The Rise of the @verified CMO
That little blue check mark. Who would’ve ever thought that it held such sway? Has it become the ultimate business card of the modern Chief Marketing Officer? The kind that would’ve made Patrick Bateman’s embossed typography make his head spin round and round because it looked like a thing of the past?
I’ve often wondered about the new role of the @verified CMO. I’m not talking about the CMO that negotiated their way to an @verified account simply because the brand they work for spends a lot of money, or the ones that put in the extra effort to verify themselves (we know who you are).
I’m talking about the ones that do it so effortlessly no one even asks why the f*** does the CMO get to tweet all day long when I have to work? I’m talking about the CMOs that know how to express big thoughts and big opinions to galvanize an organization. The ones that have found their own unique voices. The ones that have built a real audience on big ideas, championing the industry, pointing out its faults and moving us all forward.
These verified check marks represent new social currency for the CMO, and as you roll through their social feeds — the more checkmarks and verifications the more their opinions are heard. The new CMO can sway their influence and rack up an @verified account on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and LinkedIn — even genius.com is doling them out.
I purposefully omitted Snapchat and Tinder from this list. Mainly because the UI on Snapchat is unusable to me, and if you’re @verified on Tinder, I can’t imagine what that means.
Way back in 2015, the CMO role had been vilified, dismissed for the slightest downtick in sales or results. The average tenure on the job back then was just 26.5 months. Look — some CMOs should be canned sooner than 26.5 months because its painfully obvious it’s not working — but when just over 2 years is the average tenure, it’s an industry problem. All the good candidates are going to run like Forrest as fast as they can from the C Suite.
It’s a process that goes like this: out goes the disgraced CMO, in comes the new smiley CMO, out goes the deflated agency, in comes the new inflated agency. And Creatives are notorious for not wanting to pick up someone else’s work, so the new agency wants to start over.
As an agency owner, you learn quickly that you’re only as good as your team. I’ve never really understood why some brands feel the need to keep their marketing departments on a treadmill of constant rebuilding. It holds the brands back. It holds the ideas back. It holds the agencies back. It holds the industry back. Treadmills might be good for your health, but they suck for your career. We are at a time when brands need to be constantly making all day every day, building an audience for tomorrow.
For the agency — it’s a total loss. Months of work doesn’t get completed, the agency portfolio loses the work that was going to be their next PR move, and the creative team looks like they have done nothing for a year. And it doesn’t stop there, a hole is blown into the morale of the internal brand team that’s like a virus no doctor can cure.
Fast forward to 2016 and a CMO’s tenure has risen a whopping 60% to 44 months. As an agency owner, I love this trend. There have been so many times in my career when the CMO was let go and all the projects they spearheaded were left on the table.
The @verified CMO can humanize a brand in a way most marketers simply can’t. By infusing their own personality and passion, they bring the brand to a human level and allow us to all follow along. If the brand cuts them loose too fast, they might hear from some of the people that follow the @verified CMO.
For the CMOs that have a following, it also means they need to practice what they preach. Case in point, Jeff Jones resigned from Uber over cultural differences and received widespread acclaim for sticking to his principles. Most recently, Pepsi launched a tone deaf campaign, led by a CMO-turned-President that has been highly critical of agencies. Brad Jakeman has admirably fought hard for equality within our industry only to fall prey to the very same issues he has railed against.
The outspoken CMO allows agencies to gain a better understanding of what it’s like to work for a brand and make more informed decisions as to whether or not to engage in a pitch or relationship with them. With the @verified CMO, you’re either going to like them or hate them, follow them or unfollow them.
