CMO Moves November Summary

The CMO hiring buzz took a bit of a breather in November, with 35 new Marketing Chiefs announced globally: 16 women + 19 men, and, rather surprisingly, not a single internal promotion in the bunch.

Every one of them came from outside the company, keeping the year-to-date internal promotion rate at 16.5%, which is roughly in line with last year’s 16.1%.

13 of these new CMOs are stepping into the C-suite for the first time - a promising sign that CEOs are open to fresh faces. But only 5 came from entirely different industries. So while first-time CMOs are getting a shot, category experience still carries weight.

The US remained the center of marketing hiring activity, with 22 appointments across 16 states. Illinois and Texas led the way with 3 each, while Utah and Washington followed with 2 apiece. Beyond the States, Australia added 3 new CMOs, with England, Germany, and Singapore not far behind at 2 each. Bangladesh, India, Israel, and the Netherlands each welcomed one.

On the industry front, Tech continues to lead the pack with 12 new hires. Financial Services followed with 4, while Media, Sports & Entertainment, Professional Services, Government, and Hospitality each brought in 3. CPG, Healthcare, Retail, Restaurants, and Manufacturing filled out the rest with one or two apiece.

In short, the pace may have slowed for the season, but the appetite for external hires - and proven industry hands - shows no sign of waning.

This edition reveals CMOs facing mandates that demand ruthlessly measurable performance. From scaling a global racing team with social metrics to rebuilding public trust with data, today’s moves prove marketing is a hard revenue center. Success hinges on winning the buyer’s cycle early with quantitative discipline and a "math before metaphor" ethos.

CADILLAC F1

Cadillac F1 has named Ahmed Iqbal its first-ever Chief Marketing Officer - an unmistakable signal that GM’s new entrant intends to attack Formula 1’s Euro-centric status quo with a playbook that is social-first, fan-first and unapologetically American.

Between the $450 million entry fee and tens of millions in annual operating spend, GM is treating Cadillac F1 as a generational bet - one Iqbal now has to convert into audience attention and affinity.

Iqbal was deliberately sought out for his non-traditional background – he’s what we call an ‘industry traveler’ – quite the rarity in 2025, as most hiring companies opt for CMOs from within the industry, not outsiders.

The ultimate value proposition is the fusion of his relationships and his digital fluency. As he puts it in a recent interview "I know how to partner with General Motors... and I also understand social media really well". 

His auto expertise was first forged during his time at Audi, where he gained C-level visibility on critical future challenges like launching its electrification strategy, testing new revenue streams such as subscriptions, and evolving retail for the digital world. He then exported this knowledge to Twitter and TikTok, where he taught media-tech how to monetize the global automotive partnership strategy.

His signature leadership is defined by his passion for "building something from scratch" and an authentic reliance on listening. A trait he credits in a 2024 interview as the "key to my success in life and... my happiness". This empathetic approach is a necessary counterweight to the rigid structures often found in auto manufacturers. Iqbal validated his commitment to his new role by quickly hiring Henry Fernandez as Vice President of Creative, a veteran of VCCP and recently at Barbarian. Fernandez’s mission is to ensure their content is truly disruptive, focusing on "culture, connection, and building the next generation of F1 fans right here at home". Cadillac is betting that Iqbal’s ability to speak the language of General Motors while capturing the attention of the For You Page is the fastest path to establishing America's home team.

WOOLWORTHS

The appointment of Sean Barrett as Chief Marketing Officer for Woolworths Group, commencing in January 2026, is a critical strategic intervention. The American import and former CMO of US grocery giant Albertsons is brought in after a bruising period of trust and reputational damage that has reshaped how Australians see the brand.

The challenge for Woolworths is that its strategic failure went well past the usual retail pressures. The grocer fell from being the ‘most‑trusted supermarket’ to the wrong end of national trust rankings, signaling a systemic crisis of consumer confidence. Studies by Edelman and Roy Morgan demonstrate that Australians are less trusting by default than people in many other countries in the region, and are very alert to overclaiming. Once trust is damaged, they tend to punish brands hard, which is why scandals show up as huge spikes in distrust, not just mild grumbling. Net, this is probably one of the hardest CMO jobs in the world today.

While competition from Coles and Aldi and market pressures created a pricing challenge, the resulting collapse of consumer trust serves as a cautionary tale: When a brand is perceived as failing to deliver value to its customers…even amidst tough price-blitzing - the breakdown of goodwill is swift and total. The crisis has been described as a "horror reputational run", demanding a complete organizational rebuild to prove value through quantifiable metrics. But his biggest gap? Building back trust.

Barrett is a P&G alumnus who speaks math before metaphor. His core playbook is built around resolving the central conflict facing modern shoppers: they are value-seeking but also time-starved. To solve this, Barrett views retail media as crucial to "interrupt and lead that shopper with great value", ensuring they feel smart at shopping. At Albertsons, he was a supermarket superhero. He materially reweighted spend toward performance channels, improving media efficiency and lifting loyalty penetration. Barrett’s analytical approach almost guarantees that one of his first moves will be hiring a Chief Data & AI Officer–type role, proving that this trust rebuild starts with clean, connected data.

PARLOA

The appointment of Latané Conant as Parloa’s first Chief Marketing Officer is a clear declaration of intent to build durable, outsized category leadership in enterprise conversational AI. Conant makes a high‑profile move from revenue AI leader 6sense, where she served as Chief Market Officer at a company valued at around $5.2 billion, bringing her category‑creation track record to turbocharge Parloa’s go‑to‑market in an increasingly crowded, agentic‑AI‑driven space.

Rather than going feature‑for‑feature with cloud hyperscalers, Parloa is positioning itself to compete for enterprise CX transformation budgets that often also involve platforms from Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, and Conant is the hire that signals the board intends to play at that level.​

Conant brings a rare, diagonal background across marketing, sales, and customer success, shaped by time in sales, accounting, and consulting before leading brand and revenue strategy at 6sense. She has described operating with a disciplined, almost scripted rhythm to win early in the B2B buying cycle, in a world where most buyers have effectively chosen a solution before they ever speak to sales. That operating cadence underpins her GTM philosophy: marketing’s job is to influence the deal long before an SDR touches the account, not just to pump the top of the funnel.​​

Her philosophy centers on applying what she calls the discipline of “inspection and expectation setting” to marketing, holding programs accountable for creating “deals, not just leads.” Conant sees the “X factor” in Parloa’s enterprise‑grade agentic AI; in her words, the company has “the right tech at the right time” for customer experience leaders, and its message “cuts through… deepen relationships by putting the customer first, always.” This framing neatly aligns Parloa’s platform story with her long‑running insistence that category winners make the customer the hero.

Beyond the C‑suite title, Conant carries outsized industry influence as the best‑selling author of No Forms. No Spam. No Cold Calls., a widely cited modern B2B playbook, and as co‑founder of CMO Coffee Talk and leader of the Empowered CMO Network. Those communities give her direct access to thousands of senior marketers and revenue leaders, effectively turning Parloa’s new CMO into both operator and channel. Her move also caps a broader executive build‑out at Parloa, following recent CRO and CPO appointments, and signals the assembly of a high‑octane GTM machine designed very much in her image: category‑first, customer‑obsessed, and relentlessly measured.​

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