What a time to be a CMO!

There’s never a dull moment in CMO world. After a particularly busy August and September, with plenty of marketing chiefs stepping down and even more stepping up, October ended with a bit of drama.

First up, Polymarket, the notorious prediction market platform where people bet on pretty much anything, reportedly fired its CMO, Matthew Modabber, following an internal investigation into some rather creative marketing practices. And by creative, we don't mean the sort that wins you a Cannes Lion.

According to media reports, his team allegedly paid influencers to produce more than 1,100 staged videos showing people making $1.9 million from trades that never actually happened, using fake websites built for the occasion. There's something rather ironic about a company built around predicting outcomes failing to see this one coming. Ba Dum Tss.

Meanwhile, over at T-Mobile, Mo Katibeh has left his role as EVP and CMO of T-Mobile for Business after two and a half years. No scandal here (at least none that we know of) but the timing is interesting. His departure came just weeks after a new Chief Enterprise Officer arrived, following another senior leadership exit in July. His successor takes over business marketing and product with an SVP title rather than CMO. A leadership reshuffle, perhaps? Whatever the reason, that's one fewer CMO title on the org chart.

Now, despite all the comings and goings, companies are still hiring marketing chiefs at quite a clip. October saw 43 new CMO appointments worldwide, following September's bumper crop of 55.

Here's how the numbers stack up:

U.S. continues to dominate, with 28 new CMOs appointed across 13 states. Australia came second with 5 appointments, followed by England with 3. India, Switzerland, Spain, the UAE, the Netherlands, Sweden and Germany each recorded one.

As for industries, Technology remains the busiest, accounting for 16 of the 43 appointments, followed by Financial Services with 7, Consumer Packaged Goods with 5 and Professional Services with 4.

So, whether you're an aspiring CMO hoping to land your first top job, an established marketing chief eyeing your next move, or simply trying to hang on to the seat you've already got, there's plenty happening out there.

Now, let's meet a few of the people who landed a chair in October.

I have sat with Heads of L&D and co-signed sizeable investments in learning platforms. LinkedIn Learning was a big one. We bought access, encouraged people to develop themselves and then encountered the small problem of everyone having a fucking job to do.

Despite the size of the investment, I was one of the only members of the HR team nerding out on the back-end analytics.

In my experience, a tiny minority, perhaps less than 3%, were insatiable. They found the time and kept learning. I admired them. For the rest of us, professional development could mean getting three-quarters of the way through a Python course and ignoring every email about it for the next five years.

So when a learning platform tells me how many people it reaches, I have a few follow-up questions.

Coursera has appointed Amy Weisenbach as CMO, starting November 30. She joins from The New York Times, where she led marketing across News, Games, Cooking, Audio, Wirecutter and The Athletic. Coursera recently combined with Udemy, giving her two established learning brands to help sell.

For readers unfamiliar with the business, (or who just signed up during Covid and rapidly forgot them) Coursera offers online courses, professional certificates and degrees through university and industry partners. Individuals can pay to learn, while employers buy access for their staff. Its original and noble mission was universal access to high-quality learning.

There have been some amendments to the terms.

In August 2025, Coursera replaced its course-auditing experience with a preview of the first module of nearly every course. Financial aid and some free courses remained. Then-CMO Tim Hannan presented the change as “a deeper, more meaningful way to explore content.”

You were getting less free access. Marketing had been asked to make that sound like progress.

The Udemy combination closed in May this year. In July, Coursera announced a workforce reduction linked to its integration plans, with an estimated $8 million to $11 million in costs, mainly severance and healthcare benefits. A business selling career development had given some of its own employees an urgent reason to consider their next move.

Hannan had posted enthusiastically about the merger, saying he was excited to help shape what came next. Now Amy gets that assignment. The appointment announcement doesn’t explain his departure, and I won’t invent an explanation for him.

Another of his posts caught my attention because it took me straight back to those L&D meetings.

Sharing Coursera’s 2025 Learner Outcomes Report, produced with The Harris Poll, he described responses from more than 52,000 learners across 179 countries. Among respondents in emerging economies, 94% reported a positive career outcome since completing their course. Among Entry-Level Professional Certificate learners, 51% reported a salary increase.

“Since completing” deserves a moment of our time.

Those figures don’t tell us what happened to everyone who signed up, including the people whose Python ambitions expired somewhere around module six. Nor does a pay rise after a course establish that the course caused it. Someone motivated enough to finish might also be the person asking for a promotion, applying elsewhere or taking on more responsibility.

This was always difficult when we were buying the tools. We wanted to believe the investment helped people progress. Connecting the training to the business outcome was much harder than getting a report on participation.

Amy inherits that problem alongside the brand work.

Her background makes sense, though. At the Times, she marketed several different reasons to subscribe. Someone might arrive for the journalism, develop a Cooking habit and start following a team through The Athletic. She has experience explaining why a collection of products deserves a place in a household budget.

Coursera and Udemy requires a coherent proposition. A bigger catalog can leave a customer with more homework before they have even chosen a course. Having used both services, I wonder how much of the content is duplicative. People need to understand which offering fits their goal, what the credential means and why they should pay for it.

Telling them there is more to choose from won’t do much for the person already overwhelmed by the choice.

There is also a considerable difference between opening a crossword and settling down to study after work. Amy can improve the invitation. The product and teaching teams have to help people keep going. On the enterprise side, managers need to give employees time to learn (and who really has that?). A company that buys thousands of seats and fills every working hour with meetings deserves its own disappointing adoption figures.

She brings more than subscription experience. Amy has taught brand strategy and consumer behavior at NYU Stern and serves on DePauw University’s board.

I can understand this hire and foresee marketing getting much more specific about what learners can expect for their money and time. As a recruiter, I care about what someone can now do, and whether they can demonstrate it. It burns to say it, but another certificate on LinkedIn isn’t even conversation-worthy, let alone a conversation starter.

Amy has persuaded people to pay for content in a market full of free alternatives. Coursera needs that experience. It’s always had helfpul dad videos on YouTube and now it has LLMs. It also needs to earn the attention of people who bought the subscription with the best intentions and then went back to their very busy lives.

If she gets me to finish that Python course, I’ll happily write the follow-up.

Jimmy Donaldson has an enormous audience. So did PewDiePie. Being the person everyone watches is a fine place to start a business, but I’d be nervous about building the entire financial plan around the person. That’s why hiring a CMO now is a great idea.

How many businesses can make money from the same audience before they get tired of being sold things by MrBeast? Already there’s chocolate, a youth banking app and a planned mobile service.

If you have successfully avoided him, congrats. Donaldson is the YouTube star behind elaborate challenges, expensive stunts and giveaways. His business, Beast Industries, is expanding well beyond the videos. It owns Feastables, has acquired financial-services app Step and has outlined plans for a mobile phone service.

Apparently being in your children’s heads wasn’t enough. Soon it may be their pocket money and, eventually, your phone bill.

Michelle St. Jacques has been appointed the company’s first CMO. She joined in February as president of consumer goods and keeps that responsibility along with the new job. According to reporting on CEO Jeff Housenbold’s internal announcement, the company considered external candidates before choosing her.

Now she gets to help explain what the whole company wants to become.

St. Jacques brings experience with brands including Dove, Heinz, Miller Lite and Coors Light. All useful training grounds where the customer has a shelf full of alternatives. Even a devoted fan eventually gets to the end of the chocolate bar.

The appointment reporting says she joined while Feastables’ growth was slowing. It also identifies e-commerce and performance marketing as areas where Housenbold wants stronger customer acquisition and retention.

Quite a puzzling admission from a business with this much attention.

The audience is sinew and muscle. Millions of people already know the founder, watch him willingly and may be prepared to try something he recommends. But watching for free does not mean fans will become paying customers. And when they can’t access their money or get a phone signal, another lavish giveaway may just piss them off.

My reading is that Beast Industries is trying to build businesses that can keep operating when Donaldson’s next upload and his face are no longer enough to sell them. His fame gives the company a chance to recruit customers now. Established products, competent management and repeat purchases could give it a future beyond his personal ability to keep everyone watching.

The list of persona-driven founded/funded businesses that have flopped or are flopping is long. Kanye. Kate Moss. DeCaprio. Fernando Alonso. Cheryl Hines. Lewis Hamilton. Jamie Oliver. Scarlett Johansson.

This CMO needs to shape things so that the business becomes less dependent on him having a resilient hit parade.

St. Jacques’s expanded remit includes positioning across the company, marketing for MrBeast and its partners, and oversight of the viral marketing team. She will also continue running consumer goods. It is a substantial amount to add to someone’s diary.

There is also a risk that the audience gets counted repeatedly in the business plan. It makes a handsome presentation. Those people still have one household budget.

There is another difference between selling chocolate and selling services. A disappointing chocolate bar costs a repeat purchase. A frozen account or dead phone line can cost trust in every Beast business.

For Ladder readers, the appointment makes a case for commercial experience that can look rather conventional beside the excitement of the creator economy. St. Jacques has worked on brands people buy repeatedly in fiercely competitive categories.

I can understand why they chose her. I would want to know what resources arrive with the extra title.

The company already knows how to get people to watch Jimmy spend money. Michelle’s assignment is to make them comfortable spending their own, repeatedly, across an increasingly ambitious collection of businesses.

I’d pay more attention to those repeat purchases than the next hundred million subscribers.

There was a time when typing “do mosquito bites last more than 3 days?” into Google could turn an otherwise pleasant evening into a cancer scare. We became quite good at frightening ourselves with health information, and the rabbit hole of ad-augmented self-diagnosis was a rabbit hole you didn’t want to fall into.

Now you can pay a dollar a day to find out what is going on inside you. It’s easy to see the appeal.

Function Health offers access to 160-plus lab tests across the year, including annual and mid-year testing, for an advertised $365. Clinicians review the results, and members can track changes over time. Additional services, including scans, cost extra. The ambition is to make checking your health before you feel ill something ordinary people do routinely.

Taj Alavi has joined as its first CMO. She previously led global brand marketing at Instagram, global brand and creative at Uber, and global marketing at Spotify. One of those resumes that moves along a timeline of lethally good consumer marketing. Most recently, she consulted at Neko Health, so she has already spent time in this category.

Founder and CEO Jonathan Swerdlin describes Function as making health “as affordable as Spotify, as convenient as Uber, and as available as Instagram.” He has certainly squeezed her CV’s logo-stack for all it’s worth. That's a man who's probably just paid a SHREK firm a third of first-year cash compensation.

The company’s mission is to help everyone live a hundred healthy years which, to me, is an exhausting rather than compelling idea. I’d be fine with fewer years spent trying to get a doctor’s appointment, so there is room to win me over before we get to the full century.

One of Taj’s own LinkedIn posts makes the proposition easier to understand.

She describes visiting her primary care doctor, who asked to see her Function results. After reviewing them and the clinician notes, the doctor decided they could skip some planned labs and move on to the next steps. That sounds useful doesn’t it?

Taj says it saved her more fasting, lab trips and follow-up appointments. Her doctor could use the information during the consultation. This is her own experience, and she is plainly selling the service, but it gives a prospective member something concrete to picture.

It also explains why this could become a subscription people keep. If your doctor finds the results worthy, and you can see changes between tests, paying for another year may feel sensible at just a dollar a day. You don’t have to open the app every morning for it to earn its keep. Twice-yearly testing could become another thing you get on with, like going to the dentist, with hopefully less scraping.

Taj ends the post by saying she plans to add relatives to the family plan. Having explained how it helped her, she gives readers a reason to consider it for someone they love. You can see the marketer at work without needing to resent it.

A three-year-old interview with John Boiler gives us a little more insight into how she thinks. At Spotify, she talked about bringing marketing and product teams together to give people more reasons to use the service. Its Roblox presence had a dedicated team and a continuing content calendar. She was interested in what people would come back for after the launch excitement had faded out.

Function needs its membership to offset death with less steps. Her doctor’s-office story shows one way that might happen. It’s a more persuasive starting point than asking people to contemplate their hundredth birthday.

She has plenty to work with. A recent announcement reports $450 million in growth financing and the acquisitions of Getlabs and SuppCo. This is a major commercial assignment, with more to explain than a blood-testing subscription.

There are promises to watch closely. The CEO talks about members preventing heart attacks and detecting cancers early. Those claims need evidence, and marketing will need to be precise about what testing can establish but also what should happen next. A frightening number in an app is a terrible place to leave someone.

For Ladder readers, this is a good example of why a company might hire beyond the usual industry shortlist. Taj brings experience helping large numbers of people adopt unfamiliar services, alongside her more recent work in health. Function is asking people to change when and how they check on their bodies.

I’m interested in this one. A membership that helps you arrive at a doctor’s appointment with useful information, then saves you another trip to the lab, has a pretty compelling reason to exist.

Give Taj enough relatable experiences like that to work with and she may not need to mention living to a hundred very often.