Greetings new subscribers! Welp. There are a lot of you.

Hundreds of you joined us last week, which was a bit of a surge. For the new readers - what we do around here is alternate between senior marketing jobs and appointments. The circle of life.

So next week: jobs. And this week…

September is picking up exactly where August left off. In the first two weeks of the month alone, 33 new CMOs have been announced globally: 18 women and 15 men.

As usual, most companies went outside their walls for the hire: 26 were external appointments, compared with just 7 internal promotions.

So no job hugging. Share your résumé with abandon; HR still aren’t noticing you.

13 are stepping into a CMO role for the first time. And despite all the talk about CMOs’ transferable utility across industries, only one of the 33 made a meaningful cross-sector move.

The U.S. accounted for 23 appointments across nine states, with California alone producing 10, nearly 1/3 of the global total. Florida followed with 3. Outside the U.S., India recorded 3 new CMOs, the UK and Canada 2 each, with one apiece in Sweden, Germany and the Netherlands.

Tech remains the busiest sector with 9 appointments, but Professional Services wasn't far behind with 7. Financial Services and Retail added 4 each, followed by CPG with 3 and Media, Sports & Entertainment with 2.

This week, we're looking more closely at 4 of those 33 appointments and 4 companies asking marketing to solve something much bigger than advertising.

Workday has an AI story buried under years of complexity; Target needs its stores to earn the word “guest;” and Accenture wants Emma Chalwin to turn AI word salad into something clients can buy. Then there’s the PGA Tour, where half the audience is over 55 and the new CMO’s favorite sports brand is the Savannah Bananas.

Workday has been importing Google Cloud people.

Chief Commercial Officer Rob Enslin previously ran cloud sales there. President of Product and Technology Gerrit Kazmaier came from Google Cloud too. Now Sarah Kennedy Ellis joins as CMO after leading global marketing for Google Cloud and Google Workspace, following earlier CMO roles at Adobe Experience Cloud and Marketo.

That is starting to look like a pattern.

Ellis has spent the last few years squarely focused on enterprise AI adoption. In a lengthy SaaStr interview, she talks about customers moving workloads gradually, developers increasingly influencing AI decisions, CIO anxiety about falling behind, and the importance of where enterprise data lives when companies start building with AI. She is also interested in the hardest and least glamorous bit: getting people inside enormous organizations to change how they work.

Another interview is even more revealing. Ellis describes mapping who really holds influence inside companies, working closely with Finance, using small experiments to earn permission for bigger ones, and doing plenty of stakeholder work before major changes ever reach the stage. She also admits that younger Sarah tended to sprint first and clean up later. She’s probably learned some patience at Google.

Workday is an interesting place to apply it.

The company sits inside payroll, recruiting, benefits, permissions, compensation, finance and years of corporate integrations. It’s a PITA to implement. That makes it deeply annoying to replace. It also means Workday already has much of the context, provenance and permissioning that enterprise AI needs to do more than answer questions.

Then there is the interface.

Workday has never lacked people willing to complain about using Workday. Business Insider managed an entire 2024 story under the headline “Everyone hates Workday.”

But Workday’s acquisition of Sana gives it a conversational layer over all the plumbing underneath. Ask for something, let the software navigate itself. For once, a chatbot might genuinely improve the experience.

Sana may make Workday easier to use. Finance may determine how much of the enterprise Workday is allowed to own.

Workday’s own PR makes the ambition clear: it wants organizations to harness “their most vital assets - their people and their money.”

There’s the confession. Workday wants a much bigger piece of the finance market, including territory long owned by SAP. My bet is that one of Ellis’s biggest jobs will be making Workday more credible to finance leaders. That is tricky though, when the company is still most famous for people systems.

Ellis inherits a marketing organization of more than 500 people, spread across Sydney, Singapore, London, Paris, Munich, Costa Rica, Boston, New York and the Bay Area. Its previous CMO, Emma Chalwin, made the team famous (with Ogilvy’s help) for glorifying enterprise software through the Rock Stars campaign, humanizing the thankless job of CHRO.

But the team already has a hole. Erik Petersen, executive director of global brand advertising and media, left in June after 5 years, having led the machinery behind Workday’s global advertising, media and Rock Stars work.

So here is a CMO Ladder prediction: Ellis’s first major hire will be a senior brand leader at VP or executive director level, someone with agency connections or an agency background, who will help her decide what the Rock Stars campaign becomes next.

Workday should not kill it. The campaign has built genuine awareness and produced reported lifts in traffic, consideration and lead-to-sale conversion. But Ellis may decide that rock stars are now the wrapper, or should be retired from stadium duty.

She has a founder back in the CEO chair, several former Google Cloud colleagues around the table, a brand seat to fill and a much bigger story to tell about what Workday becomes at a time when every enterprise AI pitch is being judged against the fear that “productivity” is code for fewer people.

The irony is pretty good. The complexity that made Workday so frustrating to deploy may now be one of the strongest ingredients in its AI pitch.

The PGA Tour is hiring a marketer who has already helped build a sports league for the digital generation.

Tyler Rutstein joins as CMO after leading global brand and Americas marketing at Under Armour, following Overtime and nearly a decade at Adidas. He arrives alongside a new CTO and head of Investor Relations, all reporting to Andy Weitz, whose remit spans Marketing, PGA Tour Studios, Technology and IR. This is part of a wider rebuild.

PGA is swinging (sorry!). It has a wealthy commercial audience: 87% of PGA Tour fans have household income above $150,000. But they are aging. 52% are over 55.

Rutstein has spent much of his career making sports matter to people who did not grow up watching golf, which explains his selection.

At Overtime, he helped turn a social account into a community, apparel business, athlete platform and, eventually, its own sports leagues. Overtime Elite deliberately built team identities for a generation less attached to geography, while its people lived in comments and DMs and treated athletes as collaborators. At Under Armour, his obsession is the first 3 seconds. He talks about shares rather than impressions, episodic storytelling, creators, comments and finding the surprises to stop somebody scrolling. Asked recently which sports brand he thinks is doing this best, he picked the Savannah Bananas, praising the theatricality and youthful energy they injected into baseball.

That is an interesting answer from the man now responsible for marketing professional golf.

New CEO Brian Rolapp is already rebuilding the competitive product for 2028, with clearer stakes and a new structure designed to make the season easier to follow. Rutstein gets to work on the other half: making people care.

He is commercially grounded too. Behind all the creator talk, Rutstein repeatedly comes back to revenue, ROI and what he calls having to "stand on business." That should play well at a Tour that has become increasingly inventive about sponsorship. Its recent Uber deal created value from the last few miles of the spectator journey, while its media future will depend heavily on what happens when the next major rights negotiations arrive.

There is also an international wrinkle. The US remained the world’s leading soft-power nation in Brand Finance’s 2026 index, but recorded the steepest decline of any country, with its reputation ranking falling 11 places amid international backlash to “America First” policies.

Then the Tour returned to Trump National Doral for the Cadillac Championship, putting one of its Signature Events on a property inseparable from the most bloated, sweaty, political version of American golf.

Rutstein cannot control Brand America. He can control which version of American sports culture the PGA Tour projects.

That should mean more creators, more athlete-led storytelling, more entertainment - and abandoning the assumption that putting great golf on television is enough.

Target has spent decades calling shoppers “guests.”

At their Brooklyn version, I felt less like a guest and more like a victim. Shit was in piles everywhere, chaos reigned and staff were awful. In Saratoga Springs, upstate New York, shopping there felt like a dreaded chore under industrial lighting.

It has now hired an enlightened and successful hotel marketer to decide what being a guest should mean.

Mark Weinstein joins as Chief Marketing and Guest Experience Officer after 15 years at Hilton, most recently as global CMO, head of Hilton Honors and head of luxury brands. He reports directly to new CEO Michael Fiddelke and gets marketing, brand, loyalty, guest experience and digital, including Roundel and Target+.

Weinstein took over Hilton Honors in 2010 when it had around 25 million members. Today it has more than 250 million. During that 10x run, Hilton used loyalty to connect personalization, direct booking, partnerships, digital experiences and 28 hotel brands into one system.

His view of technology at Hilton was centered on utility. Use it to remove the irritating stuff, things like choosing rooms, upgrades and other transactional chores, then give staff more time to do the human bits well. Hilton has around 500,000 team members globally, and Weinstein describes technology as a way to get them out from behind process and back in front of customers. He calls the business “people serving people.” Much needed at Target.

Two days after announcing Weinstein, Target published new standards for its stores. Shelves should be stocked. Stores should be clean and organized. Employees should be easy to find. Checkout should be fast. People should be greeted and helped. Next up - fashion. Somehow a post about the fancy new staff kit surfaced on my Reddit.

I could have written the first half after visiting Brooklyn.

Target says all 350,000-plus store employees have received extra training this year and that it has put hundreds of millions of dollars into additional payroll to improve coverage, keep shelves full and stores clean. Guest satisfaction reached a 3-year high in Q1.

Weinstein has already described his new brief in hotelier language: from “car door opening to car door closing.” He wants one connected brand platform, stronger loyalty and personalization, and a clearer idea of where the in-store and digital experience should stand apart.

That phrase made me think about Saratoga.

The store was perfectly functional. I could buy cat litter, eggs, toothpaste and whatever else I had convinced myself required a 20-minute drive. Yet I cannot remember once feeling delighted to be there. The brand on television felt more stylish than the building I was standing inside. Weinstein dealt with a version of this problem at Hilton.

Before “Hilton. For the Stay,” he thought hotel advertising had become obsessed with destinations while the hotel itself disappeared from the story: beaches, food, beautiful people finding themselves in expensive locations. You could barely tell whether the ad belonged to a hotel, airline or tourism board.

His answer was to put the stay back at the center. Target may need to put the Target run back at the center.

A beautiful campaign only gets you so far if the shampoo is missing, the aisle is a mess and nobody can find a member of staff. Personalization and loyalty work better when the underlying experience gives people a reason to come back.

Marketing cannot keep the fries hot, etc.

There’s brightness here. Target Circle 360, Roundel and Target+ grew more than 20% collectively last quarter. Digital comparable sales rose 8.7%, helped by more than 25% growth in same-day delivery. Target is pushing all three as major growth engines alongside personalization and AI.

Weinstein is a marketer who talks a lot about understanding how the company makes money. He thinks too many marketers fail that test and credits his own progression at Hilton to being able to explain marketing in the language of investors, business performance and returns - the ultimate CMO weapon.

His career rule is even better: “You have to deliver the short term to earn the opportunity to innovate for the future.”

Target is a decent testing ground for the thesis. The short term is boring and brutal. Stores need stock. Staff need to be visible. Digital orders need to arrive. Traffic needs to convert.

Circle gives Target a view of the customer. Target+ expands the range of products it can sell. Roundel monetizes access to the audience, while Circle 360 removes friction from getting the goods home.

Hilton Honors spent years building its version of that loop around travel.

There is also an org-chart curiosity. Target says Weinstein oversees Roundel and Target+. Its current biography for Chief Digital and Revenue Officer Sarah Travis says she leads Target+, Roundel and the wider digital business.

Somebody might need a fresh job description.

Travis has done very well with those assets. Roundel was already approaching $2 billion in revenue when she became Chief Digital and Revenue Officer, and Target has credited her with building much of its digital ecosystem.

I will watch how Fiddelke divides the turf. Weinstein has been given responsibility broad enough to reach from advertising into the economics of the customer relationship. That is a serious mandate for a new CMO.

Asked what drives him, Weinstein describes himself as impatient and restless. He keeps asking whether something could be better, whether it could be done differently, and admits this probably drives his team nuts. He prefers people who push too hard and need reining in over people frightened of breaking the rules.

That restlessness could be useful. Target’s brand was never thing I disliked. It was the store.

And the CMO circle of life continues.

The woman Sarah Kennedy Ellis just replaced at Workday has already landed at Accenture, where Emma Chalwin becomes CMO on October 1, reporting directly to Chair and CEO Julie Sweet with responsibility for global marketing and communications. She arrives after 3 years at Workday, following senior roles at Salesforce, Adobe, McAfee and Macrovision. No pure play big-4 or prof services experiences makes her, in our language, a rare ‘industry traveler’ and is perhaps a signal that Accenture wants to be seen as a tech company now.

So, is this a better job?

In several obvious ways, yes, it is. Workday generated $9.55 billion last year, while Accenture generated $69.7 billion, serves around 9,000 clients and employs close to 800,000 people. Chalwin has gone from marketing one of the world’s largest enterprise software companies to shaping the story of a consulting empire operating across almost every major industry and market.

She also gets the whole thing, with marketing and communications sitting together and direct access to Julie Sweet. Accenture’s announcement connects her remit to brand, demand and sales, suggesting a commercial mandate with real weight behind it rather than another corporate CMO title that mainly comes with an events calendar and a lot of internal decks.

AI gives her plenty to work with too. At Workday, Chalwin helped turn hated enterprise software into something people noticed, with Rock Stars glorifying the people doing the thankless operational work behind finance and HR and giving Workday a level of cultural cachet that some B2B software companies would kill for.

Accenture is already capturing billions in AI revenue and bookings, so Chalwin does not need to manufacture a market around a distant promise. She needs to make the scale and commercial value of what Accenture is already doing legible to the outside world.

That brings us to why the job could be worse.

Accenture is harder to explain because Workday sells software, whereas Accenture sells expertise, transformation, implementation, strategy, technology, operations and thousands of combinations of all five. The product often walks into a meeting carrying a laptop, and the value is spread across people, process and client outcomes rather than sitting inside a single platform somebody can show on a screen.

Then Chalwin has Accenture Song sitting inside the same company, advising clients on marketing, brand, customer experience, commerce and creative transformation. She therefore becomes CMO of a company containing thousands of people whose day job includes telling other CMOs how marketing should work.

There is also a language problem. Accenture talks constantly about “reinvention,” “AI-led growth,” “human ingenuity,” “360° value” and helping clients become “reinvention-ready.” Some of that reflects serious work, while some of it sounds like consulting copy that has spent too long alone with an LLM.

Her job is to make substance tangible and give all that word salad commercial shape. Julie Sweet says she wants her to connect breakthrough technologies with client value and commercial impact, while Chalwin talks about building market influence, driving demand and keeping human connection at the center of AI.

In theory, it’s familiar territory for someone who spent 3 years making enterprise software more culturally relevant. At Workday, she took infrastructure and made people care about the humans operating it; at Accenture, she gets a much bigger stage, a much harder translation problem and an organization full of people with (hopefully) strong opinions about how the story should be told.

The job is probably better: the platform, access, client base and AI business are all larger.

It could be worse: so is the committee.