I was in a boardroom a few months ago, sat on a quarterly review meeting with a business I’d been advising. The CFO, quite a calm guy, no drama, asked the CMO one question “What’s the cost of acquiring a customer this quarter, and how does it compare to last quarter?”

The CMO froze - not because she didn’t have the data, she had tons of data. She had a 40-slide deck full of it ready to present impressions, reach, engagement, stats, follower, growth, email, open rates, website sessions, bounce rates, top performing posts, all of it, but she couldn’t answer the one question the CFO actually asked.

Here’s what’s going on in so many businesses right now. The marketing team is producing beautiful reports. The CMO is presenting dashboards from six different platforms, and none of it rolls into one single number that CFO can drop into a spreadsheet and work with.

When the board is making decisions about where to put the next dollar of investment, they’re not weighing up reach against pipeline. They’re weighing up marketing against sales, hires against product development, against R&D, and marketing loses the argument every single time when it can’t speak in a language of finance, the modern CMO has to learn to translate.

That’s every campaign, every channel, every activity - it has to have a traceable revenue number that sits in the same system the CFO is using not a marketing attribution tool that produces its own version of the truth, the actual finance system.

And if you can’t answer the CFOs question about the cost of acquisition, lifetime, value, payback period and contribution margin to your top campaigns, you’re not running marketing. You’re running a content operation, there’s a difference.

If you’re a CEO or you’re watching your CMO present dashboards that don’t connect to the P&L it’s a warning sign. The fix isn’t more dashboards, the fix is rewiring the measurement so that marketing activity and revenue are in the same conversation.

Email me cmo@anthodges.com, or find me on LinkedIn. Let’s have a conversation about how to simplify the measurement and get marketing speaking the language of finance. Step away from vanity metrics and into the numbers CFO actually cares about.

If you’re a CMO realise that we’ve got a different job to do today than we did yesterday. As a CMO in the modern marketing world, it’s about connecting revenue to the marketing activity that’s being produced. That’s what’s going to keep your job longer than the average one and a half year position.

Side note… You know, a CFO, on average, is around 4.5 years in tenure. The average CMO is a 1.5. Start talking the language of finance, and you’ll keep your job.

There’s a conversation running through almost every forum, comment section, and LinkedIn thread I see. I hear it at events and on stages. It goes something like this: AI is getting better and faster - so why would any business pay for a senior marketing leader when they can get the same input from a tool?

It’s a fair question. But I think it’s the wrong question.

And most of the answers being given are defensive. Lists of things AI can’t do. Arguments about human creativity. Reasons why the role is safe. That defensiveness is very telling. Why would you get so defensive about something if you weren’t a little worried yourself?

AI won’t replace judgment. That’s the one thing it can’t do. It amplifies whatever is already present.

In a business with a clear strategy, a well-understood customer, strong offers, and a team that knows what it’s doing - AI is genuinely powerful. It accelerates execution. It reduces friction. It produces more output.

But in a business without those things? AI produces far more noise, far faster.

I’ve been watching this play out in real time inside businesses I work with. Teams are adopting AI tools enthusiastically. Output is going up. In some of those businesses, results are moving with it. In others, they’re not.

What’s happening in the ones that aren’t moving? Everyone’s getting lost in the activity - doing things, making movement - without building momentum. We don’t need movement and action. We need momentum and results.

That’s the real mistake in the ‘AI versus marketing leader’ framing. The right question is whether AI running on top of good strategic leadership produces better outcomes than AI running without it. The answer is consistently yes.

Harvard Business Review published research this year on where senior leaders are struggling with AI adoption. The core finding was that the problem isn’t the tools - it’s the clarity gaps underneath them. When leadership hasn’t made hard decisions about positioning, offers, audiences, and priorities, AI surfaces those gaps rather than filling them.

It’s like boiling a pan - all the imperfections come to the surface. That’s what AI is doing. You end up with sophisticated output that doesn’t convert, because the strategy it’s executing was never clear to begin with.

What AI is genuinely replacing is the execution layer. The tactical work. Content at scale, campaign variations, data analysis, reporting, automation. A lot of what junior marketing teams spent their time on is now being automated. And that’s fine.

What it isn’t replacing is the decision-making layer. What to say, who to say it to, where to prioritise, what to stop, how to read a market that’s shifting. That layer still requires someone with experience and accountability.

You can’t build a house on sand. Build AI on weak foundations, and when the storms come, it washes away.

The fractional CMOs who should be worried are the ones operating at the execution layer anyway - the ones calling themselves CMOs while doing the work of a marketing manager. Those carrying genuine strategic authority? AI isn’t a threat. It’s about to become the best productivity tool the role has ever had.

So to answer the question at the top: will AI replace the fractional CMO? In some cases, yes - it will weed out those who aren’t actually performing at a true CMO level. Those who are connecting marketing activity to revenue, doing the real leadership work, they’re going to win. AI will amplify what they’re doing and make it even better.

Everything I do as a fractional CMO starts with simplification. We start with a Simplify Day before any retainer. Then 90-day sprints over 12 months. We get into work straight away - subtracting, focusing, simplifying - to bring revenue in as quickly as possible. No pink fluffy dice. No crayons in the first 90 days. Just revenue.

Head over to www.anthodges.com if you want a conversation. There’s a chat button or you can book a call. Wherever you’re listening to this - subscribe, comment, let me know what you think. Three of these a week. Short, bite-sized, straight to the point.

I’m Ant Hodges. Let’s simplify.

The whole point of these field notes is something short and snappy. A nugget you can take and use in your business. I wrote Simplify the Funnel because I wanted to help you simplify - so I’m simplifying this too. No production. Just me talking to you.

Today I want to talk about why the CMO market, whilst it seems to be growing fast, has a real problem for founders and CEOs.

Some of the stats I’ve seen show that the fractional CMO market has doubled in the last two years. There are now around 120,000 people carrying that title, up from 60,000 in 2022. The market itself is valued at over a billion dollars, and it’s forecast to nearly double again by 2031.

On the surface, that sounds like good news for founders. More supply means more people, more choice, and better access to senior marketing leadership - without it costing a full-time hire.

But in reality? I think what we’re seeing in this marketplace - and from working with companies who’ve had previous CMOs - is that those CMOs weren’t necessarily all they were cracked up to be.

I recently checked ten random fractional CMO profiles on LinkedIn. Only one out of ten had held a CMO title or any kind of marketing leadership within the last five to ten years.

The other nine had renamed themselves into this market. Some had come out of fairly senior executive roles in companies that had nothing to do with marketing. A couple had some experience as graphic designers or web designers, and now they’re marketing themselves as CMOs.

That’s not the same as the twenty years of experience I’ve had agency-side before I decided to stop running an agency and focus on CMO work. There’s a real credibility gap in this space.

And here’s why that matters. When you as a founder or CEO are looking for a fractional CMO, that decision carries real weight. You’re handing someone strategic authority over your marketing function. You’re trusting them to make decisions about budget, positioning, team structure, and channel investment.

Done well, it accelerates growth. Done badly, it burns months of budget and leaves the business further down the drain than before.

You know what I see in the first 90 days of most fractional CMO contracts? Things like: we’re going to spend the first three months getting your messaging right, getting your offers sorted, looking at your brand positioning - and maybe considering a rebrand.

All of that may well be relevant at some point. But the reason a founder or CEO brings a CMO on board is to connect revenue directly to marketing activity. It has to be about the numbers from day one.

The question worth asking before you hire anyone in this space is very simple. Have you actually held a CMO role? Have you had experience running campaigns like this, and what were the results?

If the answer is no, or it’s evasive, or the experience just isn’t there - move to the next person. The market is expanding quickly, which is great because it gives you choice. But when you’re sifting the wheat from the chaff, it gets hard to find someone who genuinely has the experience and expertise.

The easiest way to protect yourself is to look at their profile. How long have they been in the game? Were they transitioning from a corporate position - maybe a redundancy or a golden handshake - and now they’re branding themselves as a CMO? Were they head of distribution or operations before this? It matters.

The fractional model works when the person carrying the title has genuinely done the job. When they haven’t, you’re paying executive rates for a very expensive experiment.

If you want to know more about the role I play as a performance-based fractional CMO, head over to anthodges.com. Subscribe to CMO Field Notes wherever you’re listening - Substack, Apple, Spotify. Drop a comment and let me know your thoughts. I’d love to hear them.

I’m Ant Hodges. Let’s simplify.

But the operational reality is knocking on the door of every business that buys, ships, or prices anything.

And apologies a little longer CMO Field Note for today.

Since the closure of the Strait of Hormuz in late February, roughly 20% of global oil supply has been disrupted. Brent crude surpassed $100 a barrel for the first time in four years during March. The head of the International Energy Agency described it as the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market. Some shipping companies have suspended routes, chemical manufacturers across the UK and EU have imposed surcharges of up to 30% to offset surging energy costs, and Goldman Sachs revised its inflation forecast up and lowered its GDP growth projection within days of the conflict escalating.

For those indirectly affected in business, this is not just geopolitical noise, this is a cost structure event.

Inside the businesses that I work with, those with revenues around $5million to $50millon, here is what I see happening. Delivery costs are rising, supplier costs rising, energy costs rising, margins tightening and cash flow buckling under the pressure. My gym also sent a message to members this week telling us all that after careful consideration, they are left with no choice but to raise the membership fees we all pay - they are feeling the energy cost impacting them. And then to top everything off, almost without fail, someone looks at the marketing budget and says it isn’t working.

The marketing didn’t change, the economics changed. I see the marketing getting blamed because it’s the most visible expenditure with the least obvious short-term return. Nevermind if there is a war going on, and consumers are being more careful with their hard earned cash, or if the strategy is wrong, it’s always the marketing’s problem if it can’t justify itself.

The businesses navigating this well are doing a few things differently though.

They’re not cutting first and asking questions later, they’re getting clear first. They are asking some key questions:

* Which offers are genuinely strong enough to convert at a higher price point in the current climate?

* Which channels are producing measurable return despite consumer anxiety right now?

* Where is the team’s time going, and what is it actually producing?

I firmly believe that external shocks don’t kill businesses, it’s an unclear strategy during external shocks that does.

I know this from my own experience. My first business collapsed in the height of the economic downturn in 2008/09. I owned and was running an advertising agency at the time, working with clients across the third sector - charities, non-profits, local government, and a division of the MoD. Every single one of those clients is still around today. My business isn’t.

Yes, the sub-prime crash had an impact on the financial decision-making inside our clients’ organisations. That wasn’t what brought us down. Internally, we had grown so fast, and had a fairly large team, but we had no real processes, no clear strategy, and no poise to ride out the storm when it hit. The external pressure was real. But it was the lack of foundations that made us crumble.

That time in business taught me the most significant lessons I have ever learned in business. The key lesson was to get the foundations in right, as soon as you can. It’s like that Sunday school lesson we learned as a kid, when you build on solid foundations things last, build on sand and the’ll wash away when the storms come.

When everything tightens - margins, budgets, team capacity - the businesses with strong foundations of vision, clarity of purpose and a solid delivery mechanism, they keep moving. The ones still trying to do everything with a loosely defined strategy freeze and suffer the worst at times.

As always, let me finish with an important question to ask right now if some of this resonates and lands with you and conversations in your business right now.

“Let’s for get what we think we need to cut for a moment and ask what do we need to make absolutely clear?”

If the next few months are going to be harder than the last three, clarity is not a nice-to-have, it’s the lever that you can pull on to stay alive and thrive.

A great CMO knows all of this and will think strategically about that line between the investment in systems and resource in your marketing division, linking it directly to revenue all the time, despite the economic or geopolitical events around the world.

That survey highlighted that 63% of marketing leaders are now reporting increased pressure from CFOs - up from 52% the year before. 61% are facing more scrutiny from CEOs. Board-level pressure on marketing has risen 21% in a single year.

It reminds me of the days pf the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 - the CFOs then were pulling on the purse strings and cutting marketing spend.

The new data from this survey are not isolated data points. They’re a consistent signal about where the relationship between marketing and finance is heading.

Inside the businesses I work with, I see founders and CEOs who don’t fully trust the marketing numbers they are being presented with. The reporting is inconsistent - different dashboards showing different things, none of them telling a clear story about what marketing is actually contributing to revenue. In short, attribution is messy. So when the CFO asks what the marketing budget is producing, the honest answer is often “we’re not entirely sure.”

And when you can’t answer that question clearly, budgets don’t get cut to zero. They get frozen. With everything going on in the world right now, uncertainty about markets is piling on even more pressure for fear of dealing with another recession - and yes, I did say the R word. All the number are getting questioned even more that ever, and seeing as we are just into Q2 of a new calendar year, and Q1 of a new financial year in the UK, they get whittled down incrementally because nobody can make a confident case for investing more.

Unfortunately it’s a pattern I see in many businesses, marketing not being abolished, just marketing being eroded because the connection between activity and outcome has never been made explicit or given clear visibility to everyone involved, not just the C-suite.

The solution isn’t more reporting. More reporting usually means more numbers that don’t tell a story. What changes the conversation with a CFO is one clear line from marketing activity to revenue. Not impressions, not engagement rates, not MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) sitting in a pipeline that hasn’t moved in sixty days. A clean answer to the question “What did we spend, and what did it produce?” is the answer.

Most marketing teams can’t answer that question. And until they can, the budget conversation will always feel like a fight. Marketing that can’t show its contribution to revenue is always a cost. Marketing that can show it is an investment. The CFO treats those two things very differently.

This is the No.1 task of any modern day CMO. Put away the crayons and fluffy work around branding, get with it with the numbers. and create that clear line between activity and revenue that everyone can cheer about.

If the budget conversation in your business has been uncomfortable lately, the question worth asking isn’t how to make a better case for more money. It’s why the current spend is hard to defend.

If this is the conversation you’re having right now, we need to talk. Head over to www.anthodges.com and let’s start the conversation.

Source reference: The CMO Survey, September 2025 - Marketers Claim a Broader Role and Increased Influence Amid Pressures. 63% CFO pressure statistic.

The layoff numbers are still coming in.

So far in 2026, over 60,000 tech workers have been cut. In 2025, the total was nearly 245,000 across the sector. Amazon cut 16,000 roles - while simultaneously reporting record revenue of $716.9 billion. Microsoft. Meta. Companies with strong financial performance making significant headcount reductions in the same quarter.

The pattern is consistent. Headcount down. Revenue expectations unchanged.

Inside $1m-$50m businesses, the same logic is playing out at a smaller scale. Teams are leaner than they were two years ago. Hiring is tightly controlled. But the growth targets set in January haven’t moved.

So the marketing team is doing more with less. The founder is doing more with less. Everyone is doing more with less. And the expectation is that focus and efficiency will fill the gap that headcount used to fill.

Sometimes it does. Often it doesn’t.

Here’s what I see when this goes wrong. The team is stretched across too many channels, too many campaigns, too many competing priorities. Each one gets partial attention. None of them gets enough. Results are inconsistent because the effort is inconsistent - not because the strategy is wrong, but because there isn’t enough capacity to execute any single strategy properly.

The answer most businesses reach for is hiring. But the businesses I see handling this well aren’t hiring their way out of it. They’re cutting their way out of it.

Fewer channels. Fewer campaigns. One or two things done exceptionally well rather than eight things done adequately. When you’re operating with a leaner team, concentration isn’t a compromise - it’s the only strategy that works.

The capacity mismatch is real. The way through it isn’t trying to do everything with fewer people. It’s deciding what not to do.

What used to be solved with headcount now needs to be solved with focus. And that’s actually a harder decision than hiring.

If you’re sitting with a leaner team and the same targets, I’d be curious what you’ve decided to stop. Hit reply.

Source reference: Network World / RationalFX analysis, March 2026 - Tech layoffs surpass 45,000 in early 2026. Amazon record revenue cited from same report.