Why The CMO Role Is Shifting

Joeri Billast 0:00

The future CMO is not the person who uses AI the most. The future CMO is a person who understands what AI cannot replace. And the first thing AI cannot replace is trust. Hello everyone and welcome to the Web3 CMO Stories podcast. A few days ago I delivered a private keynote for the More Agencies Network about what I believe is one of the biggest shifts happening in marketing leadership right now. Not just AI, no tools, not prompts, but the collapse of differentiation. In this episode, I want to share an edited version of that keynote with you. I removed some of the webinar and the QA parts to keep the focus on the core ideas. Why AI is commoditizing competence, why trust is becoming the real mode, and why the role of the CMO is being fundamentally reconstructed. This keynote also builds on conversations from my podcast, my TedEx talk in Lisbon, and my book The Future CMO, endorsed by Philip Kotler. So, with that said, let's dive in. Before I'll really begin, three things have happened between December 2024 and September 2025. And those three things explain actually why we are having this conversation today. The first thing that happened was in Cairo. This billboard, which you can see on the screen, ran across 15 locations in Cairo in November, December 2024, and it was advertising the marketing plus conference. The headline speaker was Philip Gottler. For anyone that doesn't know him, he's considered as the father of modern marketing. His textbook, Marketing Management, has been, I think, on every business cool syllabus since 1967. Because in the meantime, he's about 93, 94 years old. And so he spoke at that event, but you can imagine he was not physically there, he was on Zoom. And I was there in person on the same program. And as you can see, my face was next to him on that billboard. It really felt like recognition for myself, and because I do a lot of podcasts, articles, keynotes, and yeah, for me, this setup what came next. So after Cairo, I asked Kotler, Do you want to come on my podcast, WebQMR Stories? And he said yes. And so shortly after we recorded a podcast, and the conversation was about something most marketers may underestimate. Complaints. Customer dissatisfaction. Role of the CMO in problem management and the idea Kotler has been developing was the idea of a chief problem officer. And that may sound like a narrow topic, but it is not a narrow topic. It's actually where marketing leadership has been weak for years. And the conversation confirmed for me that the CMO role needs to move much closer to customer value, to problems, to accountability, and to trust. The marketing function cannot keep operating at a distance from where the dissatisfaction actually lives. And for me, this is what reconstruction means. If I say the role of the CMO needs to be reconstructed, that's what I'm talking about. Not really evolution, but really being rebuilt around value, around customer problems, around accountability and trust. And so after the podcast recording, I started writing the book that Bruno mentioned, The Future CMO, eight chapters about what this construction looks like in practice for CMOs, for agency owners, for marketing leaders. And so when the book was finished, I sent it to him. Then I asked him, Professor Kottler, would you like to give me a review of the book? So first I sent a summary and he didn't directly answer. So I asked him, Did you get my email? And he said, Yes, I'm waiting for the manuscript. So I sent him the book. He read the book and he sent me an email back. He said, Your book is the best update I have read on role and the work of CMOs. And wow, yeah, that meant a lot because if one of the defining voices of modern marketing says that the book is valuable, then I know that direction is to work taking seriously. And so I remember even thinking that even if I don't sell a single copy of the book, for me it's already a success. Because yeah, if someone like Philip Kotler said it's good, I think it has some value in it and it already succeeded in an important way. And so that is what today is about, why the direction changes, by what we have collectively missed, and what to do about it. It's not a session about tools, it's not about brands, but about something more, I would say, more uncomfortable than that. So for myself, if you haven't met me yet, most of you haven't because you're around the world. My name is Yuri Vilast. I'm Belgian. I'm based in Sintra, so that's near Lisbon, in Portugal, and I have senior marketers, agency owners, CMOs, reinvent their all. So what comes next. And so what I will be sharing today is based on my keynote in Cairo, it's based on my keynote in OER, digital innovation, it's based on around 300 podcasts or conversations that I had. It's based on my TEDx talk recently. I was on stage, the same stage where Bruno was at Ciado. And of course, it's also based on my book, The Future CMO. And if if you remember only one idea from today, yeah, make it this. The future CMO, it's not a person who uses AI the most. The future CMO is a person who understands what AI cannot replace. And the first thing AI cannot replace is trust. And here is what I've come to believe about this moment myself. AI did not just democratize competence, it commoditized it. It was actually also one of the slides during my TEDx talk. Before the ChatGPT moment, competence still felt like a clearer differentiator. The good marketer wrote better copy, built better campaigns, immediately shop positioning, and that was craft, and craft was a moat. By moat I mean the thing that still protects your differentiation. The reason a client chooses you over the agency next door. And today every marketer has the same tools, the same proms, the same outputs. A junior with ChatGPT delivers technically, correct copy in five minutes, and a senior with the same tools delivers technically, correct copy in five minutes, so the same. The service level difference between average and good execution has become much harder to see. And what is strange about this moment is that marketing leadership is still treating it like a tooling problem. Which prompts were best, which AI stack should we buy? How much can we automate? And those are the wrong questions because everyone is working on them. And when everyone works on the same questions, yeah, the differentiation is collapsing. And so the problem is not that AI makes humans useless, the problem is that AI makes sameness easier. And sameness is the enemy of trust. And for agencies, this matters a lot. Old mode was output, more posts, more campaigns, more channels, more speed. And that works when the production was hard. But production is no longer the bottleneck. The bottleneck is meaning. Can your client say something that actually matters? Can their market recognize their point of view? Can people verify their credibility before the sales conversation begins? And these are not creative questions. And the clients will not pay premium fees for type output that AI can produce. They will pay for clarity, they will pay for judgment. They will pay for trust. The new mode looks different from what most agencies are still selling. It is a defensible point of view. Customer can verify a community that compounds strategic judgment and not output volume. And so across hundreds of podcast conversations that I had, I noticed a pattern. The stronger steals actually are not asking how do we produce more. They were asking what do we want to be known for? And that's a completely different question, and it leads to a completely different business. I've structured this in this collapse in three shifts. The first shift from attention to trust. Second shift from content volume to point of view. And the third one from pool adoption to strategic leadership. And this may sound simple, but each one changes how agencies position themselves, how CMOs lead, and how brands grow. Many teams are still stuck on the left side, still chasing attention, still producing more content, and still collecting tools. For me, the future belongs to the leaders who move to the right side. And so let's start with attention. For more than a decade, marketing has been obsessed with attention. Breach, impressions, views, cliques, engagement, you name it. And attention still matters. But attention is no longer the hard part. The hard part is what happens after the attention. Do people believe you? Do they stay? Do they refer you? Do they pay a premium? And do they defend your brand when something goes wrong? And that is where the real business value sits. Here's a simple way I can put it: attention tells you who sees you, and trust tells you who believes you. You can get attention and still have no trust. But you can go viral and not matter. You can publish every day and still not be believed. And now we have the data also on what trust does for business. Trusted brands command 15 to 20% price premium over their competitors. And then they recover two and a half times faster from crisis. And the customer lifetime value is 32% higher. And they get four times more referrals. And these are not, I would say these are not marketing metrics, but business metrics. It's about the business. And this is exactly where most marketing leaders go wrong. They measure engagement rates, click-throughs, reach, attention metrics, derivative indicators, but they don't measure the thing that actually moves the bottom line, which for me is trust. Trust reduces friction. And friction reduction, that then becomes revenue. And if people trust you, they need less convincing. They ask fewer defensive questions and they move faster through your sales process. And also they refer more easily. They recover faster from doubt or mistakes. And every one of those translates into a measurable business outcome. And that is why I built the trust ROI calculator in my book, The Future CMO. It's about five steps to help you transform trust from a vague concept into a measurable asset on an executive dashboard. So step one is mapping where trust signals appear across your customer touch points. Step two is measuring trust through three things NPS, retention, and referral velocity. NPS tells you whether people say they would recommend you. Referral velocity tells you whether they actually do and how quickly. And retention tells you whether they stay long enough to do either. Step three is calculating your pricing power differential against competitors. Step four is tracking how past you recover from reputation incidents. And step five is linking those metrics to revenue on the same dashboard your CFO already looks at. I'll share a practical version of this trust calculator afterwards so you can apply to your own brand or future clients. The second is from volume to point of view. And this is where many brands or agencies got trapped. AI made it incredibly easy to publish more. More posts, more blogs, more videos, more newsletters, even more comments. But publishing more is not a strategy. Sometimes it's just noise generation, and the market is already full of noise. So for me, the brands that win from here are not the ones that publish the most, they are the ones with a point of view that people can recognize. Maybe you know Mark Schaefer. I interviewed him several times on my podcast. He was recently also the special guest on my Sintera Synergist retweet. And he put it this way: competence is ignorable because AI has competence, you know, we as humans cannot beat AI when it comes to competence, but it is audacity that gets through. Competent contents, yeah, because everyone can create this kind of content, it gets ignored. AI holds competence, but what breaks through is a position people have to sit up for. A defensible point of view has three properties. It's specific, it names what is broken in your industry by name, and not in some vague terms. It's defensible, backed by your own experience, by your own data, or a pattern that you have seen. And it is repeatable, it is showing up consistently across all your content, the same position and different examples. And so here is a test. If you swat your competitors' logos onto your content, would it still feel like yours? And for most marketers, the honest answer is no, and that's exactly the problem. If your brand has no point of view, AI will only help you say nothing faster. And so when you have a real point of view, something else happens. You are you stop just you know attracting an audience, which you can have, of course, if you uh if you post memes or you post things that people engage with, but then it's just an audience. But if you have a real point of view, um something else happens because you start attracting community, and that's the real difference. An audience is just consuming, listening, a community is participating, an audience consumes, a community contributes, an audience gives you attention, and a community gives you the rest. And most brands still measure the wrong things here, they measure reach but not participation, so they measure followers but not belonging. Engagement but not commitment. For me, future ready uh CMOs agencies they will think less about or be less like broadcasters and more like community architects because trust is rarely built in one campaign. It compounds through repeated meaningful interactions. And this is why I built a second calculator with this the community health calculator, and it's also in my future CMO book. It consists of four dimensions: the participation rate, content, quality index, memory tension at 90 days, and the ratio of community-driven to brand-driven content. And by the way, this is also what we work on at uh at Syntra Synergies and my marketing retreat here in Sintra. And then the third shift, and this is the most important one. There is a strange belief in marketing right now that using more AI tools automatically makes you more advanced. And I do not believe that. AI tools do not make you a better CMO, they expose whether you were one. If your strategy is weak, then AI scales weak strategy. If your positioning is generic, AI produces generic content faster. And if your brand has no trust, yes, AI will not create trust for you. AI does not fix a lack of leadership, it will amplify it. And that's why the role itself is changing. The brand guardian becomes a chief value officer. It's a big chapter in my book. The campaign manager becomes a community architect, the creative director becomes a trust architect, and the tool operator becomes a strategic translator. And it's not just title changes, it's what I mean by reconstruction. The CMO being rebuilt around value, around trust, and around strategic leadership. And across all the conversations I've had with senior marketers over the last year, on my podcast, but also at events or on one to ones, the pattern is consistent. The leaders who are thriving right now. Now are not the ones with the biggest AI stack they are the ones who got clear faster than their peers on what their role actually is for and everything else followed from that clarity. So let's make it practical. Question one is your brand citable by AI? And ChatGPT, Claude, Plex T you name there are a lot of those LMs these days. When answer questions in your category, does your name appear? As we all know, the search behavior is changing. Senior decision makers are no longer diving keywords into Google, but they are asking AI tools for summaries, for comparisons, for recommendations, and first opinions. And if your brand is not citable in those answers, then you risk becoming invisible before the sales conversation even starts. Question two Do you have a defensible point of view? The same logo test as I told you before. Could a competitor swap their logo on your content and have it still feel theirs? If yes, what you have is not a point of view, it's a competent noise. Question three. Can a stranger verify your trust signals in thirty seconds? So not three clicks deep on your above page, not buried in a case study somewhere, but at the surface. Name clients, real testimonials, endorsements from people who matter. Question four are you optimizing for trust or attention? What gets celebrated internally with you and your company? The vital post or a quite client outcome that took six months to build? Because what you celebrate, you get more of. So these are four questions. 30 minutes of work, maybe. Honest answers will give you a radically different list than what most marketing teams have on their roadmap right now. And honesty is the whole point. You can fool yourself, but your brand does not. And I will close with a line I stood on the FedEx staged two months ago already in Chiado in Lisbon. When content becomes infinite, trust becomes a filter. And trust cannot be scaled. AI can scale almost everything. Content can be generated, images can be generated, campaigns can be generated, even strategy documents can be generated. But the one thing that makes your brand fundamentally valuable, AI cannot make. AI cannot accelerate it. AI cannot automate it, AI cannot generate it. Trust can only be earned. One interaction at a time, one promise kept at a time, one client at a time. And this is the reconstruction we need. And that, ladies and gentlemen, that is your work. Thanks for listening to this special edition of Web3 CMO Stories. If this conversation resonated with you, you can find the book The Future CMO on Amazon. Or you can connect with me directly on LinkedIn. And if you are a senior marketer, a founder, a consultant, or an agency owner navigating these shifts in AI, trust, visibility, you can also explore Sintra Synergies. The strategic retreat I host in Portugal for small groups of marketing leaders. You will find all relevant links in the show notes. If you enjoyed this episode, feel free to share it with someone in the marketing leadership who should hear it. If you haven't given me a review yet, this would really help me if you give me these 5 stars. This really goes a long way. And as always, thank you for listening and hope to see you back next time.