Are we entering peak CMO carousel season? It certainly feels that way. Over the first two weeks of May alone, a surprising number of senior marketing leaders announced their exits.

Atlassian CMO Zeynep Inanoglu Ozdemir wrapped up a three-year stint at the software giant. Binance’s Rachel Conlan is reportedly set to leave in June after leading the crypto exchange’s brand strategy through a particularly noisy chapter for the industry. Crypto.com also saw longtime CMO Steven Kalifowitz depart, marking the company’s second C-suite exit in as many months. Elsewhere, BetMGM’s Casey Hurbis stepped down after 18 months in the role, while Lazada’s Marcus Chew exited after overseeing marketing across 11 Southeast and South Asian markets. And in one of the more notable moves of the month, PepsiCo Asia Beverages CMO Bernard Cheng is heading to Netflix to lead marketing across Southeast Asia and Greater China.

As one group of CMOs heads for the exit, another set of opportunities seems to appear almost immediately. We are featuring a few of the more interesting roles today. As a reminder, we are not the employer, nor agents of the employer.

First though, a quick snapshot of the market. The US marketing job market continues to hold up surprisingly well, with 38,736 open roles this week, up 10.3% year-over-year. Director-level positions and above now sit at 5,147, marking 18% annual growth. For now at least, marketing continues to outperform the broader hiring market.

A common thread ran through many of this week’s roles: modernization pressure.

Not the TED Talk version of transformation. The real version. The awkward, operational, politically messy kind where companies are trying to modernize growth engines, rebuild commercial systems, preserve loyalty, absorb AI, rethink wellness, industrialize marketing operations, and still avoid flattening themselves into beige corporate sludge.

The roles themselves tell the story. JPMorganChase wants marketing infrastructure operators inside Payments. Grand Circle is trying to digitally modernize without destabilizing trust with older affluent travelers. Mars is wrestling with what “better for you” even means in a world of GLP-1s, protein obsession, and wellness anxiety. Meanwhile, our APAC paid-subscriber role at Continental barely resembles Western consumer marketing at all. It looks more like a regional industrial strategy seat disguised as a marketing job.

JPMorgan Chase is hiring a Managing Director to lead Payments Marketing Transformation & Operations, a role that speaks to current thinking in senior marketing.

Big banks are hiring marketing operators to modernize planning, governance, measurement, sales alignment, and speed to market. It’s infrastructure. The role explicitly owns the transformation agenda for Payments Marketing at up to $500,000, which is a weighty signal.

This sits inside J.P. Morgan Payments, part of the Commercial & Investment Bank, rather than the firmwide masterbrand layer. The brief is not about polishing Chase advertising or broad consumer perception. It’s all about making Payments Marketing operate faster and with more measurable commercial impact.

Payments is crucial - It is where banking, software, merchant services, treasury, transaction data, and global commerce increasingly collide.

The job description reads like an OS  rebuild. The incoming MD will own the multi-year transformation roadmap, planning routines, forecasting, governance forums, performance management, marketing-to-sales alignment, process modernization, and measurement standards. The language is heavy on adoption metrics, impact analysis, executive reporting, pipeline support, local market alignment, and controls.

JPMC already appears to have a serious marketing engine. Recent work includes the award-winning “Every Payment Speaks Volumes” campaign with Media.Monks is a strong example of making a complex payment infrastructure feel human and commercially relevant. Its “Payments Unbound” collaboration with WIRED and LinkedIn also shows a business actively repositioning itself as a modern payments innovator rather than a legacy bank talking about digital transformation from a safe distance.

LinkedIn profile traces suggest Payments Marketing is already a deep and specialized bench, with leaders covering digital payments, trust and security, open banking, APAC marketing, sales engagement, product commercialization, merchant ecosystems, and AI-enabled regional execution. This role is coordinating and modernizing where there is already real reach across the organization

This is a search for the person who makes a high-performing payments marketing machine easier to run, easier to measure, and easier to connect to revenue.

The talent pool in-house probably looks different from a normal marketing leadership search. The obvious candidates may come from payments, merchant services, cards, transaction banking, or enterprise financial services. But the more interesting targets may sit in transformation-heavy environments: Mastercard, Visa, Stripe, Adyen, Fiserv, Salesforce, Adobe, Accenture, Deloitte, or large B2B marketing operations teams where sales alignment, governance, analytics, technology adoption, and regional complexity already collide.

To win this interview, consider that JPMorganChase is asking for someone who can turn ambiguity into structure, govern change across a matrix, make marketing activity legible to finance and sales, and modernize execution without creating risk headaches.

This is senior marketing as an operating discipline.

This one has all the ingredients: chocolate inflation, wellness anxiety, GLP-1s, protein snacks, indulgence, agency drama (Mars recently moved media away from WPP), and the strange discipline of a privately-held confectionery empire trying to define what “better for you” even means.

Mars is hiring a Chief Marketing Officer to oversee KIND and its broader Better For You portfolio, including brands sitting at the intersection of wellness, convenience, snacking, and purpose-led consumer identity.

The job description itself is fascinating. At one point it bluntly states: “This role is not for a traditional CPG marketer.”

Which is funny because that exact phrase structure now appears in about half of modern CMO postings. Somewhere along the line, “not X, but Y” became the official dialect of transformation-era hiring.

Still, beneath the cliché lies a very real tension. Mars is self-aware enough to know that large-scale corporate systems can suffocate the founder-led energy. The posting repeatedly references challenger mindsets, experimentation, creators, tastemakers, communities, cultural relevance, and “mission-right” growth.

This role sits inside one of the biggest snack companies in the world, but the brief sounds closer to modern wellness and lifestyle ecosystems than traditional CPG:
functional nutrition, occasion-led consumption, creator influence, digital-first communities, purpose signaling, and omnichannel identity management.

Mars also appears to understand that “better for you” is… complicated.

Consumers still want indulgence. They still snack constantly. But they are increasingly negotiating with ingredient scrutiny, the data-driven self, protein obsession, wellness signaling, GLP-1 discourse, sugar anxiety, and a broader cultural shift toward “earned” indulgence.

One of the smartest parts of the JD is its emphasis on protecting distinctiveness as the portfolio scales. The incoming CMO is expected to preserve brand autonomy and challenger energy while simultaneously plugging these businesses into the scale, discipline, and distribution capabilities of Mars. Another balancing act.

Large CPG companies are mostly excellent at operational scale and global distribution. They are not always excellent at preserving weirdness, subculture credibility, or founder-era emotional texture.

Yes, Mars will absolutely look at senior operators (even traditional ones, we bet) from PepsiCo, Mondelez, Nestlé, Danone, General Mills, or Unilever. But the more interesting candidates may come from challenger wellness brands, functional beverage companies, modern nutrition ecosystems, DTC consumer health brands, or businesses that learned how to build obsessive consumer communities before they built mass scale.

The role also carries unusually heavy commercial expectations for a “brand” job. The posting repeatedly references ROI discipline, omnichannel growth, portfolio optimization, sales partnership, innovation pipelines, and managing increasingly large marketing investments with accountability.

Mars appears to want someone capable of helping founder-led wellness brands grow into scaled global platforms without flattening them into generic corporate snacks.

That challenge has defeated plenty of large consumer companies before.

Grand Circle Corporation is hiring a Chief Marketing Officer at a fascinating moment for travel.

This is a $350K–$450K CMO role at a travel business aimed at older, affluent, experience-driven customers. Also notable: GCC appears to be hiring CTO, SEO, UX/web design, and digital CX talent at the same time, suggesting a broader digital rebuild rather than a simple marketing replacement.

Grand Circle has some heft. The company says more than two million Americans have traveled with its brands, including Overseas Adventure Travel and Grand Circle Cruise Line, supported by more than 35 offices globally.

The brief is packed to the brim with transformation language: AI-driven performance marketing, digital evolution, personalization, eCommerce optimization, acquisition engines, MarTech, loyalty, customer journeys, and scalable growth.

That means the old playbook is starting to creak.

Americans aged 50+ remain one of the wealthiest and most travel-active demographics in the country, particularly for premium guided travel and experiential tourism. The target customer is monied and travel-hungry, but also old enough to remember every travel panic from SARS to COVID to hantavirus coverage on cable news. Trust, safety, reliability, and service consistency still matter alongside aspiration.

One line in the job description gives away the tension underneath the search: the incoming CMO must create “customer acquisition, upsell and cross-sell engines without sacrificing the loyalty of existing buyers.” A real, thinking person wrote this, not an LLM.

Grand Circle needs new customer acquisition, stronger digital conversion, better personalization, and a more modern marketing technology stack. It also needs to protect a valuable long-term customer file, where repeat travel behavior, familiarity, and trust may be central to the economics of the business.

The job likely sits very close to operations too. Travel marketing is never just demand generation. It depends on availability, pricing, itineraries, seasonality, service delivery, safety perception, call center performance, and the emotional confidence required to get someone to book a meaningful trip abroad.

The talent pool here is broader than traditional travel marketers alone.

Obvious backgrounds include Expedia, Booking, Airbnb, Marriott, cruise operators, airlines, and premium hospitality groups. But some of the more interesting candidates may come from high-LTV consumer businesses where loyalty, retention, database marketing, and lifecycle orchestration already sit at the center of growth: AARP, luxury subscription businesses, premium catalog brands, fintech loyalty ecosystems, or sophisticated DTC.

The AI mention is also notable. Unlike some corporate postings awkwardly stapling AI onto everything, GCC appears focused on practical applications: personalization, media efficiency, segmentation, customer experience optimization, and cross-sell economics.

The ultimate challenge here as we see it, is growth without destabilization.

Grand Circle appears to want someone capable of modernizing a mature growth engine without breaking the loyalty dynamics that made the business valuable in the first place. A balancing act worth a cool half a mill base.