‘More self-sufficient’: The changing (yet again) and increasingly challenging role of the CMO

An impossible job has become even tougher.

Yuko Oki, chief marketing officer of Rakuten TV, has to find a way to make Rakuten TV’s bifurcated business economic model — combining subscriptions with advertising — ticking over. Of course, it’s always been this way for one of the smaller players in the market. But the challenges are more acute than ever.

On the one hand, subscription growth is slowing as people return to normal activities outside the home. On the other hand, competition for ad dollars among streaming services is intensifying as more people reach the limit on how many ad-free services they can pay for.

“I took the role because it wasn’t just about soft marketing, it was about the commercial side of the business too,” said Oki, who joined Rakuten earlier this year. “CMOs are working at a time when we have to be more conscious of the financial value we can bring to their businesses.”

Nowhere is this point clearer than in the narratives dominating the earnings season that’s just closed.

A year ago CEOs were focused on the pandemic — the word Covid-19 repeated countless times by them to explain to analysts performance and forecasts.

Now, the recurring word is “headwinds” — Covid-19 being one of many. If it wasn’t macroeconomic issues, it was the need to continue contorting their businesses around an ever-fragmenting media landscape. CMOs are having to do more as a result. And in doing so work across more disparate parts of their businesses than ever before.

“We’re relied on more to do more of what the sales operation has done in the past,” said Jennifer Smith, CMO at video player Brightcove. “And we’re expected to work right across product, sales and customer divisions to be able to deliver insight on purchasing habits and past trends and future predictions. I spend a lot of my time looking at the past to predict what the next quarter is going to look like.”

CMOs are no stranger to this sort of reinvention. Their role seems to shift every few years. In fact, it was only 2017 when there was talk of whether the role was even needed after Coca-Cola replaced it with a chief growth officer. Two years later the CMO was reinstated. Regardless of the moniker, the seemingly never ending stream of anxiety-inducing events to eclipse the world since then has proven why businesses need someone who innately understands how those products and services fit in society.

Recent events in Eastern Europe bring those shifts into sharp focus.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine triggered a chain reaction of geopolitical and economical events. Naturally, CMOs are watching the situation unfold with concern. It’s too early to predict the human toll, though the short-term implications are clear: Sanctions will dampen, not suppress inflation in living costs, while supply chain blockages will curb growth.

Unsurprisingly, CMOs are weighing up whether to keep advertising.

Some of them are excluding news and politics content as a whole category during this time so as …read more

Source:: Digiday