some reveal where younger consumers hunt for novelty.

When consumers believe every tube performs roughly the same function, shelf space, distribution, and pricing become everything. Fortunately for Colgate, those are areas where the company remains exceptionally strong. Unfortunately, they are also advantages that can make large organizations slower to challenge their own assumptions.

Colgate's enterprise business is valuable precisely because it is narrow. Professional recommendation scales slowly. Consumer habit scales globally. If Raghavan's background in enterprise and emerging markets is meant to inject clinical credibility into the core brand, the timeline is uncertain and the consumer reception is unproven. Colgate has tried premium extensions before. They rarely moved the needle.

Meanwhile, the company is not standing still on format. Hello Products, which Colgate bought, is the #2 player in toothpaste tablets. So, Colgate sees the threat. But playing defense through M&A is different from leading from the core brand. When your innovation strategy is buying the companies that might replace you, you are managing decline, not driving growth.

Ram Raghavan inherits one of the most valuable marketing assets on the planet: habit. The next chapter depends on whether Colgate can modernize that habit before somebody else does it for them.

Time waits for no man, nor toothpaste. Younger consumers are not loyal to any toothpaste brand. They are loyal to aesthetics, to values, to the story, to a product that lets them tell about themselves. Colgate's story is that it works and it is everywhere. That built an empire. It may not be enough to keep one in power.

Last up (For our paid members), a new public company CMO arrives with a love-at-first-lightning story. The reality is more complicated: she has to sell belief in a market that prefers easy.