The CMO Is Not Being Eliminated. Wasteful Marketing Is.

Why the next generation of marketing leaders will look a lot more like CFOs — and why oversized agency models should be nervous.

By Robert Douglas

There is a warning shot being fired across the marketing industry.

It is not subtle.

It is showing up in boardrooms, earnings calls, restructuring announcements, agency reviews and C-suite org charts.

The traditional CMO role is under pressure.

Not because marketing no longer matters.

Because marketing matters too much to be managed like a department that spends money, makes decks, oversees campaigns and hopes the business eventually notices.

Today’s CEOs, CFOs and boards are asking a much harder question:

Does marketing create measurable business growth — or does it simply consume budget?

That question is changing everything.

And for a lot of incumbent CMOs, senior marketers and legacy agency partners, the answer may be deeply uncomfortable.

The CMO title is already shrinking

According to Forrester’s 2025 research, only 49% of top marketers at Fortune 500 companies still held the title “chief marketing officer,” down from 55% the year before. The same research found average Fortune 500 CMO tenure declined from 4.1 years in 2024 to 3.9 years in 2025, while the percentage of companies with a marketing executive reporting to the CEO or sitting on the leadership team fell from 63% to 58%.

That does not mean marketing is disappearing.

It means the C-suite is redesigning the role.

In many companies, the job once called “CMO” is being absorbed into broader commercial, growth, operating, customer, revenue or strategy roles. The message is clear:

The person responsible for marketing can no longer be just a brand steward. They must be a business operator.

UPS, Etsy and Walgreens were not isolated events

UPS made one of the clearest moves when Kevin Warren, the company’s chief marketing and customer experience officer, left at the end of 2023 and UPS eliminated the CMO role entirely. Marketing responsibilities shifted under Matt Guffey, the company’s chief commercial and strategy officer.

Etsy made a similar move. After former CMO Ryan Scott stepped down, the company eliminated the standalone CMO role and shifted marketing responsibilities to Raina Moskowitz, who became chief operating and marketing officer. The move came as Etsy announced an 11% workforce reduction after post-pandemic growth pressures and flatter sales.

Walgreens also saw its CMO, Linh Peters, leave as part of corporate layoffs in late 2023, during a period when the company was cutting corporate roles and restructuring under pressure.

These were not just personnel changes.

They were signals.

When performance gets questioned, when growth slows, when costs rise, when investors demand discipline, the marketing function gets examined with the same cold financial scrutiny as every other part of the enterprise.

And increasingly, the C-suite is asking:

Why is marketing separate from commercial growth?

Why is marketing separate from customer strategy?

Why is marketing separate from sales performance?

Why is marketing separate from operating discipline?

Why are we funding large agency ecosystems when only a handful of people are actually moving the business?

Papa Johns is a useful case study

Papa Johns shows how quickly the pressure can build when sales soften and leadership demands a more commercially disciplined marketing agenda.

In August 2024, Todd Penegor became president and CEO of Papa Johns. His background is telling. He came from Wendy’s, where he had served not only as CEO, but also as CFO — exactly the kind of commercially disciplined executive companies increasingly want at the center of transformation.

By the third quarter of 2024, Papa Johns reported a 6% same-store sales decline in North America, its third consecutive quarterly decline, while revenue declined 3.1%.

The company then appointed Jenna Bromberg as CMO in November 2024, replacing Mark Shambura, who had left for Panera after a little over a year in the role. Shambura’s tenure included a refresh of the “Better Ingredients, Better Pizza” platform and an agency shakeup that moved creative to The Martin Agency and media to Carat.

That sequence matters.

Declining sales.

New CEO.

New CMO.

New agency structure.

More emphasis on value, operational simplicity, digital, loyalty and sales momentum.

In Q3 2025, Papa Johns again reported pressure in North America, with comparable sales down 3%. Revenue rose only 0.3% to $508.2 million, below analyst expectations, while net income fell sharply to $4.5 million from $41.8 million a year earlier. CEO Todd Penegor cited softness among lower-income online customers and the fact that consumers were buying smaller, less expensive orders.

By early 2026, Papa Johns announced plans to close roughly 300 underperforming North American restaurants by the end of 2027, with about 200 expected in 2026. CFO Ravi Thanawala said many of the affected units were older, lower-volume locations generating less than $600,000 in annual sales and negative income.

That is the environment modern marketers are operating in.

Not “What is the brand platform?”

Not “What is the campaign idea?”

Not “What does the agency recommend?”

But:

What is happening to transactions?
What is happening to average order value?
What is happening to frequency?
What is happening to franchisee economics?
What is happening to profitability?
What is happening to market share?

That is not a traditional CMO conversation.

That is a CFO-meets-CMO conversation.

PepsiCo shows the same pressure at a much larger scale

PepsiCo is not eliminating marketing. Far from it.

But its recent leadership moves show how much modern growth is being tied to integration, operational discipline, pricing, portfolio simplification and financial performance.

In December 2025, PepsiCo announced that Ram Krishnan would become CEO of PepsiCo North America, leading both Foods and Beverages across the U.S. and Canada. PepsiCo said his mandate included accelerating the integration of Foods and Beverages operations, better meeting consumer and customer needs, and evolving the portfolio around changing preferences.

That is a very different mandate than “make the advertising better.”

It is a mandate to connect portfolio, innovation, pricing, customers, channels, operations and marketing to commercial performance.

PepsiCo has had real pressure in North America. In Q3 2025, revenue grew 2.7% to $23.94 billion, but North American beverage volumes declined for the twelfth consecutive quarter, net income fell 11.2% to $2.6 billion, and the company continued to address volume pressure through pricing, package sizes, portfolio transformation and cost-cutting.

PepsiCo also brought in Steve Schmitt, formerly CFO of Walmart U.S., as its new CFO, effective November 2025, during a period of activist investor pressure, declining volumes and demands for operational improvement.

And PepsiCo has been pushing financial sophistication directly into commercial decision-making. A 2026 paper described PepsiCo’s use of AI-driven pricing and promotion optimization systems designed to evaluate millions of product, promotion and timing combinations to support revenue and margin objectives.

That is where marketing is going.

Not away from creativity.

Away from marketing theater.

But, will it work? Will it work for Pepsi? I’ve been watching Pepsi since I started working on soft drinks and I’m skeptical.

The new CMO must think like a CFO

The old CMO could sometimes survive by being the company’s chief storyteller.

The new CMO must be the company’s chief growth translator.

They must understand the consumer, yes.

But they must also understand:

Margin.
Incrementality.
Inventory.
Retail velocity.
Household penetration.
Frequency.
Lifetime value.
Cost-to-acquire.
Cost-to-serve.
Channel economics.
Working media efficiency.
Agency labor waste.
Sales conversion.
Pricing elasticity.
Portfolio prioritization.

The new CMO does not walk into the boardroom with a sizzle reel and a brand pyramid.

They walk in with a point of view on where growth is coming from, where money is being wasted, where the consumer has shifted, which channels are overfunded, which agencies are overstaffed, which products deserve investment and which sacred cows need to be killed.

That is the kind of marketer CEOs and CFOs are willing to keep.

Everyone else should be nervous.

The agency model is part of the problem

Let’s say the quiet part out loud.

Too many marketers have been trained to believe that a large agency team equals strategic importance.

Forty people on the status call.

Fifty names on the staffing plan.

One hundred-plus people billed somewhere inside a holding company ecosystem.

Layers of account people, planners, producers, project managers, investment teams, platform specialists, creative directors, associate creative directors, group directors, coordinators, analysts and offshore support.

And yet, in many cases, only a tiny fraction of that team is doing the work that actually matters.

The rest is process.
The rest is overhead.
The rest is theater.

That may have been tolerated when companies were growing, budgets were loose and marketing departments were protected by complexity.

But those days are fading.

When North American comps are down, when volumes are declining, when activist investors are circling, when CEOs are simplifying portfolios, when CFOs are asking for proof, nobody wants to pay for a bloated agency village.

They want speed.

They want senior thinking.

They want accountability.

They want fewer people closer to the business.

They want the work to work.

This is where Left Off Madison fits the new era

Left Off Madison was built for the world marketing is entering now.

Not the bloated world marketing is leaving behind.

We are not a holding-company machine that needs to justify an army.

We are a senior-led, growth-minded, integrated agency built around the reality that most clients do not need more agency people.

They need the right people.

They need experienced operators who can connect strategy, consumer insight, creative, media, production and business performance without turning every assignment into an expensive parade of meetings.

That is the new-era marketer’s dream:

A smaller team with bigger experience.
Strategy that understands sales.
Creative that understands conversion.
Media that understands efficiency.
Production that understands speed.
Insights that understand business pressure.
Senior leadership that is actually involved.
Less waste.
Less ego.
Less distance between the problem and the people solving it.

For marketers under pressure, this matters.

Because the question is no longer whether your agency can produce work. The question is whether your agency can help protect your relevance inside the company.

Can they help you prove that marketing is not a cost center?

Can they help you show the CEO where growth can come from?

Can they help you speak the language of the CFO?

Can they help you move faster than the internal politics around you?

Can they help you do more with less before someone else decides you should be doing less with nothing?

The warning to marketers

The CMO role is not dead.

But the wasteful CMO is.

The decorative CMO is.

The “brand love” CMO with no revenue argument is.

The CMO who hides behind agency complexity is.

The CMO who funds awareness while ignoring today’s buyer is.

The CMO who cannot explain why the company is spending millions while household penetration, sales velocity, traffic, conversion or repeat purchase are going in the wrong direction is living on borrowed time.

The companies eliminating or redesigning CMO roles are not rejecting marketing.

They are rejecting marketing that cannot prove its business value.

That is the lesson.

And it should scare anyone sitting in a senior marketing seat who still thinks the answer is a bigger agency roster, a larger status call, a prettier brand deck or another campaign built for tomorrow’s theoretical customer while today’s buyer is walking away.

The new C-suite wants marketing leaders who can drive results with the discipline of a CFO and the imagination of a CMO.

That is the future.

And for the marketers smart enough to recognize it, Left Off Madison was built for exactly this moment.