CMO Moves Mid-November Update

This week, we start with a question that’s been puzzling us.

Why are companies so reluctant to hand the CMO reins to one of their own?

Just earlier this week, I chatted with Ad Age’s Adrianne at length about this curious case.

Now, with the numbers in for the first half of November, the picture’s no less puzzling…

21 new CMOs were announced globally: 9 women + 12 men, and NOT A SINGLE internal promotion. All external hires. Evidently, when it comes to succession planning, many companies are still outsourcing ambition.

7 of these new CMOs are stepping into the C-suite for the first time, while 4 have switched industries entirely - what we like to call “Industry Travelers.”

The US continues to lead the charge, with 14 appointments. Utah took an unexpected lead with 2, while the rest were spread across a dozen other states. Internationally, Australia and England welcomed 2 new CMOs each, with Israel, the Netherlands, and Singapore added one apiece.

Tech remains the hungriest sector, responsible for 7 of the hires, followed by Professional Services with 3. Financial Services, Media and Entertainment, CPG, and Travel all clocked in with 2 each.

• Tech: 7

• Professional Services: 3

• Financial Services: 2

• Media, Sports & Entertainment: 2

• CPG: 2

• Hotel and Travel: 2

• Restaurants: 1

• Government: 1

• Manufacturing: 1

SONOS

Sonos, the premium audio company still reeling from a "calamitous 2024", has made its most significant move yet to rebuild its bruised brand. The company announced it has hired advertising veteran Colleen DeCourcy as its new Chief Marketing Officer, starting in January. This hire lands in a leadership vacuum created by a disastrous year. A botched app update in May 2024 torched the brand's reputation, contributing to a 15% YoY revenue drop and a widening net loss.

The fallout led to the previous permanent CMO's exit within a year, and board member Tom Conrad stepped in as a turnaround CEO. Conrad, who faces a punishing 49% approval rating amid a Glassdoor-reported culture of "poor leadership", recently told investors, "We need a new strategy".

With this hire, it's clear Colleen DeCourcy is that new strategy.

DeCourcy is much more than a rare "Madison Avenue Veteran" in a CMO role - she's a "fixer" who runs toward, in her own words, "a big... audacious problem". She's famous for her "it's not a principle unless it costs you something" philosophy, learned at the legendary agency Wieden+Kennedy.

She proved it by walking away from the agency's third-largest client, Facebook, on principle after the Cambridge Analytica scandal. This is precisely the DNA Sonos needs. The company's core problem is that it has Strong brand equity but limited product storytelling and low marketing agility today.

We reckon DeCourcy's playbook might be a direct antidote. She's a C-suite operator who plays "3D chess" and knows how to "run a P&L and a spreadsheet". A key Sonos weakness is its failure to connect with younger channels; DeCourcy was most recently the CMO of Snap, where she was obsessed with its "90% self-reported joy metric". She believes "happiness compounds", a vital philosophy for a brand whose loyal customers are currently furious. (As a Sonos user, I was bit mad, but I’m personally over it since the last big fix)

Her biggest challenge may be internal. Glassdoor reviews show a conflict between "Great people" and "Poor leadership". Her leadership style is tailor-made for this. She's known for building psychological safety, disarming conflict by saying, "Here's my neck, let's talk", and ending meetings with "I love you guys" – you can feel the agency roots!

I’ve watched her interviews on YT. I reckon she's been hired to give the team at Sonos a leader they can trust. As she said while at Snap, it's about "Less likes, more love". Sonos needs a lot more love right now, and they've just hired the one person who might be able to get it back.

VEEAM

Tech ALWAYS dominates the CMO appointments by volume, month after month. And with 7 CMO hires in tech, mostly B2B SaaS in the last two weeks, it was honestly hard to pick one. We picked Veeam because it’s a story of a massive, founder-led company navigating its "Act II".

Veeam was founded in 2006 by the classic visionary/tech-guru duo of Ratmir Timashev and Andrei Baronov, who sold their first company for $115 million. They were acquired by Insight Partners (our fave VC) in 2020 for a staggering $5 billion with a specific mandate: move the HQ to the U.S. and conquer the American market.

That "Act II" has worked. The company just hit $1.7 billion in Annual Recurring Revenue and has a $15 billion valuation. This is no scrappy startup; they're a B2B giant. And that's why this hire matters. They've hired a high-concept strategist to write "Act III."

Veeam Software has hired Allison Cerra as its new Chief Marketing Officer, a move that signals a pivot from product-led marketing to high-concept category design. This isn't a simple brand-polishing job; it's a strategic intervention. Looking at Linkedin data, there’s low attrition overall at 9% but in marketing, there’s a talent leak, with employees bleeding to direct rivals like Cohesity and Datadog. Cerra has been hired to provide the unified strategy the company is missing. A recent interview from her last CMO gig at Alchemy Technology shows she's a top-tier conceptual thinker.

Her signature move is a framework she calls the "3-Phase Arc of Transformation". She uses the music industry as an analogy: Chapter 1 was the "replicated digital twin" like Napster (a bad user experience); Chapter 2 was the user-experience-led model of iTunes and the iPod (a "joy to do"); and Chapter 3 is the "hyperpersonalization at scale" of Spotify ("stuff we can't imagine").

At her last job, she used this arc to brand the new category of "Anticipatory Banking". She's bringing this exact playbook to Veeam. Her new mandate is to evolve the company from a Chapter 2 player (reliable cloud backup) into a Chapter 3 pioneer. Her own quote from the announcement, "data resilience isn’t just protection – it’s permission to innovate", is the entire brief. This is proven by her past thought leadership: “Cyber resilience means planning for failure, not avoiding it at all costs”.

This hire directly addresses the CEO's stated need for a leader who "understands the intersection of technology and trust" and the internal culture. Cerra's philosophy is that "innovation doesn’t happen in isolation, it’s built on connections: between people, platforms, and purpose". She's the strategist brought in to break down Veeam's internal silos and give its 250-person marketing army a new, unified story.

HORIZON FAMILY BRANDS

Here in snowy Saratoga (yes, we got back from Tokyo, despite airport woes stateside), there’s good milk to drink. And we drink this version, so it’s super fun to see them staff the top marketing role.

This is a classic private equity playbook. In April 2024, Platinum Equity acquired Horizon Organic from Danone and, just a few months ago, rebranded the new standalone entity to Horizon Family Brands. The new CEO, Tyler Holm, has a clear mandate: use the cash flow from Horizon's #1 position in organic milk to "expand its product portfolio through strategic innovation and acquisitions over the next three to five years". We see this as a clear "build-and-buy" growth strategy.

Enter Andrew Springate. This is a heavyweight hire. Springate is the "trailblazer" and "Ad Age Marketer of the Year 2024" who just spent eight years as CMO of Keurig Dr Pepper, where he famously "propelled Dr Pepper to become the second largest soft drink brand in the U.S.". He is a CPG operator with a proven signature move: taking a massive, legacy brand and executing a "thoughtful growth plan" to find new, accelerated growth.

This hire is about more than milking milk. His mandate is a PE dream: "lead marketing, innovation, consumer insights & analytics, and research & development" a fascinating challenge in a category where the loudest "innovation" is the MAGA crowd's newfound obsession with raw, unpasteurized milk. The CEO's brief for him is to "lead our innovation pipeline" and build a portfolio of "better-for-you brands". He's been hired to take his Dr Pepper playbook and apply it to Horizon, using the stability of the core brand to fund and launch the next generation of high-growth products.

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