What is it about September?

Last September, 51 new CMOs were announced worldwide, making it the busiest month of 2025. This September? 56.

Yes, 56 companies found a new Chief Marketing Officer in a single month.

The usual breakdown: 31 women and 25 men. Just 10 were promoted from within, while a whopping 46 were hired externally. Nearly half (25 of the 56 ) are first-time CMOs. Industry travelers remain a much rarer breed - just 4 crossed into an entirely different vertical. People looking to pivot, le sigh.

The U.S. continues to do most of the hiring, with 37 new CMOs across 12 states. But September was unusually busy elsewhere too. India announced 5 new CMOs, Canada and England 3 each, France 2, with Sweden, the UAE, Scotland, the Netherlands, Italy, and Germany adding one apiece.

And then there is tech. 19 of September’s 56 new CMOs went into tech companies, more than a third of the entire month. Professional Services came next with 8, followed by Retail with 7 and CPG with 5.

The full breakdown:

So September has done it again.

But 56 appointment announcements also means 56 press releases telling us how thrilled everyone is. We have been squinting past the congratulations to figure out what these companies are actually hiring their new CMOs to do.

This week in highlights: Google Cloud’s new CMO has some blunt views on how marketers make themselves dispensable. Red Lobster is hiring an agency leader whose work it already knows. And Patreon has promoted its first CMO, giving us a reason to revisit what creators get for the company’s slice of their financial action.

Stephanie Buscemi joins Google Cloud as CMO with a blunt assessment of what marketing has become: “We optimized channels instead of companies.”

Mic drop.

In a recent essay, the former Confluent and Salesforce CMO argues that marketers have helped make their own jobs dispensable. Under pressure, they retreat into running campaigns or fixing the pipeline. The tough job is getting product, sales and leadership to agree on who they serve and what they promise. That work goes unattended.

She has a good story about how that happens. At Salesforce, she found product marketers competing for the same customers’ attention. She compared it to planes landing at San Francisco airport without air traffic control. Each team had something to sell. The customer had to make sense of the combined arrival.

Having raised the problem, she was asked to fix it. She spent about 2 years bringing product marketing together and helping the business explain how its growing range of products fit together in a customer’s life.

Her impatience with technology in search of a purpose goes back further. In a 2016 presentation, she described asking someone with a “big data initiative” what they were trying to solve. The answer was that they had a big data initiative.

“Oh my god this is gonna be expensive and long.”

Ten years later, there is good reason to apply that question to AI. In announcing her Google Cloud move, Buscemi focused on buyers asking whether it will work in production, survive security checks and deliver a return before exhausting the IT budget. Her job is to make Google’s capabilities clear and useful to those people.

At Google Cloud, she gets to apply that philosophy to a business selling almost every layer of the AI stack, from infrastructure and models to developer tools and applications.

She once wanted to be a broadcast journalist. She worked at CBS and NBC before returning to the Bay Area and finding her way into technology marketing. The interest in other people’s stories has endured, along with a willingness to let them tell their own.

In an earlier podcast, she suggested taking a metaphorical match to corporate B2B websites. Too much company-approved language, too little customer contribution. She wanted customers to help create the content, even if it was imperfect and occasionally critical. For Google Cloud, accounts from people building and running things could give buyers something worthy to judge alongside the product promises.

She is very direct about getting developers to use the product. Why send them a succession of marketing offers when they want to try it? At Confluent, she described marketing and sales working towards usage. And if the company missed its number, marketing had no business doing a victory lap.

There is warmth alongside the impatience. Buscemi says her husband asks whether she really has to speak to everyone in an elevator. She does. With colleagues, she describes adapting to those who need a weekly sit-down and those who prefer quick daily exchanges.

Google Cloud is getting someone who has spent years thinking about how people understand technology, buy it and use it. She has also published a demanding account of what a CMO should contribute. We now get to watch her apply it.

Confluent lost a real one. Where do you go after Stephanie? 

Andy Pitts joins Red Lobster as CMO with a family connection to the brief.

“Red Lobster was my dad’s favorite restaurant. Today it’s my son’s,” he wrote in announcing the move. He has also spent several years working on the business at BarkleyOKRP, its agency partner. He knows the brand from both sides of the table.

Red Lobster is hiring someone who has already been helping to tell its comeback story. Barkley became its agency of record in 2022 and stayed involved through the 2024 bankruptcy and the effort to win customers back. Pitts moves across from an executive role in client experience, with restaurant work spanning Wingstop, Dairy Queen and Fogo de Chão.

His credits include the Wingstop–Wendy’s Twitter rap battle, in which the two brands exchanged bars after a user invited Wendy’s to respond. Pitts was one of the credited account leaders. Worth a watch. Lessss doo it!

The best example for his new assignment comes from Red Lobster itself. BarkleyOKRP’s comeback campaign put CEO Damola Adamolekun in front of customers, following his appearance on The Breakfast Club. When diners asked for more spice and flavor in the new seafood boils, the response reached beyond the social team. According to the case study, a CEO video followed within 24 hours, with new flavor profiles and adjustable spice levels introduced within a week.

That is a promising way to earn another visit. A customer complains about dinner, someone listens, and the next dinner changes. It also shows how much of the marketing job depends on colleagues who buy ingredients, train staff and run kitchens.

Pitts’s mandate covers marketing, guest experience and brand strategy. His agency background gives him a head start on the brand and its customers. The move in-house puts him closer to the decisions that determine whether the experience lives up to the advertising.

A real balancing act. Endless Shrimp returned for limited runs in April and August this year. In announcing the August return, Adamolekun said the company had found a way to make it work for guests, restaurant teams and the business. Keeping those interests together will require care. An offer must give people a reason to come in at a price and pace the restaurant can sustain.

From a hiring perspective, Red Lobster has had years to watch Pitts work. He has had years to see the business up close. Both sides should have a fairly good idea of what they are getting.

His dad and his son have already supplied the endorsement. The business now has to get more families to put another visit in the diary.

Why the fuck don’t more agency leaders get the CMO job at brands? Many of them are already doing a trial run. Perhaps this hire will prove why more should happen.

Mike McGarry becomes Patreon’s first CMO, tasked with making the company earn its cut.

For new creators, Patreon’s standard platform fee is 10%, with payment processing charged separately. That buys membership tools, video hosting and community features. Helping someone turn an audience into a steady income is a business worth paying for. The manifesto about funding the creative class can wait until after the sums.

When we covered Patreon’s $400K product marketing vacancy, we questioned its ambition to become a discovery platform. Creators brought their fans to Patreon. Patreon collected a fee. Its discovery pitch gives creators grounds to expect the company to bring some customers of its own.

McGarry has already been working on that assignment. He joined in early 2025 as its first SVP of Marketing and built its first fan-facing marketing strategy. Before that came brand marketing at Shake Shack and content and creative leadership at Coca-Cola. He has experience giving people reasons to choose a brand. Now he needs fans to open Patreon without waiting for a podcaster to tell them where the bonus episode lives.

Patreon has introduced a discovery feed and says its discovery features deliver 1.5 million new free and paid memberships to creators each month. Nice for the pitch deck. Combining free and paid leaves us unable to tell how much of that activity produces an income. A free follower may become a paying subscriber. This distinction deserves more attention from a company whose mission rests on getting creators paid.

CEO Jack Conte has been frank about it. In August, he acknowledged that discovery was failing smaller creators, with Patreon’s own data confirming their complaints. He also identified a basic constraint: Patreon has fewer fans than the bigger platforms. The company is changing its recommendations to give smaller creators a better chance.

McGarry’s team has found imaginative ways to attract attention. Its recent tabletop gaming campaign brought creators together to roll a six-foot, 200-pound, twenty-sided die down a hill. It gave niche fan communities something made for them and helped creators introduce one another to their audiences.

The value question is how many fans went on to pay a creator they had never supported before, and how many kept paying. Patreon says tabletop memberships rose 35% year over year, which is encouraging but leaves the important questions unanswered: how many were paid, how many were new to Patreon and how many stayed? The size of the die tells us less than the size of the return.

There is a trap here, too. Creators who feel knackered by ‘feeding’ social platforms may have little appetite for another feed to keep fed. If discovery on Patreon demands another unpaid content schedule, the company risks adding to the problem it sells relief from.

Promoting the person already building consumer demand makes sense. McGarry knows the team and has had time to test the work. He also inherits a company that has been very good at describing the dignity of creative work.

I think creators can already explain that. What they need from Patreon is a clear account of what its involvement adds to their income. McGarry should be prepared to put that number in the spotlight.

For more specifics on Asia CMO hiring, did we mention we now have an Asia Pacific edition? Check it out here - it’s quite good.