Defining the title and the territory of the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO), and advocating ways to align and combine across the C-Suite has been the mission of the CMO Council since inception. We celebrate 25 years in 2026 and will be marking this milestone by highlighting our groundbreaking history of authority leadership, strategic advocacy, decision support content, peer-powered networking, and experiential knowledge transfer worldwide.

Our mission includes growing the relevance and value of chief marketing officer despite the proliferation of adjacent chiefs in the areas of brand, revenue, growth, digital, data, CX, innovation, commercial, etc. Today, nearly 70% of Fortune 500 companies have a C-suite marketing leader. There are tens of thousands of CMOs today from a handful in 2001. Yet turnover, attrition, remit, authority and value still raise questions about CMO viability.

The digital transformation of marketing continues at a rapid pace driven by technology innovation and borderless customer connectivity. The advent of data-driven decisioning, integration of siloed functions, fragmentation of marketing supply chains, complexity of global marketing ecosystems, automated programmatic media buying at scale, as well as talent sourcing and operational challenges have multiplied exponentially over the years.

From its genesis at a Brand Recovery Summit in Silicon Valley more than two decades ago, the CMO Council is now a robust, engaged global community of nearly 20,000 marketing leaders across more than 10,000 companies controlling over $1 trillion in aggregated, annual marketing spend. We seek to continue our predictive, first-to-market role as a thought leader and knowledge broker sharing insights and next/best practices from the world’s foremost marketing practitioners.