Something unusual is happening in the marketing industry.
Businesses are becoming more dependent on marketing while simultaneously questioning how much they should spend on it, who should lead it, and whether artificial intelligence can do much of the work.
The numbers tell a fascinating story.
A recent Marketing Brew survey found that 60% of respondents believe the chief marketing officer role is more important today than it was five years ago. Yet only 17% believe every company actually needs a full-time CMO.
Meanwhile, 51.3% of B2B marketers surveyed by Marketing Week expect their companies to increase brand investment over the next year, even as nearly 45% struggle to convince leadership to approve that spending.
And in another corner of the industry, artificial intelligence is moving beyond writing advertisements and analyzing campaigns. AI agents are beginning to participate directly in buying advertising space.
Three developments. One industry. And an increasingly complicated question.
If marketing has become more important than ever, why are we making it so difficult to do well?
The CMO Has Become Everyone's Problem Solver
There was a time when the chief marketing officer's responsibilities were relatively straightforward.
Understand the customer. Develop the brand. Generate demand. Support sales.
Those responsibilities haven't disappeared. They've simply acquired an expanding collection of additional duties.
Marketing Brew's State of the CMO report surveyed more than 450 readers about the evolving role of marketing leadership.
The results suggest that marketing executives are being asked to take responsibility for increasingly complex areas of business operations, often without comparable increases in resources.
According to the survey, 65% of CMOs have taken on additional AI strategy responsibilities, while 48% have added public relations duties.
Consider what this means in practice.
Today's marketing leader may oversee paid advertising, brand strategy, customer experience, social media, corporate communications, analytics, AI implementation, and data governance.
They are expected to generate short-term revenue while simultaneously building a brand that remains relevant years into the future.
Those objectives don't always operate on the same timeline.
A paid search campaign can produce measurable leads within days. Brand recognition may take months or years to develop.
Yet marketing leaders are often evaluated as though every investment should produce an immediate financial return.
According to Marketing Brew's research, 73% of respondents believe marketing leaders have less time to demonstrate results than other executives.
That creates a difficult environment for strategic decision-making.
When executives are under constant pressure to prove short-term performance, long-term investments become harder to defend.
And that's where another interesting contradiction emerges.
Businesses Want Stronger Brands. They Just Don't Want to Pay for Them.
On October 6, Marketing Week published findings from its State of Brand in B2B survey of 300 marketers.
The research revealed that more than half of respondents intend to increase brand investment over the coming year.
Specifically, 51.3% expect brand budgets to grow, with 14.8% anticipating substantial increases and 36.5% expecting more modest growth.
Another 33.1% expect investment to remain stable.
That sounds encouraging.
But nearly half, 44.9%, also reported difficulty securing approval for brand-building expenditure.
More revealing is that 55.5% of marketers at larger B2B organizations reported difficulty getting brand investment approved, compared with 35% at smaller businesses.
Why?
One explanation is that brand development remains harder to measure than direct-response advertising.
A company can spend $10,000 on lead generation and report the number of inquiries, appointments, and customers acquired.
But what happens when it spends $10,000 improving brand perception?
How much is increased trust worth? What is the financial value of being remembered? How do you measure the customer who chooses your business six months later because they've repeatedly encountered your name?
Those benefits can be measured through research and experimentation, but they are rarely as easy to attribute as an immediate online purchase.
That makes branding a harder sell in organizations focused primarily on short-term financial performance.
The irony is that brand recognition can make future customer acquisition more efficient.
When buyers already know and trust a company, the advertising doesn't have to begin by explaining who the business is.
It can focus on why the customer should choose it.
Performance marketing captures existing demand. Brand marketing helps create the preference that shapes future demand.
Businesses need to understand the difference rather than treating the two as competing investments.
AI Is No Longer Just Creating Advertisements. It's Starting to Buy Them.
The next development could fundamentally reshape the mechanics of advertising.
Artificial intelligence has already made it easier to produce marketing content, analyze customer data, generate images, and test advertising messages.
Now the industry is moving toward something called agentic advertising.
Unlike traditional AI tools that respond to individual requests, agentic systems can perform sequences of tasks within defined permissions and controls.
In advertising, that could mean software agents communicating with advertising platforms, evaluating inventory, negotiating purchases, and managing campaign operations.
A September 28 Marketing Brew article examined the growing adoption of the Ad Context Protocol, or AdCP, a proposed open standard designed to support AI agents working across advertising systems.
The nonprofit AgenticAdvertising.org announced a board with representation from across the advertising industry, including executives from WPP Media and Salesforce.
Its work includes developing governance and measurement practices for agent-based advertising.
Early use cases have included agent-supported media buying for a supermarket chain in the Netherlands and a campaign involving beverage brand Clubtails.
This is potentially significant for smaller businesses.
Complex media buying once required specialized personnel, sophisticated software, and considerable manual management.
Agentic systems could eventually reduce some of those operational burdens.
But the technology also introduces new questions.
Who is responsible if an AI agent purchases inappropriate advertising inventory?
How should spending permissions be managed?
Can an automated system accurately distinguish genuine customer demand from low-quality traffic?
And perhaps most importantly, who decides whether the campaign is strategically worthwhile?
Automation can make advertising execution faster.
It cannot eliminate the need for a business to understand its customers.
The Problem With Becoming an AI-First Company
There's another challenge hidden beneath the excitement around artificial intelligence.
Businesses increasingly feel pressure to demonstrate that they're embracing AI, regardless of whether the technology improves their results.
Marketing Brew's survey found that 66% of respondents felt pressure to appear AI-first even when using the technology did not necessarily benefit their work.
The report also found substantial skepticism about AI-generated advertising, with roughly two-thirds expressing concern that such ads can do more harm than good.
This highlights a growing disconnect between technological adoption and actual business value.
Companies can now generate dozens of advertisements in minutes.
But producing more advertisements doesn't guarantee better advertising.
If every company uses similar AI-generated imagery, messaging, and creative templates, differentiation may become more difficult.
The result could be a marketplace filled with more content but fewer memorable ideas.
That creates an interesting opportunity for businesses willing to prioritize creativity, customer insight, and distinctiveness.
AI can be exceptionally useful for research, testing, analysis, and routine production.
But using it simply to produce more content can become a distraction from the fundamental purpose of marketing.
The objective is not to generate advertisements as cheaply as possible.
It's to influence the decisions of the right customers in a way that creates sustainable business value.
Does Every Business Really Need a Chief Marketing Officer?
The growing complexity of marketing raises an important organizational question.
If artificial intelligence can automate substantial portions of advertising execution, does every business need a senior marketing executive working full-time?
Marketing Brew's research suggests the industry remains divided.
Only 17% of survey respondents believe every company needs a full-time CMO, while 39% believe part-time marketing leaders can be just as effective as their full-time counterparts. Nearly as many disagree with that latter position.
For smaller companies, fractional marketing leadership may offer access to strategic expertise without the financial commitment of another full-time executive.
A fractional CMO might establish brand positioning, design a marketing budget, oversee outside agencies, and create performance measurement standards.
AI tools could then support execution and analysis.
But the model isn't appropriate for every organization.
Large businesses operating across multiple brands, geographies, and distribution channels may need dedicated leadership to coordinate complex functions and manage significant risk.
The more useful question is not whether the CMO role is disappearing.
It's whether businesses are separating strategic leadership from routine marketing execution.
Those are different responsibilities.
And technological advances may make that distinction increasingly important.
The Future of Marketing May Be Less About Technology Than Judgment
Consider the developments unfolding simultaneously.
More businesses are planning to invest in their brands.
Marketing leaders are assuming broader responsibilities with limited budget growth.
AI tools are becoming more capable of performing tasks previously reserved for specialized professionals.
And the industry is experimenting with automated advertising systems that can communicate and transact across platforms.
These trends point toward a future in which marketing becomes more technologically sophisticated but also more dependent on sound strategic judgment.
Because the hardest questions remain surprisingly human.
What does the customer actually want?
Why should they trust this business?
What makes a brand different from its competitors?
How much should a company invest today to create demand tomorrow?
And which opportunities are worth pursuing in the first place?
Technology can provide more information, faster analysis, and increasingly automated execution.
But somebody still has to determine what the information means.
That responsibility isn't going away.
The Bottom Line
Marketing is entering a period of significant change.
The traditional CMO role is evolving. Brand building is regaining attention. Artificial intelligence is moving from content creation into advertising infrastructure.
Yet the companies that benefit most from these developments may not be those that automate the greatest number of tasks or purchase the most sophisticated technology.
They may be the companies that develop the clearest understanding of their customers and make the smartest decisions about where to invest.
A strong brand still matters. Creative thinking still matters. Customer trust still matters.
AI changes how some of that work gets accomplished, but it doesn't change the need for human judgment.
AI maps the market. Humans move it.