The first CMO Awards gala dinner was replete with everything you could possibly want to indicate a new era of industry recognition and elevation has arrived. Attended by more than 170 of the most important marketing and industry leaders in the country, we had an enviably excellent top 10 CMOs, an incredibly hard-working list of 51 CMO finalists reflecting the gobsmacking breadth of modern marketing remits today, one heck of a growth initiative winner and highly commended list, and a heart-swelling amount of peer-to-peer camaraderie.

Powered by Mi3, the new CMO Awards program also had the backing of three significant commercial partners, each of which commands significant might in the marketing and advertising industry – Adobe, Publicis Groupe and News Australia. Additionally, we were buoyed by a hefty amount of support and goodwill from across the marketing fraternity and industry to realise this program.

Why did people get behind the CMO Awards? Because everyone in that room, and every entrant who put forward a submission, recognises the ongoing need for an evidence-based program that can spotlight and reward modern marketing leadership excellence.

Secondly, and arguably more importantly, we need something to help further elevate the stature of marketing leadership in business. And that’s because there’s still a long way to go before marketers unilaterally command the respect and esteem of the c-suite and board for what they do to drive growth and commercial success.

Thirdly? Client-side marketing leadership can be a lonely job, especially when you’re different to the rest of the c-suite, often misunderstood, and upheld to unrealistic short-term expectations. For a bunch of extroverted storytellers who want to support each other to deliver the best of the craft, having a safe space to do that is valuable too.

Where the problems still lie for marketing leadership

The ambition behind the CMO Awards isn’t a new one. It’s been two-and-a-half years since I ran my seventh and last CMO50 gala event, and a little over two years since the brand and marketing industry-leading program – and media brand behind it – was shut down. Both were fuelled by an ambition to treat marketers like business people and support their contribution to business growth, thus elevating their position in the c-suite and leadership ranks.

The identity-crisis kind of questions we were asking all those years ago were again present in the CMO Awards judging room this year, and they remain burning questions we’re still trying to answer about marketing leadership:

• What really is the role of the CMO and how broad does it go? How do we judge performance fairly given the varied responsibilities and remit?
• What can a CMO truly influence in a business and leadership context versus what is out of their hands – and do they need to report to the CEO or have a P&L to achieve it? Or can they impact through influence, proactivity and a clear eye on the business value and prize?
• How well can marketers frame a story that connects the dots between the why, who, how, where and what – so that everyone in the business gets it?

Of course, marketing hasn’t stood still, and neither have consumers, macro-economic and geopolitical conditions, technology innovation, channels, commerce, ways of working or measurement. It’s been both a tough and opportunity-laden two-and-a-half years for CMOs.

The tough bit? Quiet redundancies across categories have taken an edge off confidence – and taken marketing headcount just as more complexities and challenges came the CMO’s way. Capability upskilling is a problem. A relentless thread we’ve seen around pursuing optimisation, the persistent misunderstanding of what marketing can do, misalignment with business needs, plus fragmenting media and consumer tastes, then a cost-of-living crisis have been huge changes to steer through. And now we have volatile Trump and his tariffs.  

Certainly reading this year’s CMO Awards submissions, and speaking with so many marketing leaders over the last 18 months since joining Mi3, it’s apparent resilience and adapting to ambiguity are the hallmarks of a good CMO. But I’d say thriving in adversity and the most complex of conditions and pressures are the hallmarks of a great one.

CMO Awards judging process

All of this came to bear on CMO Awards judging this year. Judging is a robust, jovial, at times combative – but always respectful – and singularly unique exercise. Judges score every submission on a number of factors, plug those numbers in, then we sit down to discuss. It’s at that point the real debate starts: Is the order what we expected, who are the outliers, how did we interpret what’s being conveyed? From there, we either hit a straight-out yes or find compromise on how we see the year shaping up and where recognition is due.

Amid the seriousness of weighing up why we’d scored the way we did, we did joke about what this year’s bingo buzzwords would be. In the midst of the covid-19 pandemic lockdowns, Mark Ritson and his Mini MBA topped the tally as training and incidental budgets were shifted towards the bombastic ex-professor – alongside small indulges like sweet treats, streaming services subscriptions and apparently, golf clubs.

This year, the buzzword hands down was MMM, or Market Mix Modelling. I quote one of the CMO Awards judges here: “Hands off to Mutinex for creating a wave of interest in a topic that was historically being reserved to the nerd community”.

In terms of martech, customer data platforms (CDPs) remain one of the hotter techs being utilised, although the good news is they’re increasingly connected to other systems and fuelling more effective engagement programs.

AI wasn’t in quite submissions as you’d think, and with a couple of standout exceptions, most AI was coming in for efficiency gain. But there was certainly debate among judges on who we thought had used a bit of ChatGPT to assist them in writing their submission this year.

Shakespeare lessons for marketing leaders

With all this to consider, I’d hoped by the time I got to the CMO Awards gala dinner that all the incredible insights gleaned during the judging would culminate in some Shakespearian-like quip, oozing with wisdom, that I could deliver. Instead, I spent the days prior to the event bemoaning the fact I’m unlikely to achieve Shakespeare at this point.

So I went directly to the bard to help sum up what’s going on in marketing leadership right now. And I found four strikingly salient quotes (incidentally, both tragic and comedic):

“O how full of briars is the working-day world.” – Rosalind, As You Like It

“Though there be madness, yet there is method in it.”  - Polonius, Hamlet

“If it be now, tis to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come; the readiness is all.” – Hamlet, Hamlet

“Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing.” – Cressida, Troilus and Cressida

The thing is, CMOs don’t really need profound, they need pragmatic.

What we saw in entries was progressive but also reflected several struggles marketing leaders continue to face:

• There is a battle of efficiency over effectiveness: With so much efficiency driving, it leaves you wondering if there’s enough brain space – or stamina – to put towards proactive expectation setting, rather than reactive expectation explaining.
• Battle of the brands: However, CMOs are doing their best to get back to brand over performance, and reacquainting ourselves with the principles of marketing. Judges agreed the fact we’re finally seeing not just belief in brand as a unit of value creation, but demonstrations of it, was fantastic. CMOs are fighting for it and creativity and we know both are essential to true cut-through and engagement.
• Martech use and personalisation for its own sake has shifted to conscious utilisation: We’re connecting the dots on how we orchestrate activity using these tools and it’s delivering improvements to programs marketing teams are executing. 
• New ways of working are bubbling to the surface: Notably, insourcing not just of search and social, but also creative and some digital media. It’s resetting how we operate, adding agility and of course, delivering cost efficiencies.
• Market Mix Modelling: We weren’t talking about this in 2022, let alone 10 years ago. Judges agreed it’s a good thing: It indicates we’re finally capturing more of the right data we need to prove marketing’s worth and secondly, keep improving it.
• Capability and upskilling are critical, but not everyone’s worked it out yet: It’s not just in the new stuff either. Classic, foundational skills of marketing – storytelling, brand, strategy – have to be valued too. There are people now in senior roles across marketing teams who came up through digital-first and performance-oriented marketing and never attained the full breadth of experience in what marketing can truly deliver, nor built capability in these core marketing tools, let alone the full 4Ps of marketing. The lack of capability investment does show overall, though we read some great standout exceptions this year.
• Tactics do not equal strategy: Judges could see CMOs want to do it all, and they wanted to tell the judges about it in submissions. But knowing why you’re doing something, and choosing not to do something, is as critical as doing it.
• Data is data: It’s insight you want.

There were plenty of other things judges want to see more of – profitability, commercials, strategy, more macro-economic opportunity grabbing, better narration – but there were some inspiring, progressive, strategic things too. Overall, CMO Awards entrants and their teams should be proud of fighting the good fight to keep elevating marketing’s stature in business.  

So to bring these back to Shakespeare and his clever way of putting it:

“O how full of briars is the working-day world” – those thorns and brambles aren’t going anywhere, they’re going to keep growing, and we’re just going to have to keep navigating our way around them as best we can.

“Though there be madness, yet there is method in it”– Strategy and starting with the business and customer outcome has to be the first port of call: It gives you the why, it directs you on what you should say no to, and gives you a centre point of gravity, even when everything feels like it’s a whirlpool. 

“If it be now, tis to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come; the readiness is all” – having a culture that is willing to keep learning, upskilling, adapting and improving keeps everyone focused and ready, even amid ambiguity and the unknown.

“Things won are done; joy’s soul lies in the doing” – yes marketing is about doing, and possessing curiosity, compassion and courage while seeking cross-functional influence and learnings. Just know WHY you’re doing it in the first place.

Facts and figures from the CMO Awards entries

Finally, to share some of our own data-driven insights around this year’s program, we also pulled together a few interesting facts and figures about the finalists for our 2025 CMOs of the Year:

Sector representation: The strongest category representation was FMCG, which accounted for 18 per cent of the total 51 finalists. This was followed by finance, banking and insurance, then travel and tourism. Service-led organisations struggle to make it into the top echelons – often it’s because CMOs don’t have a direct seat at the executive table, but it can also be the way marketing is perceived more broadly in these organisations.

CMO tenure’s impact: While we know the CMO tenure commonly remains the shortest of the modern c-suite, the CMO Awards generally does skew towards recognising the value of those who have nutted it out longer than average and in terms of overall company tenure. I’ve always read this as CMOs having earned the trust of stakeholders and the wider organisation to do more short and long. This year’s average job tenure – allowing for the odd outlier and my spreadsheet skills – is 3 years and 3 months. Incidentally, this is exactly the same as I saw in 2022. Company tenure is even longer: 5 years, 4 months – although it has been skewed by a few long-timers in their organisations.

Reporting line: Two-thirds of finalists this year report to the company CEO or managing director. The remainder generally report into a division MD or lead, or group executive. To enter the CMO Awards, you do not need to report directly to a CEO or MD, however judges noted it generally does help in terms of the diversity of remit and strategic contribution to business.

Company ownership: Just over 6 in 10 work for Australian majority owned or ASX-listed companies. We did have several private equity owned businesses across the finalists too, but judges recognised it generally does fall that those from locally owned organisations – with some category exceptions – seem to have more control over more Ps, the P&L, and ability to be more strategic – and therefore rank higher.

Gender representation: For those interested in the gender split, yes finalists prove marketing is made up of more women than men: 65 per cent of finalists are female. And 8 of our top 10 are female too – more on that soon.

A few other fun facts and figures on companies represented by the 51 finalists:

• Just over half run marketing – or sometimes marketing and CX functions – of between 30 and 100 staff; 1 in 5 have 20 or fewer staff.
• Just over half work for companies with >1,000 employees; 3 in 10 have <1,000 employees.
• Three in four of CMOs who reported figures indicated marketing budgets exceeding $10m per annum. 
• Across the majority of companies, under 3 per cent of total revenue is spent on marketing.