Team, I'm sick. I have man flu.

The single greatest thing about having a newsletter is being able to trumpet my suffering to an audience of thousands. The worst part is that nobody else does the actual writing.

My recovery feels like it’s stalled - while the world of CMO moves is in rude health.

After a record 56 CMO appointments in September, the hiring spree has continued into October. In the first two weeks alone, we've tracked 26 new CMO appointments worldwide: 12 women and 14 men. 7 were promoted internally, while 19 were hired from outside their firms.

Half of them, 13 to be precise, are taking on the CMO title for the first time. And guess what? Not a single appointment involved an “industry traveler”, as we call those rare CMOs who cross into an entirely different sector. This is no time for the mythical ‘career pivot’, people, category expert or bust.

U.S. continues to lead, with 18 appointments across 13 states, including 5 in California and 2 in Georgia. Outside the U.S., Australia announced 4 new CMOs, 3 of them at CommBank following a restructuring of its marketing organization. Sweden, England, Germany and Spain each recorded one appointment.

Technology continues to dominate, accounting for 10 of the 26 appointments, followed by Financial Services with 6 and CPG with 2. The remaining were spread across 8 different industries.

But what has caught our attention lately isn't just the number of CMOs stepping up. It's also the sheer number stepping down.

We reported a wave of high-profile CMO departures in August, and the trend continued through September. October has already brought two more, although under rather different circumstances.

Sharon Peters, CMO of Spectrum, is leaving at the end of 2026, following Charter Communications' acquisition of Cox and a major leadership ker-plunk. Spectrum lost 172,000 broadband customers in Q2 alone, and its new COO, Nick Jeffery, wants fewer management layers, better customer service and, most importantly, a return to growth. After nearly 5 years as CMO, Peters is leaving as the business needs more than marketing to address cord-cutting and wireless substitution.

Elizabeth Rutledge, Global CMO of American Express, is retiring in March 2027 after an extraordinary 37 years with the company, including 9 as CMO. Wild loyalty! She helped turn a traditional financial services brand into a lifestyle brand with cultural relevance, particularly among younger consumers, through dining, entertainment and Formula 1 sponsorships. 9 years in the CMO seat is quite something these days, especially when the average tenure at S&P 500 companies is just 4.1 years.

Two very different departures: one amid a major restructuring and mounting commercial pressure, the other after a remarkably long and successful career.

And for those wondering where all these departing CMOs might go next, we're introducing something new this week: CMO Gigs, a selection of publicly advertised CMO roles for those considering your next move.

Speaking of your next move - I need help filling a role, as this common cold has broken me. I’m retained to find a North American CCO for an important client, based in New York or LA, up to $450k base and strong package. Start ASAP. You’ll need a standout conceptual portfolio, at least 50+ person creative-team leadership and proof you’ve raised an agency’s reputation, attracted talent and won business. Copy roots are essential, sorry - no art, design, experiential, film. Must inspire a room, rebuild creative confidence and have a clear view on AI’s place in the work. DISC profile probably Captain or Driver. Loud but low-ego. ECDs who have never held the title are fine if they have the creds and ambition. Interested, or know someone? Reply.

Now, on to this week's appointments.

“We Have the Meats” is an expensive promise when beef prices keep going up.

Jenna Bromberg joins Arby’s as CMO on November 2, with the unenviable task of making its sandwiches more tempting while the business is dealing with the cost of putting meat in them. A marketer can only do so much about the price of a cow.

America’s cattle shortage has been years in the making. Trump helpfully added tariffs on Brazilian beef while domestic supplies were already tight, before reversing those additional duties last November in a typical TACO move. Making imported food more expensive during a shortage is a classic “high IQ” strat.

We first covered Bromberg when she joined Papa Johns in November 2024. Back then, we asked whether restaurant CMOs were taking blame for problems elsewhere in the business. Her next assignment feels like an echo.

During her tenure, Papa Johns gave us garlic-sauce bath bombs, dough-shaped stress balls and a Toy Story 5 partnership that brought Pizza Planet into the real world. The company reported roughly 4bn earned media impressions from the Toy Story activity. Impressive attention don’t always mean more dough.

North American comparable sales fell 8.3% in the second quarter of 2026. In August, Papa Johns announced Bromberg’s departure as part of a wider leadership reshuffle. Chris Lyn-Sue, who had been running its international business, became global CMO. The company credited him with helping deliver seven consecutive quarters of positive international comparable sales.

So what does Arby’s see in Bromberg?

Brand president David Graves points to her combination of creative brand-building and commercial leadership. Her scope includes innovation, value and personalized digital experiences. Another personnel change gives us a better view of how the work will be sliced. Jeff Baker, who has been leading Arby’s marketing, is staying as VP of Category Management and Culinary Innovation, focused on the menu. Bromberg will have an experienced colleague working on what customers eat. An offer needs to appeal to a hungry customer, make money for the restaurant and be something the kitchen can deliver consistently amid cowflation.

I’d be interested in what Jenna learned at Papa Johns that she would now do differently. Which activity earned another round of investment? Which looked better in the campaign report than it did in the restaurants? What did franchisees tell her that changed her mind?

For Ladder readers, her appointment is also a reminder that a difficult tenure need not smudge a senior marketing career. Another employer can look at the same record and see someone very compelling. The challenge in those interviews is being able to explain your decisions, their results and what you learned without claiming every success or blaming everyone else.

We wished Jenna well when she took the Papa Johns job. I wish her well with this one too.

Working at a hyperscaling company both made me and nearly broke me. I lasted less than a year at Grab after a $750m funding round led by SoftBank. I gained a muffin-top (don’t google it), my laptop had pizza-grease sheen, and I was fielding WhatsApp voicenotes and meeting requests around the clock. We had funding and an apparently bottomless appetite for growth. I found my bottom.

So when I read that Motive had secured more than $1.3 billion in growth financing and hired Andrew Bennett as CMO, I thought about what his working days might look like.

I hope he gets to eat away from his laptop.

I thought financing at that level sounded a bit rich for a smart dashcam company with enterprise ambitions. Does it support the TAM?

Andrew’s customers have their own growth problems. Construction firms face tariffs on materials and equipment, while Trump’s tighter commercial-driver licensing rules are restricting who can get or renew a license. Apparently building and moving things in America needed to be harder.

That gives Motive plenty to talk about. A fleet owner watching costs climb has good reason to care about wasted fuel, accidents and vehicles sitting idle. But they still have to pay for the software. Andrew needs to show how much money a customer can save and by when.

This is the bit I would watch after a financing announcement that large. Inside the company, everyone wants to accelerate. Outside it, the customer may be delaying a purchase because their own business has become more expensive to run. I remember how that gap gets filled: meetings, more targets, pizza grease, meet Laptop.

Bennett has certainly made this kind of argument before. At Conga, his pitch included recovering the cost of contract-management software earlier through better renewal tracking, pricing and supplier savings. That was a company claim, but it tells you how he approached the sale. Give the customer a way to justify the expense.

Before his decade at Smartsheet, he ran Deneki Outdoors, an outdoor recreation business where he learned digital marketing by doing it himself. He has also led commercial sales. I’d expect him to have some sympathy for the person who has to turn an MQL into a paying customer.

Bennett likes fly fishing and has led both sales and marketing. Hook, line and sinker should all be his problem. No handing sales a bucket of leads and swimming off upstream.

Curious about the other 24 CMOs we didn't cover today? Paid subscribers can browse the full list of CMO appointments announced so far this month, plus 405 appointed earlier this year and another 501 from 2025.