What are the top priorities and challenges of CMOs in 2025?
Today’s Chief Marketing Officer isn’t just shaping brand narratives; they’re steering enterprise strategy. Altrata’s Spotlight 2025: Chief Marketing Officers in the US reveals how Fortune 500 CMOs are driving innovation, optimizing customer experience, integrating AI, and forging cross-functional alliances to transform business models.
In a high-pressure, performance-driven environment, CMOs are emerging as critical voices at the strategy table, making them essential players for corporate leaders, recruiters, partners, and solution providers to understand and engage with.
This report is your competitive edge
Whether you’re identifying high-impact talent, targeting CMOs with tailored solutions or mapping influence networks through elite alumni ties, this report arms you with the insights you need to act smarter and faster. Get ahead of where the marketing function is headed, from the traits and backgrounds of top-performing CMOs to the strategic priorities shaping their decisions. If you’re selling to, hiring for or partnering with marketing leaders, this is the roadmap to building trust, relevance and commercial success in 2025.
What are the top priorities and challenges of CMOs in 2025?
The role of the Chief Marketing Officer is undergoing a transformation. As businesses adapt to rapid technological change and shifting market expectations, CMOs are stepping up as critical strategic players in the C-suite. Today’s marketing leaders are not only tech-savvy and data-driven, but they’re also fiercely focused on customer connection and brand authenticity.
To meet the moment, CMOs are building cross-functional, collaborative strategies that bring marketing closer to the customer. They’re playing a central role in redefining how the business operates post-transformation, especially as AI becomes a core part of marketing’s toolkit. The challenge? Harnessing innovation without losing the human touch. And with tighter budgets and growing pressure to prove ROI, the stakes have never been higher.
“We set aside a very small percentage of a marketing budget for crazy innovation. For marketing that thinks outside the box and pushes boundaries.”
Raja Rajamannar, CMO, Mastercard
Altrata’s Spotlight 2025: Chief Marketing Officers in the US – the first of its kind to be published by Altrata – draws on insights from Boardroom Insiders’ unique in-depth profiles of today’s executive leaders to examine how CMOs are adapting to these challenges
Studying the CMOs at Fortune 500 companies, we also draw on BoardEx’s unique and proprietary Global Leadership Database. We examine their demographic makeup, professional and educational backgrounds and personal interests to give a comprehensive and current picture of leading CMOs in the US.
What sets CMOs apart: Strategic AI-adoption and unique personal interests
Today’s CMOs are stepping beyond the traditional boundaries of marketing to play a larger role in shaping business strategy. From driving tech investment to leading customer experience innovation, they’re increasingly seen as strategic architects within the C-suite.
Our analysis of Fortune 500 CMOs reveals their top priorities for 2025:
- Innovation (54%): Over half of Fortune 500 CMOs prioritize innovation, making this a crucial conversation starter for technology and service providers looking to offer creative, strategic, and innovative solutions.
- Customer Experience (42%): Nearly half are focused on enhancing the customer experience. Companies selling customer analytics, experience management platforms, or consultancy services should position their offerings around improving customer loyalty and satisfaction.
- Market Share (40%): CMOs are prioritizing strategies that help their brand increase market share, making solutions that demonstrate clear competitive advantages and measurable growth particularly attractive.
These strategic priorities are creating new paths to growth, sharpening brand and product differentiation and delivering standout customer experiences, all while managing tighter budgets and staying focused on performance.
Spotlight 2025: Chief Marketing Officers in the US
But it’s not just their business impact that sets them apart. CMOs also bring a rich blend of personal passions to the table, from fitness and travel to mentoring, music and a love for dogs. These interests offer a more human perspective on the people powering marketing at the highest level and provide insights for personalized relationship-building strategies, event sponsorship, and targeted engagements.
Professional backgrounds of Fortune 500 CMOs
Where do these marketing leaders come from professionally? Many of today’s Fortune 500 CMOs have been shaped by experience at major corporates and financial services firms, with companies like PepsiCo and Procter & Gamble topping the list. Known for their bold, immersive brand campaigns and deep investment in marketing talent, these organizations have become training grounds for some of the most influential CMOs in the US.
Tech giants like IBM and Microsoft also feature prominently, offering future leaders exposure to innovation at scale. Beyond the brand prestige, prior employers matter in another key way: they form powerful alumni networks. In a world where warm introductions can open more doors than cold outreach, these connections can be a critical asset in building influence and driving business.
AI-powered optimization: How CMOs are leveraging technology to enhance strategy and performance
One key insight within the report is that CMOs are actively leveraging AI and generative AI (GenAI) technologies to enhance creativity, differentiate products, and boost marketing performance, while carefully managing ethical considerations and customer relationships.
Other key points explored within Spotlight 2025: Chief Marketing Officers in the US include:
- CMOs are more strategically integral than ever: Increasingly critical within the C-suite, CMOs are expected to drive collaborative, cross-functional initiatives that place the customer at the heart of the brand experience.
- 52% of Fortune 500 CMOs are women: The report finds notable gender balance in the CMO role, with equal representation of women and men, reflecting a shift from traditional male-dominated executive roles.
- 37% of Fortune 500 CMOs are externally appointed: This is similar to the share of CHROs, and eight percent points higher than Fortune 500 leadership team members in general.
Spotlight 2025: Chief Marketing Officers in the US serves as a must-read for business leaders, marketing executives, industry analysts, and anyone seeking to effectively engage CMOs as strategic decision-makers and influential buyers.
Unlike traditional surveys, this innovative report harnesses thousands of publicly available company statements, executive videos, industry commentary, and press interviews to offer in depth insight into the mindset and strategies of today’s top marketing executives.
Methodology
This report was based on analysis from two of Altrata’s products: BoardEx and Boardroom Insiders. Most of the analysis centered on the more than 420 CMOs within Fortune 500 companies, alongside additional secondary research.
This report leveraged BoardEx’s unique and proprietary Global Leadership Database, covering board and non-board members, C-suite executives, senior leaders and professional advisers. The database contains more than 2.4 million profiles of public, private and not-for-profit organizations and the 1.8 million people who work for them. All BoardEx data is collected from credible, published sources and cannot be edited by users. Our data is powered by a team of skilled analysts, who research, verify and maintain these profiles. Data details include current and historical roles (with start and end dates) for board positions, employment and education.
Boardroom Insiders’ detailed executive profiles include the professional backgrounds, business priorities and strategic vision of more than 40,000 VP and C-level executives of the Global 2000, the world’s 2000 largest companies. Boardroom Insiders’ research team reviews news articles, earnings transcripts, interviews and more.
About the author
Maya Imberg is the Head of Thought Leadership and Analytics at Altrata. She is responsible for spearheading the company’s thought leadership efforts and overseeing its analytics and predictive modeling services commissioned by clients. She joined Altrata’s Wealth-X in 2016 as Director of Custom Research responsible for secondary research, data analytics and branded content. Maya has over fifteen years of experience in research, spanning market research, macroeconomics and financial services. Prior to joining Wealth-X, Maya held a variety of consultant and economist roles at the Economist Intelligence Unit and spent a number of years working for Datamonitor’s Financial Services practice. Maya holds an undergraduate and MSc degree in economics and comparative politics from the University of Pennsylvania and London School of Economics respectively.