On 10 November marketers from around the world convened in London to talk about ‘what matters most’ to them and their brands at Forbes’ 2025 CMO Summit Europe.
The event was organised by Seth Matlins, the managing director of Forbes CMO Network and a former marketer himself, at places like Endeavor’s cultural agency, 160/90, and Live Nation.
Last week, Matlins took some time to chat to MediaCat UK, reflecting on the CMO Summit and telling us about marketers’ biggest priorities and gripes in 2025.
Forbes’ CMO Summit is conducted according to Chatham House rules, which means Matlins couldn’t discuss the specifics of who said what. So we had to ask him to talk about marketers in the round, like they’re a homogenous hive-mind that faces the same issues and speaks with one voice.
Inevitably, something gets lost when talking about a subject in this way, but Matlins had a good go at aggregating and distilling marketers’ views on technology, agencies and their own status within the corporate hierarchy. What follows is a transcript of the interview, edited for concision, clarity… and to remove all but one of the references that Matlins made to his forthcoming book.
What were the main topics of discussion at Forbes’ CMO Summit Europe?
We talked about the challenges and opportunities of marketing in a world without much certainty, marketing at a time of pervasive and constant technological change, and the implications of it in terms of what marketing does, and how people will discover and shop.
What’s 2025 been like for marketers? Could you give it a score out of 10?
What I will say is that it continues to be difficult. The CMO has, in my opinion, the hardest job in business.
It’s not that the CEO’s job is an easy one — to the contrary. But the CMO is typically reporting to the CEO, and the CEO is never reporting to the CMO, which makes the CMO’s job harder.
The CMO’s job is made harder still, not just because of macro and micro forces in the external environment, but because, at least amongst the world’s largest companies, the vast majority of CEOs, CFOs, and boards have no marketing experience whatsoever.
Therefore, they don’t know what it does, what it should do, what it can’t do, and on what timeline — which is to say they don’t know what to expect and what not to.
I was looking at some data that shows marketing budgets over the past five years in aggregate — it’s Gartner data, if you want to cite it — are down something like 43%, based on a percentage of firm revenue. It’s down from about 11% pre-pandemic to 7.7%. In 2025, and so while the marketing budgets are down 43%, I’m reasonably sure that expectations of marketing are flat or up, not down 43%.
The narrative I’ve been seeing is that marketing spend isn’t going down, it’s just being funnelled to different sources, with more of it being spent directly with the platforms, rather than going through agencies.
I suspect media budgets in and of themselves may not have declined. Marketing budgets are, of course, made up of much more than media budgets.
You know, let’s just do a little research right now…
[Matlins starts tapping away at his laptop]
So, according to Perplexity, which is citing various sources, media budgets have increased.
So yeah, I think that’s the distinction. What you point to is another challenge: too many CEOs, CFOs and boards define marketing as advertising.
What do CMOs wish that CEOs and other board members knew about marketing?
I think the vast majority of CMOs wish that they better understood that marketing is, in fact, a principal strategic and financial engine, and maybe the single most important engine of top-line revenue growth that a firm has. I think they wish they better understood that there is almost no financial metric that publicly traded companies report on that isn’t influenced by marketing.
Do you get the sense that most marketers want to be judged on financial outcomes? I’ve heard the argument made by Byron Sharp that it’s better to measure marketers performance against metrics they have direct control over, like how many people they reach?*
I don’t think anybody wants to be scored on that which isn’t within their control. I think that — and I don’t mean this pejoratively — to the extent you’re capturing what Byron said accurately, reach is not a metric of impact. I wouldn’t want to be measured on that, either.
Marketers should be held accountable for that which they are responsible. But the problem is — and it’s an organisational problem, not a marketing problem — the CMO is responsible for X and accountable to Y, but doesn’t have the authority to influence X and Y.
What a CMO should be held accountable to is some measure of their impact on moving the business forward. Sometimes that is quantitative, sometimes it is qualitative, oftentimes it is a measure of both, and multiple determining factors should go into that analysis.
What do marketers think about what’s happening in the agency world at the moment, in terms of consolidation and automation?
We discussed it at some length at our London summit, even more so than at our Aspen summit, which was about six weeks earlier. The implications of AI — GAI [generative AI] in particular — in the agentic universe are certainly going to influence what CMOs in house, and what they look to agencies for.
The larger holding companies have, by and large, made their margin on media. Creative has become a gift with purchase. I referred to this on stage in London as the chickens coming home to roost [because] creativity has never been more important. Ideas are what sells. So, creativity and has been commoditised, and yet this technological change we have is about to commoditise the fuck out of media planning, and in some cases buying. Programmatic will become more and more in housed. There’s been much discussion about Cindy Rose’s first public communication as WPP’s head, and the fact that she mentioned AI a huge number of times, and I’m not sure she used the word creative once. I could be wrong about the numbers, but I’m certainly not in the direction.
If you look at the Omnicom-IPG M&A activity, it’s unclear to me what that will yield in terms of benefit to their clients because there’s a difference between what they say it’s gonna do and what it actually does.
A lot of clients are increasingly concerned about the double dipping that the holdcos have done in media — arbitraging media for their benefit but not necessarily their clients’.
I suspect a lot of agencies would say they’ve been forced to make money through double dipping or rebates because, as you said, creativity isn’t valued as it should be by clients.
What you bring up brings into question the business model. I do think the business model is really fucked up. A friend of mine who’s a CMO posted on LinkedIn that they wanted to see more agencies come to them with business models that were based on actual impact. My reply to it was that I applaud the intent, and of course an agency should be rewarded for impact, but how do you measure impact? And are you going to be transparent, and is your CFO going to provide an accurate measure of impact to the agency? And how do you isolate the work the agency does from the rest of the work you’re doing in terms of its impact? Which again brings us back to metrics and the measurements. We can measure pretty much everything these days, but we’ve forgotten that we should only measure what’s relevant.
What new skills do marketers need to acquire? Or is the job more or less the same as it’s always been, just with a few more tools and channels?
Those are two different questions; let me take the second one first. Both at our Aspen and London Summits, the last panel conversation we had was titled ‘Is Marketing Still Marketing?’ And what became clear in the answers is that marketing is absolutely still marketing, which is to say that the fundamental job remains creating and capturing demand, and driving sustainable, profitable growth.
To your first question about skills, I think everybody’s trying to figure out in real time the implications of AI on how they organise because firm organisation broadly was not built for this moment.
David Sandstrom, who’s the CMO of Klarna — which has been wildly aggressive in deploying AI — has had to retrench, because they made some assumptions that didn’t play out. Everybody’s trying to figure out how it changes organisational constructs in the near and longer term
At the summit, were there any views put forward by CMOs that surprised you?
I talk to so many of these people so regularly that no, I wouldn’t say there were surprises, by and large. But what I will say is that one CMO talking about the implications of AI said: ‘Our work with AI is changing our inputs, but it’s not appreciably changing the creative output’, and that surprised me.
How do CMOs feel about their status within the corporate hierarchy?
Gone are the days when the CMO did have that seat at the board table, did have that principal role in strategic and financial planning. And because too many do not, growth is punched in the face, company by company. And then, across all those companies, global GDP is diminished.
More often than not, what we’re seeing is chief executives who don’t understand marketing bifurcating, trifurcating the responsibility for the customer into multiple areas, and the principal responsibility for growth into multiple areas. To quote McKinsey Research, when everybody owns growth and everybody owns the customer, nobody does.
Why did CMOs lose the ear of the board, and what’s their route back?
Since 2005 you’ve seen a doubling in the number of companies globally, you’ve seen a tripling in the number of service businesses and brands globally, you’ve seen a 30X increase in the number of products on shelves. So you’ve seen this massive exponential increase in products, services, brands and companies needing to be marketed. Yet in real dollars, over 20 years marketing budgets are up only 55%, while the number of things needing marketing is up exponentially.
You have more people running companies who do not come from marketing, who don’t know what to expect and on what timeline. And what you’ve seen is a divorce of product, place, and price from the CMO’s remit. It is misunderstanding, absence of understanding, and sometimes sheer ignorance that I think exacerbates the situation that we’re in.
Are there any particular channels that marketers seem to be excited about the potential of?
You can’t paint marketers with one brush, but more are exploring, exploiting, and ultimately monetising social channels and social commerce. That is more of a B2C construct, but even B2B businesses are looking at social media platforms and investing more resources into that because that is increasingly where people are discovering, finding, and even purchasing.
Finally, is there anything that I haven’t asked you that I should have done, or anything you think is interesting for our readers?
Wait for my book to come out. [Matlin’s book is called The CEO’s Guide To Marketing, and it is based on his podcast of the same name.]
* You can find Sharp’s argument here, at around 20m20s. His argument is a bit more nuanced than I presented it in the question. Sharp says that while it is perfectly reasonable to judge some marketing activity on sales, much of the effect of advertising is not well captured in financial metrics.
Lead image generated by Google Gemini.