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Sonder 2026 Owned Media Global Report
Owned Media: The Cornerstone of a $500B Global Commerce Media Opportunity
The 2026 Sonder Owned Media Global Report, developed in partnership with the CMO Council, reveals the true scale of a rapidly emerging growth engine: a $573 billion global commercial opportunity that most brands and retailers have yet to fully unlock. While the United States represents more than one-third of this potential, the majority of owned media value sits outside the U.S., signaling massive...
Modern Online Gaming Phenomenon Fuels Digital Marketing Fervor
Smart Brands Seek Fans Among 3.6 Billion Global Gamers
The global interactive entertainment market has shifted in a profound way. There are 3.6 billion gamers, including over 2 billion mobile gamers, in the world today. Should your brand be getting into the game to score in this massive market...
The Big Book of Chat Commerce 2025
Unlocking A New Customer Engagement Architecture
Are you delivering a friction-free, instantly gratifying customer experience? If not, you’re at high risk of brand abandonment, especially among younger generations. Just look at the latest research: 8 in 10 consumers will leave when asked to install a brand-specific app, and 4 in 10 Gen Zers will hang up if put on hold. ...
CMO At The Crossroads
Assess Where You Need to Progress in the Intelligence-Powered, Marketing Technology Era
Marketing is entering a new era driven by Generative AI and data intelligence, demanding a transformative shift in the role of the CMO. CMOs must now be growth leaders, accountable for revenue, operational efficiency, and customer engagement in a connected, data-driven world...
2025 CMO Council Global Member Findings
An Enduring & Engaged Community of Marketing Unity Worldwide
The 2025 CMO Council Global Member Survey highlights a strong and lasting sense of community, with many members staying engaged for over five years. Most discovered the Council through events or peer referrals, and the top draw remains its trusted thought leadership. Professional development and networking continue to add meaningful value for a broad segment of the membership...
The Pathway to GenAI Competitive Advantage
Is Your Data Prepared to Unlock GenAI's Business Value?
After a year of delivering mostly marginal efficiency gains, GenAI is on the verge of accelerating functional effectiveness and competitive differentiation. Nearly 4 in 5 business leaders believe GenAI will deliver a competitive advantage over the next 18 months, such as AI agents improving the customer experience. But not everyone will be able to reap the benefits. Some 3 in 5 leaders aren't ...
CMO Council Marketing Vitality Index
Annual Assessment of Forces+Factors Impacting Functional Performance
The CMO Council has curated Marketing Performance Indicators (MPIs) from trusted third-party sources, centers of domain knowledge, and proprietary data to inform an analysis on marketing vitality for each of the five major marketing categories...
Instant Interaction Driving Business Traction
How the Live Mobile Chat Commerce Revolution Is Powering Fast, Frictionless Transactions, Secure, Lower Cost Customer Engagement and Stronger Brand Affinity
Chat Commerce is taking the world by storm. This emerging digital channel of engagement delivers fast and frictionless customer interactions with a brand’s chatbot or live agent conducted mostly over popular messaging platforms, such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp. It leverages these trusted social connections and engages localized audiences seeking to satisfy real-life needs.Chat ...
Marketing and Data Security: The Unlikely Brand Building Partnership
Can Marketing and Security Safeguard Brand Trust Amid the Data Storm?
Much rides on marketing’s relationship with information security to acquire, maintain and secure customer data for competitive advantage. Together, marketing and security can navigate perilous waters, such as Generative AI, trust and privacy concerns, en route to preserving and building the brand...
CMO Intentions 2024
Fueling Martech Innovation Through AI
MarTech procurement intentions have made a massive swing to embracing new GenAI tools, applications and analytics. Almost 60% of marketing leaders view this area of investment as offering the most value and ROI. This is good news and comes at a critical time: 1 in 3 CMOs say their campaign performance needs improvement or has underperformed. Our newest report, “CMO Intentions 2024,” ...
Shaping Marketing's Future Impact And Driving Profitable Growth
It's crucial for CMOs to understand the waves of change hitting us and how to harness them for positive transformation.
We have spent months understanding the overwhelming challenges the CMOs are faced with and the years and decades of first-hand experience addressing those leveraging data and insight into development to define these critical priorities going forward. These are not just challenges; they're opportunities for us to shape marketing's future and the impact we can deliver...
Fire Up Your B2B Revenue Generation Engine
Bringing Precision, Predictability and Performance to Customer Targeting, Outreach and Conversion
Most B2B marketers say they should be driving the customer-acquisition machine, yet 62% say their lead gen and engagement strategy underperforms! Millions of dollars are being wasted on misguided “spray and pray” campaigns. ...
What Every CMO Needs to Know About Sponsorship
When it’s done right, sponsorship provides one of the most powerful, flexible, and accountable of all marketing media. The problem is that in 99% of the cases, sponsorship fails because of a lack of strategic direction, a lack of skills, and a lack of accountability – all areas where small changes precipitated by marketing leadership can invoke huge changes in company fortunes. Even if...
Boosting Yield In The Account Marketing Field
Bringing Precision, Personalization and Performance to Customer Revenue Growth
Here’s a handy primer from the CMO Council and WM America on how to Boost Yield in the Account Marketing Field. No more “spray and pray.” Apply new ABM methodologies using precision prospecting, timely and relevant engagement, and AI-driven data enrichment for intention-based buyer targeting...
Marketing and Finance: Fueling Innovation or Falling Behind?
Economic Adversity Will Test Their Resolve for Collaboration and Innovation
Economic headwinds have arrived, and chances are, you’re not prepared. Only 10% of marketing leaders strongly believe their marketing investments, whose reins are often held by finance, position them to emerge from economic turmoil ahead of the competition, according to our new report produced in collaboration with KPMG LLP...
Getting Smart About Ad Waste
Always-On Attribution Eliminates Up To 94% of Media Waste
CMOs are facing growing budget pressures and increased expectations to drive positive ROAS from their media investments. Optimizing media spend based on always-on attribution has proven to drive increased incremental sales and revenue in a new study conducted by InMarket, in cooperation with the CMO Council...
Outsmart Adversity
How CMOs Can Weather Economic Headwinds and Emerge Poised for Growth
With looming economic headwinds, this year will test marketing’s mettle to survive them and even emerge in a growth position. Yet only 34% of marketing leaders are highly confident in their ability to handle economic adversity and uncertainty against their revenue growth mandate. ...
Sales & Marketing: Driving Revenue Through Collaboration
Altered Purchasing Patterns Put New Emphasis on the CMO-CRO Relationship
Most sales and marketing organizations haven’t been able to pivot fast enough to the new digital buyer. More than 70% of marketers don’t feel very confident in their current sales and marketing model to sell effectively in the digitalized customer journey. This means they risk falling short of their revenue mandate...
Cracking Tomorrow’s CX Code
Real-time customer intelligence for exceptional experience
It’s no secret that the last few years have upended the way customers want to interact with companies. Digital engagement has led to higher customer expectations, bigger demands and about a million more choices if one brand doesn’t deliver. Privacy laws and changes by tech companies have marketers scrambling to get the data they need to meet customer expectations...
High-Velocity Data Marketing
Future State: Evolving into an ALERT Enterprise
Marketers are turning increasingly to data as a source of wisdom and foresight; and to get ahead of sudden disruptions and heightened consumer expectations. The CMO is at the epicenter of this data movement at a time when companies need strategic, intelligence-based direction more than ever...
National Brands Kickstart Local Demand
When local businesses stumble, a national brand’s revenue tumbles. A third of national marketers say 40% or more of their company’s revenue comes from local business partners, yet less than 30% of small businesses have fully recovered from the pandemic. Do the math, and you’ll see a lot of lost revenue...
The High-Velocity Data Marketer
Meeting disruption with insights at speed
CMOs have entered a new era of high-velocity data marketing to spot sudden disruptions in market and customer behavior. We’re talking about the speed of acquiring real-time, relevant data signals. Speed of generating data insights. Speed of closing the gap between data and insights, insights and action...
Smart Spending at Speed
How to Turn Procurement Into Your (Not So) Secret Growth Engine
Given today’s marketing pressures, such as tighter budgets, leaner staff, higher stakes with MarTech, and expectations of increased and tangible return on marketing investments, smart and fast marketing sourcing has become a team sport.This has led to a grassroots refresh of marketing’s relationship with procurement. Why? CMOs who more actively involve procurement in marketing sourcing...
Humanize + Optimize The Way You Recognize Every Customer + Contact
Using Frictionless Biometrics Across All Channels of Engagement
Improving digital customer experience (DCX) is now a crucial business issue for brands. Consumers have flocked to digital channels since the start of the pandemic. Too often, they have encounted experiences that don’t satisfy, causing many to abandon transactions and take their business elsewhere. Very often, the problem is digital authentication and identity verification. More than 80 ...
Making High-Tech MarTech Pay Off
Future of MarTech Depends on CMO-CIO Relationships
As high-tech companies emerge from the pandemic, marketing and MarTech lie at the heart of the recovery. To optimize MarTech investments, marketing needs to have a very effective relationship with IT that spans strategy, selection and management. Such a working relationship drives MarTech innovation, capability maturity and higher performance. ...
Making Consumer Products MarTech Pay Off
Future of MarTech Depends on CMO-CIO Relationships
As consumer products companies emerge from the pandemic, marketing and MarTech lie at the heart of the recovery. To optimize MarTech investments, marketing needs to have a very effective relationship with IT that spans strategy, selection and management. Such a working relationship drives MarTech innovation, capability maturity and higher performance. ...
Why Customer Service Is The New Marketing
For far too long, customer service had a comfortable place on marketing’s back burner. But what happens when the pot starts to boil over?The customer journey is no longer a linear funnel. With so much noise and endless distractions, marketers need to foster real, human connections. New research from Acquire finds that customer service is the new key to effective marketing, loyalty, ...
Making MarTech Pay Off
Future of MarTech Depends on CMO-CIO Relationships
As companies emerge from the pandemic, marketing and MarTech lie at the heart of the recovery. To optimize MarTech investments, marketing needs to have a very effective relationship with IT that spans strategy, selection and management. Such a working relationship drives MarTech innovation, capability maturity and higher performance. ...
Financial Service and Online Payment Edition
Uncover your competitors’ social advertising strategies and optimize your brand campaigns to influence consumer sentiment and acquisition, outsmart your competition, and win market share
Don’t fall prey to one-dimensional data analysis for determining your brands multidimensional impact. This Partner Content report explores how marketing leaders need to see farther and deeper than ever before into their brand’s analytics, impact and performance. Learn how to achieve a 360-degree view of your brand strategy metrics to see how you stack up against competitors...
Health Insurance Edition
Uncover your competitors' social advertising strategies and optimize your brand campaigns to influence consumer sentiment and acquisition, outsmart your competition, and win market share
Are you measuring yourself in a silo? This Partner Content report focuses on the health insurance industry and provides unique strategies for your organization to see into your brand’s competitive landscape. Learn how to outsmart your competition and win market share with more visibility and context than ever before...
Consumer Electronics Computers Edition
Uncover your competitors' social advertising strategies and optimize your brand campaigns to influence consumer sentiment and acquisition, outsmart your competition, and win market share
Customers are people, too. So many emotions are behind each click, purchase and interaction customers have with your brand. This Partner Content report explores how marketing leaders can measure their brand analytics, impact and campaigns beyond the narrow lens of one-dimensional data. Treat customers as more than just a number...
Brandtotal Top Chart Reports
May-June 2021
BrandTotal’s Top Performers charts presents brands that dominated social media that month. Learn what worked and why, how leading brands are generated social media success and more! This Partner Content report covers three main categories: Top 10 Most Engaging Ads, Top 10 Most Loved Ads, and Top 10 Spenders. Did your organization make the cut...
The Omnichannel Experience
Why Companies are Paying Attention To It
Are marketers missing the mark with their content? For 42% of marketers, content is the most vital tool for lead acquisition, yet it’s consistently underutilized. Omnichannel communication in today's digital climate requires cohesive, accessible and impactful content narratives in order to resonate with rapidly evolving audiences' needs. For many brands, gaps in communication, inconsistent ...
Airlines And Hospitality
Brands Are Pivoting Their Strategy and Messaging To Grab Market Share As The World Opens Back Up
The world is opening up! The industry that was initially the hardest hit – travel – is set to lead the recovery. This industry report highlights who is dominating the Share-of-Voice (SOV), which creatives are catching fire, what the consumer sentiment is around brands and even specific posts, what each brand’s messaging and positioning strategy is, and who’s getting it ...
How Changing Consumption Patterns have Shaped the Way Food and Beverage Brands are Advertising
Leading Food and Beverage brands are household names and key drivers of the economy. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, fundamentally changed the way we relate to these brands. If there’s one thing we’ve learned over the past year, it is the importance of brand messaging, particularly when it comes to paid social media messaging and creative. What messages are brands attempting to connect...
The Future of Finance Lies in a Customer Segment of One
How Financial Services Can Remain Relevant In The Eyes Of The Customer
An ecosystem is rapidly unfolding in financial services, blurring boundaries between stalwart finance institutions, giant tech companies and emerging FinTechs. Financial services — banking, payments, wealth management and more — need to devise a strategy on how to align to this new paradigm and come up with defensible competitive positions...
Will Retailers Capitalize or Capsize on Consumer Data?
How to Ascend the Analytics Maturity Curve and Deliver a Winning Digital Experience
Retailers are at crossroads as the world emerges from the pandemic, which tore a particularly destructive path in the retail and consumer packaged goods industries...
Scaling the Value of the CMO
How to Globalize, Modernize and Optimize Enterprise Marketing Operations with Interim CMO Domain Experts and Advisors
Chief marketers are stretched and challenged like never before. The global pandemic has disrupted markets, operations and customer behaviors. Agile recovery and new routes to revenue are the new imperatives. Leaner, more digitally proficient marketing organizations with shared purpose and greater productivity are a key deliverable for 2021. Better integrating and leveraging new automation ...
Getting it Done in 2021
Marketing Leader Intentions + Projections
There’s some good news and optimism from global marketing leaders looking for growth recovery in 2021. Nearly two-thirds of 200 members surveyed by the CMO Council worldwide say they will boost marketing spend in the coming year and most don’t expect to downsize or re-structure their organizations...
Forging the Future of Customer Experience
Building a Unified Data Foundation For Turning Customer Insight Into Action
The rise of the data-driven marketer has propelled the marketing function beyond branding and into the realm of customer experience and revenue growth. Before marketers can succeed in their new role, however, they must first solve the customer data conundrum. A whopping 60% of marketers aren’t happy with the depth and granularity of customer insights, while 36% don’t even have the data...
Authority Leadership Marketing
Making Content the Cornerstone of Customer Engagement and Relevance
B2B marketers today must introduce strategic themes and advocacy platforms that resonate with customer decision makers sweating business issues, problems and challenges. By assuming a trusted authority leader role and evidencing intimacy with market needs and requirements, vendors become credible sources of relevant information and conversation...
How To Achieve Transformational Growth
Combining Vision, Insight, and Innovation with Cultural Alignment and Unified, Disciplined Digital Execution
CMOs in the age of digital transformation and accelerating competitive intensity are being challenged to set forth new routes to revenue. With the expectation that the mandate of today's CMO is to achieve consistent and substantial growth, there is increasing pressure to identify strategies that will achieve increased customer value, scale global operations and improve product success...
Exceeding the Requirements of the Trust Economy
Identifying Opportunities to Secure the Trust in Brand Experiences
Warren Buffet famously said, “It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.” This has never been more true when it comes to the sacred trust between customers and brands. Today’s customers are ready to flee brands that can’t keep personal data secure. Yet, too many brands risk losing customer trust in the face of massive data proliferation and rising ...
Are Garbage Leads Trashing Your Brand?
Time to Add More Compliance to Lead Marketing Science
Too often, marketers provision leads from agencies, offshore list sources, internal departments or media channels that are not the result of an opt-in, permission-based, relevant content-consumption process. In other words, they’re garbage. And it gets worse: These leads may be coming from bad actors, such as overseas lead farms cutting corners and outright illicit name scrapers. All of ...
Critical Channels of Choice
Meeting the Customer Expectation for Omnichannel Relationships
Omnichannel IS the critical channel of choice. No matter what the generation, from Gen X all the way to the Silent Generation, consumers want a blend of both digital and physical channel experiences. Yet only 13 percent of consumers believe that brands are fully meeting this expectation and delivering across both physical and digital channels. ...
Bringing a Human Voice to Customer Choice
Rededicating Marketing to Serve the People in Front of the Data
Chief Marketing Officers believe brands like Amazon, Google, Apple, Nike and Starbucks are getting customer experience right, looking at omni-channel engagement as a means to guide and inspire customers on a journey, and not just push them forward in a buying process. And in fact, this human-first approach is not just developing better relationships, but driving significant profitability and ...
The CMO's Growth Driving Playbook
CMOs are expected to drive growth. Yet while research released in Q2 earlier this year (2018) highlighted that CMOs are increasingly activating on growth-driving activities, many are still stuck in the traditional role of brand storyteller rather than strategic revenue creator. Indeed, many are far less comfortable with key aspects of driving growth such as architecting the customer experience and...
GDPR: Impact and Opportunity
How Marketing Leaders Addressed GDPR Readiness and Compliance
GDPR, the European Union’s new General Data Protection Regulation, has forced marketers to rethink their operations to ensure they are compliant. Yet new research highlights that far too many marketers are unaware that GDPR even applies to them, and have taken no steps to modify their policies...
Doing More With Data
Discovering Data-Accelerated Revenue Traction
Charged with the mandate of elevating customer experience, marketers increasingly look to data to better engage with customers and identify new opportunities. Yet previous CMO Council research highlights that marketers admit their organizations could do more to transform the data supply chain to allow them to do more with internal data assets...
Doing More With Data: Strategic Overview
Assessing the Current Dynamic of Data, Engagement and Cross-Functional Collaboration
Recent CMO Council research highlights the need for executives across marketing, commerce and supply chain to do more with the data at their fingertips, especially given the need to provide a superior customer experience in an omni-channel environment...
CMOs and the Spark to Drive Growth - Executive Perspectives
How do Marketing Leaders Intend to Drive the Growth Agenda?
In the first part of this investigative growth-driving series, “CMO Action to Spark a Growth Reaction,” we highlighted results of a survey of nearly 200 senior marketing leaders. That research demonstrated that on the road to driving growth, CMOs have evolved beyond their traditional role as brand growth leader, and today are getting comfortable in taking on the role of sales and ...
CMOs and the Spark to Drive Growth
How do Marketing Leaders Intend to Drive the Growth Agenda?
CMOs are increasingly expected to drive growth. In our first investigation into marketers as growth-drivers in 2016, 68 percent of the marketing leaders surveyed saw themselves as growth leaders. They also revealed that senior management and the board held them accountable for growth, believing it was their chief or primary mandate. Yet that investigation also revealed that far too many marketers ...
Gaining Traction With Every Digital Interaction
Identifying Operational Efficiencies That Impact Customer Experiences
Nearly 80 percent of marketers surveyed for this study by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council reveal they are still unable to fully realize the revenue potential of their customers. Developed in partnership with SendWithUs, this strategic brief reveals that collaboration around the channels of choice for the customer is critical to turning an automated touchpoint into a revenue-producing ...
The State of Engagement
Bridging the Customer Journey Across Every Last Mile
Customer empowerment is heightening the job security risks of chief marketing officers, who are struggling to keep up with new digitally driven ways to engage, satisfy and enrich the experience of more mobile, savvy and fickle consumers...
Ingenuity in the Global eCommerce Community
How To Compete and Not Get Beat in the Digital Retail Marketplace
This strategic brief explores how the massive scale, data quality and customization capability of online marketplaces are bringing new levels of customer insight, enriched experiences and added value to brands...
Brand Protection From Digital Content Infection
Safeguarding Brand Reputation Through Diligent Ad Channel Selection
While programmatic ad spend continues to increase exponentially year over year, the risk of digital display ads appearing next to offensive or objectionable content is becoming a top concern for marketers. In fact, this study—conducted in partnership with Dow Jones—reveals that 72 percent of marketers are concerned about brand integrity and control when it comes to their ...
Establishing and Enriching the Content Supply Chain
Aligning Campaigns, Content and the Customer for Exceptional Experience
While as much as a third of most marketing budgets are dedicated to content origination, few companies formally assess the effectiveness of their content strategies and the relevance and value of content offerings. Even fewer are examining the performance, influence and impact of content in the pre-sales, conversion and customer relationship development areas...
Strategy 2017
Are You Asking the Right Questions to Get Customer Experience Right?
While marketers made great strides in taking ownership of customer experience (CX) strategies in 2016, recent research from the CMO Council reveals that 49 percent of marketers believe they are only able to deliver connected, personalized, data-led experiences some of the time—and primarily only across digital engagements. Furthermore, when asked about the ROI of these experiences, only 7 ...
The CMO Shift to Gaining Business Lift: Executive Perspectives
The role of the CMO has evolved far beyond anyone could have predicted 10 years ago. Gone is the traditional role of mere brand ambassador, replaced with the critical role of business driver, change agent and customer experience champion. As was revealed in the report "The CMO Shift to Gaining Business Lift," CMOs have a clear desire, and business-supported mandate to serve as the primary growth ...
Connected Interaction to Power Brand Attraction
How Marketing Is Transforming to Create More Connected Customer Engagements
According to this research by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council and IBM, senior marketers will be devoting significant effort to better understanding the customer journey and how to create more personal, content-rich and connected experiences for their customers in 2017. The success of these efforts, however, will be contingent on their ability to create alignment across the digital and ...
Mind the Gap
Outlining Key Actions Marketers Can Employ Across Their Teams to Achieve True Customer Experience Success
Believe it or not, just 8 percent of 200 chief marketers surveyed by the CMO Council in Q3 admit to auditing, assessing and continually improving the customer experience. Given the critical need to convert, grow and retain relationships in an omni-channel world, this is a pretty pitiful statistic...
The CMO Shift to Gaining Business Lift
The CMO of today has denounced the traditional role of mere brand ambassador, instead opting to actively assert their role as business driver, change agent and customer experience champion. But while the CMO of today knows they will need to take the driver's seat in steering the development of next generation products, services, business models and customer experiences, many may still be falling ...
Omnichannel's Missing Link
Identifying the Disconnect Between Brands and Retail Partners
According to the findings from this CMO Council study, conducted in partnership with digital marketing intelligence company Netsertive, the strength of the entire omnichannel experience may lie in the last mile of the journey, where customers are choosing to transact, as well as in local retail partnerships and touchpoints. Marketers almost unanimously agree that delivering an omnichannel ...
The New Rules of Engagement
A Look Into Shopper Marketing
Marketers in today’s connected world are aiming to deliver personalized communications to consumers, but are they really getting it right? According to a study by the CMO Council, in partnership with Bazaarvoice, while consumers are increasingly comfortable with marketers using their personal data for targeted advertising that is relevant to them, marketers are still struggling to deliver ...
Building Brands That Attract + Engage Fans
How Culturally Connected Brands Stay Valued, Real and Relevant With Consumers
How do consumer brands stay relevant, authentic and differentiated in a rapidly evolving and culturally complex global market? With 195 countries and 6,500 languages around the world, the challenge is daunting as brands seek new methods and motivators to connect and engage with audiences through social, mobile, experiential, digital advertising and eCommerce channels...
The Purpose-Built Experience
Starting With the Customer and Adding a Heavy Dose of Empathy
Despite the understanding that the desire to create customer-centric experiences is driving marketing, marketers are still struggling to achieve true customer experience success. In fact, 73 percent of marketers surveyed by the CMO Council stated that customer centricity was critical to the success of the business, but 41 percent indicated that their lack of customer-centric experiences had ...
Making Personalization Possible
Amplifying the Customer’s Voice for a Lasting Experience
Clicks, views, posts, shares and visits have taken a back seat to acquisition, retention and revenue growth as core measures of customer experience and engagement success, reports the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council. According to a new study conducted with Microsoft Corp., marketers are de-prioritizing digital campaign metrics in favor of business-focused measurements that more directly tie ...
Predicting Routes to Revenue
Identifying Real-Time Decisions for Business-Driving Engagement
While there is an over-abundance of consumer data and analytics, marketers have yet to master what meteorologists and economists do best: funnel this multiplicity of data into actionable insights to reliably anticipate and predict what’s ahead and then prepare for it...
CMO Shift to Gaining Business Lift Background Presentation
This presentation explores background research sourced by the CMO Council, Deloitte, and third parties to provides additional context to our latest initiative, "The CMO Shift to Gaining Business Lift" in three main exploratory research areas...
Mapping Monetization
Best Practices and Strategies for Identifying New Opportunities and Maximizing Existing Experiences
The CMO Council recently partnered with Vindicia, the leaders in payment and billing solutions, to host a series of executive roundtables to discuss new paths to revenue and the challenges to monetization optimization. The number one issue that marketers found most challenging to overcome: FEAR...
Activating the New American Mainstream
Defining, Reaching and Engaging the Multicultural Market
This study—entitled “Activating the New American Mainstream”—addresses the necessity of reaching these critical customer segments that are quickly becoming the new mainstream consumers in America. According to a 10-question survey of 150 North America-based senior marketing executives, 67 percent reveal that their CMO has a high level of buy-in and support for multicultural...
Total View for Total Engagement
New Challenges in Reaching and Engaging the SMB Audience
For a previous study by the CMO Council (titled “Better Traction From Smarter SMB Interaction”), some 70 percent of the 184 total respondents revealed that the SMB market is an extremely important market for their businesses, with only 5 percent of marketers feeling that the market was not important at all. Looking toward the future, 66 percent anticipated an increase in SMB focus, ...
From Creativity to Content
The Role of Visual Media in Impactful Brand Storytelling
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but marketers have not turned a strategic lens on optimizing the return from their visual media content investments. While 65 percent of senior marketing executives believe visual assets are core to how their brand story is communicated, a scant 27 percent have the ability to aggregate, organize and manage these assets across marketing and non-marketing ...
The Path Forward
Marketing’s Outlook Into The Digital Future
This strategic report from the CMO Council and Ebiquity suggests that as budgets increase to fund digital marketing campaigns and more personalized customer engagement, marketers now need additional expertise in data analytics, content creation and channel proliferation to improve ROI...
APAC Digital Directions
Strategies, Mandates and Challenges
Conducted in partnership with Adobe, this report highlights that while improvements are clearly being made when it comes to digital, APAC marketers are still largely focused on single-vector metrics that measure past success or single points of campaign performance, and they are typically not measuring impact on harder business metrics, such as sales pipeline measurement or customer lifetime value...
The State of Digital Brand Advertising
2014 Industry Benchmarks Report
For three years, the CMO Council partnered with Nielsen to survey brands, agencies and media publishers to learn more about how—and where—they’re spending advertising dollars. The latest resulting white paper—titled “The State of Digital Brand Advertising”—takes a detailed look at the steps marketers are taking as they strive to maximize the impact of ...
Best Practices in Engaging Mobile Customers
As part of a recent study by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council and SAS—titled “Getting in Sync With Mobile Customers”—leading marketers shared their insights around mobile as a critical component within the marketing toolkit through a quantitative survey. This research found that mobile can be a real game-changer for marketers who create a full strategy around it ...
Getting in Sync With Mobile Customers
Capitalizing on Marketing's Big Mobile Opportunity
With mobile device dependency central to today’s digital lifestyles, enlightened brands are creating new mobile relationship marketing strategies that go well beyond simple app and mobile advertising delivery. In this study from the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council, conducted in partnership with SAS, we found that 61 percent of marketers surveyed reveal they have deployed some form of ...
APAC Digital Marketing Performance Dashboard 2014
The 2014 digital dashboard has found that countries such as Australia, India and Singapore are pulling away with strong executive support and digital champions while South Korea, China and Hong Kong struggle with executive support and skill shortages. It also found that marketers are not moving beyond more basic measurements. Asked whether they are measuring throughout the life of campaigns, only ...
Quantify How Well You Unify
Exploring the Business Impact of Marketing Technology Integration
This report explores how well chief marketers are taking ownership of digital marketing technology strategies and to what degree they are unifying and extracting value from multiplying customer data sources. The 38-page report summarizes the quantitative insights of 150 senior marketers and highlights insights from qualitative interviews with leading marketers at Wells Fargo, Charles Schwab, ...
State of Marketing 2014
A Global and Multi-Regional Marketing Assessment
The "State of Marketing"—the most valued annual study by the CMO Council—provides an in-depth view of global marketing vitality and direction and serves as a valuable resource tool to help calibrate, prioritize and make a business case for marketing investments. The benchmark report is based on a 50-point assessment taken by more than 525 senior-level marketers from around the globe. ...
Localize to Globalize
Unifying Messages, Experiences and Engagements Across Global Campaigns
In this age of the customer-defined experience, language and how we present content to our customers can mean the difference between rejection and transaction. While much focus has been placed on the channels through which content can be delivered, less attention has been paid to the complex challenges associated with adapting, packaging and translating content for different audiences, cultures ...
Real Insight: Real Time
Marketing's Social Evolution
Two CMO Council Dinner Dialogue events were held in early 2014 in New York and Los Angeles to discuss the intersection of social, content and business performance. With marketers from brands like Sirius XM, Harper Collins, Johnson & Johnson, Macy’s, NBA, Live Nation, Paramount, Honda and many more in attendance, it was clear that the organizations were all at different stages in their ...
Best Practices in Mobile Relationship Marketing and Engagement: Capitalizing on Mobile Relationship Opportunities
While global consumers have been quick to adopt an immersive mobile lifestyle, marketers have been a bit more cautious about fully committing to mobile relationship marketing (MRM). More brands are launching apps or are establishing mobile-enabled content, but few are looking at the totality of the mobile relationship and fully integrating it into the overarching marketing strategy...
The Content Connection to Vendor Selection
How Online Information Sourcing Influences the Pre-Sales Buying Process
This strategic brief includes findings from a survey of 352 senior-level B2B buyers, influencers and decision makers and features insights into the effectiveness of marketing content in generating value for customers. It also includes qualitative findings of interviews conducted with marketing executives at IBM, Allegro Development, AppNexus, CA Technologies and more. It provides an in-depth, well...
Turning Social Feeds Into Business Leads
“Turning Social Feeds Into Business Leads,” developed in partnership with hoojook, Inc., argues that the auto industry ecosystem should do more to leverage social media as a platform for driving business leads into sales pipelines. Based on interviews with senior marketers and executives from auto manufacturers, dealer networks, aftermarket service providers and B2B automotive ...
Best Practices in Big Data and Engagement
Capitalizing on Big Data Opportunities
This white paper is the first in a four-part series, which looks at how leading brands are turning big data into actionable customer insights and engagements. Featured are two best-practice studies in which both brands are truly innovating and activating big data analytics to create some of the most relevant and profitable experiences with their customers...
Destination 2017
Preparing to Meet Tomorrow's Customer Experience Expectations
Building a fully connected customer experience requires marketers to have a complete, 360-degree view of the customer. In addition, customers expect transparency and value from the brands with whom they choose to do business, and this requires marketers to have customer intelligence and data that enable them to meet customers' expectations of seamless and highly personalized engagements. And as ...
Know More to Grow More
Applying Timely, Targeted and Tailored Insight to Improve Pipeline Performance
Conducted in partnership with Dun & Bradstreet, this report identifies a number of gaps in the customer intelligence process and underscores the importance of arming front-line resources with alerts and insights to capitalize on moments of opportunity. And while marketers agree that the provision of this intelligence is important, only 21 percent of those surveyed feel equipped to provide this...
Advancing Analytics
How Insight Fuels the Marketing Engine
The demand for a marketing intelligence engine that can aggregate data and deliver the facts marketers need to create more engaging customer experiences has never been greater. Marketers must reach their customers with real-time, relevant messages through the customers’ preferred channels to meet their ever-evolving needs and be able to sort through the wealth of data without having it ...
Better Lead Yield in the Content Marketing Field
How to Select, Connect and Convert Business Buyers Through Engaging Content and Smarter Multi-Channel Delivery
Vendor content frequently lacks value and trustworthiness in the eyes of BtoB buyers, who are increasingly turning to more trusted, peer-driven sources of content along their path to purchase, according to the CMO Council's Content ROI Center. This white paper includes the results of a survey of more than 400 BtoB buyers and content seekers around the world who were reached through NetLine ...
Customer Attainment From Event Engagement
Benchmarking the Business Value of Trade Shows and Events
While events and trade shows are still a vital part of the marketing and customer engagement mix, senior marketers remain challenged to identify effective methods to measure and prove ROI, according to this CMO Council study, conducted in partnership with the Exhibit & Event Marketers Association. Further complicating this scenario is that events and trade shows have largely remained isolated ...
2013 Online Advertising Performance Outlook
Reaping the Full Benefits of Online Advertising Efforts
According to the McKinsey Quarterly, “the rapid growth of online advertising hides a serious challenge: the digital world has developed faster than the tools needed to measure it. This problem has made it difficult for marketers to fully exploit the web’s promise as the most targeted and measurable medium in the history of marketing…Hobbled by nascent ...
Big Data's Biggest Role: Aligning the CMO & CIO
Greater Partnership Drives Enterprise-Wide Customer Centricity
The CMO Council, along with partner SAS, set out to better understand the key challenges, opportunities and requirements that both CMOs and CIOs were facing in their journey to develop a more customer-centric enterprise. Through the research, what has emerged is a picture of alignment around platform and technology, as well as the opportunity for even deeper connections around data and ...
MRM Year In Review
Mobile Advertising Bright Spots in 2012
As marketers look to understand, test, leverage, exploit and measure mobile advertising, there is also a call for best practices in how this integrates with both online and offline customer acquisition and relationship-building initiatives. To answer this call, the CMO Council identified a collection of brand leaders for this whitepaper, which also includes media consumption insights gathered by ...
Engage at Every Stage: Using Mobile Relationship Marketing (MRM) to Put More Interaction in the Hands of the Customer
The desire to engage at every stage of the customer lifecycle has always been the unrealized goal of savvy marketers, but this may no longer be the case. Marketers are putting mobile interaction in the hands of consumers and finding clever, gratifying ways to add value to every aspect of the brand experience, reports the CMO Council, but some challenges still remain.Detailed in the full report are...
Advancing Customer Intelligence in APAC
A Study in the CMO Council's Improve Every Marketing Move Initiative
This report explores how companies, specifically those with a presence in Asia-Pacific, can engage with customers in a more valuable way by being more adept at big data analytics. Not surprisingly, marketers report being overwhelmed by growing volumes of customer data and are still playing catch-up in the social media-driven, mobile device-dependent Asia- Pacific market. Download the full report ...
Variance in the Social Brand Experience
The CMO Council set out to take a closer look at the state of affairs in the busy two-way street of social media marketing from both points of view: the consumer’s and the marketer’s. We surveyed 132 senior marketers and more than 1,200 consumers on the subject of social media, asking each how and why they are currently using it, what they get out of it, and what they’d like...
Localize to Optimize Sales Channel Effectiveness
Powering Performance on a Field Marketing Level Through Localized Content
Localized marketing has become a critical area of strategic focus and competitive advantage for brands. Yet, just 12 percent of marketers believe they have highly evolved campaigns and analytics on a local level in contrast to nearly 50 percent who see themselves as underperforming or needing new strategic thinking and capability development in local marketing. In this study &...
What's Critical in the Vertical: Global Banking
The latest report in the "Critical in the Vertical" series showcases research from more than 1,200 consumers and delves into the needs, expectations, and pain points of banking’s retail market. It also includes insight from over 120 senior-level marketers from around the globe, who outline where and how banks should invest, communicate, and address consumer concerns. (Published: 2001...
The 2011 State of Marketing
Outlook, Intentions & Investments
Say goodbye to “Random Acts of Marketing” as integration, alignment, visibility and return on investment (ROI) all top the list of requirements for marketing performance improvement through 2011. Among the priorities, marketers intend to add a one-two-punch of marketing analytics talent coupled with strategic planning and business development experience to better target, segment and ...
What's Critical in the Vertical: Utilities
Relevant Messaging That Engages a Targeted Audience
Generating loyalty at a time when consumers are making active decisions over which bills to pay makes marketing within the utility space an ever-changing and challenging role. The CMO Council interviewed over 1,000 utility consumers and 100 utility marketers to get an understanding of needs, requirements and sentiment. The end product? 30 pages of insight into customer engagement, advocacy and ...
Renovate to Innovate
Building Performance-Driven Marketing Organizations
As businesses in every industry work to transform themselves, CMOs are being tasked with driving the bottom line as business strategists. No longer just brand managers, marketing executives are now hired as change agents and decision-makers. The CMO Council sat down with over 20 newly appointed CMOs and delved into the challenges and nuances of their role. In addition to these interviews, the ...
What's Critical in the Vertical: Retail Banking In Australia
Meeting the Needs of a New, Demanding Customer
Only 15 percent of marketers in Australia’s $2.5 trillion banking sector feel confident they have sufficient insights into customer profitability, value and retention. While Australia remained on steady footing through the global recession, bank marketers now face a younger, smarter banking customer with a desire for greater digital interaction and online engagement. The complimentary paper...
What's Critical In the Vertical: Insurance
There is some great news for marketers in the insurance space: your customers are ready, willing and able to learn more about what you do and how you can become more involved in their lives. This may simplify the news, but according to the consumers surveyed for What's Critical in the Insurance Vertical, 21 percent of consumers who received information about additional products or services ...
Mobile Relationship Marketing
Opportunity to Put Interaction in the Hands of 5 Billion Global Mobile Consumers
As the most pervasive channel of communications and targeted engagement on the planet, the mobile phone reaches more than 5 billion users globally. The mobile channel is an unprecedented opportunity to reach both developed consumer markets in new an intrusive way, and developing regions that cater to a previously untapped, unreachable, and unbanked mass of humanity. The Big Brands Embrace the Move...
State of Marketing 2010
Outlook, Intentions and Investments for 2010
The CMO Council State of Marketing Report, featuring the 2010 Marketing Outlook Audit, is the largest annual independent assessment of senior marketing executives today. This annual global benchmarking initiative undertaken by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council, gains insights into how senior marketing decision makers are managing marketing mix modeling, budget allocations and media mix ...
Bringing Social Security to the Online Community
A Presentation by Donovan Neale-May
A crucial concern for many users is security, a CMO Council survey (in process) of online social network users and trusted business group participants, shows that social networks worry about their personal data being stolen, spam, phishing, accepting third-party application invites, etc. Protecting personal, professional, and corporate reputations is a growing concern as well as the attraction to ...
Protection From Brand Infection
Marketer's Fight Against Fakes, Frauds and Infringements
Sophisticated and savvy online brand extortionists and cyber scammers are boldly preying on unsuspecting consumers with bogus brand name email/websites, deals and inducements that entrap, extort and expose consumers to financial loss, identity theft, and viral infection. Offline, global and organized counterfeiting operations fueled by the down economy are flooding the market with knock-offs and ...
Marketing Outlook 2009
Senior Executive Course for Strategy and Spend
Customer anxiety and cutbacks are the biggest factors influencing marketing budget allocation in 2009, reports the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council in its annual Marketing Outlook study. Despite a restrained economy, however, marketers see budgets holding up fairly well with dollars being stringently controlled and directed against growing and retaining market share...
The Leaders In Loyalty
Feeling the Love From The Loyalty Clubs
Customer loyalty and rewards programs are everywhere – it seems like every brand has one and the average consumer is carrying a handful of laminated cards from big retailers alongside a few hole-punched printed cards from their neighborhood burrito palace or dry cleaner. Yet, through the CMO Council’s research in The Leaders in Loyalty: Feeling the Love from the Loyalty Club these ...
Mastering the CLOSE: New York
Event Wrap Up and Summary
On January 22, 2008, 30 sales and marketing executives gathered at Columbia University to convene the first in a series of six global workshops focused on the alignment of sales and marketing as a vehicle to optimize sales effectiveness and, ultimately, drive business growth. Attendees spanned industries as diverse as financial services (represented by American Express and HSBC) to high tech (...
Closing the Gap
The Sales and Marketing Alignment Imperative
Global businesses continue to suffer from a seemingly unbridgeable divide between their marketing and sales teams—a gap which undermines two of the most important competencies necessary to generate demand, capture revenue and gain competitive advantage. The traditional relationship between sales, marketing and channel groups tends to be more antagonistic than synergistic. Even in those ...
Mastering the CLOSE: Paris
Event Wrap Up and Summary
Paris in the springtime. Picturesque. Romantic. Collaborative? CLOSE selected Paris as the sixth and final venue of its six-month global think tank junket. Over the course of six months, the CLOSE workshops gathered some of the most open, honest, eager and seasoned sales and marketing executives the world has to offer. The Paris contingent proved yet again that while the divide between sales and ...
Mastering The CLOSE: Palo Alto
Event Wrap Up and Summary
The needs, challenges and expectations of America’s high tech companies is not brought into clearer (and harsher) focus than in the Silicon Valley. Through its history of bubbles that burst and companies whose future hinged on sales in an era of giant marketing and media spend simply can not be hidden. And through it all, the region continued to remain relatively small and insulated. Sales ...
Business Gain From How You Retain
Addressing The Challenge of Customer Churn and Marketing Burn
Business Gain From How You Retain examines ways companies can improve the return on customer equity and lifetime value by making customer insight, understanding and intimacy a hallmark of the organization. The study assesses the degree to which major global brands are unifying and centralizing customer data, undertaking effective marketing analytics, embracing advanced segmentation strategies, and...
Mastering the CLOSE: Brazil
Event Wrap Up and Summary
In late 2007, the CMO Council set up a membership organization, CLOSE: The Coalition to Leverage and Optimize Sales Effectiveness, to convene sales and marketing to discuss the importance and best practices of aligning the two functions. A major part of the effort is a dedicated website – closebiz.org – that features the latest academic and field research, real-time news and ...
Mastering the CLOSE: Sydney
Event Wrap Up and Summary
The CLOSE workshop world tour found it’s way to Sydney, Australia to learn about the challenges, successes and aspirations of sales and marketing executives. This stop of the global tour was intended to tap into the insights of the Asia Pacific. However, it is important to note that Australia is essentially a market in and of itself. It is a mature market, with distinct needs and ...
Marketing Outlook 2008
The CMO Council released the findings of its annual Marketing Outlook survey with an upbeat report on spend levels mostly holding steady or trending upward in 2008. Many marketers say they are frustrated and stymied by organization cultures, senior management mindset, and insufficient budgets. More than 800 senior marketers across all global regions responded to the CMO Council audit, which looked...
Mastering the CLOSE: London
Event Wrap Up and Summary
In late 2007 the CMO Council set up a membership organization, CLOSE: The Coalition to Leverage and Optimize Sales Effectiveness, to bring both sales and marketing to the table to discuss the importance and best practices of aligning sales and marketing efforts. A major part of the effort is a dedicated website – closebiz.org – that features the latest academic and field research in ...
Competition at the Crossroads: Strategic Planning and Action in Disruptive Markets
The new study by Deloitte and BPM Forum finds that companies are having difficulty anticipating market change and are limited in their capacity to make effective course-correcting action, in large part due to insufficient investment in strategic planning, getting the right information and having the required talent that can look beyond today's sales, profitability, current products, customers and ...
Define and Align the CMO
The CMO Council is frequently asked by the media, executive recruiters and CEOs to define the essential qualities and attributes of a successful marketing officer. To achieve this we have partnered with a professional services company called 'Bluprints™' to assist us in a globally inclusive process to systematically decipher a distinct Formula for Success - exclusive to the CMO community...
Secure the Trust of Your Brand
Assessing the Security Mindset of Consumers
There has been little research into how broadly such incidences are eroding consumers’ trust in brands. This is the impetus for Secure the Trust of Your Brand™, a major thought leadership initiative fielded by the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) Council. This comprehensive research effort is designed to better understand the degree to which information security, business continuity, and ...