Adweekly: CMOs Are Living Many Lives in the C-Suite
Welcome to Adweekly, the LinkedIn newsletter giving you an inside look at the advertising industry. Each edition will highlight some of Adweek's most important stories from the past week to help marketers, agency leaders, creatives and publishers better understand the industry they work in. By senior media reporter Mark Stenberg
Good morning, and welcome back to Adweekly.
In our May cover story, ADWEEK returned to one of its favorite subjects: the ongoing evolution of the chief marketing officer role.
While we have covered the winnowing tenures of CMOs and their changing titles in the past, this exploration—co-bylined by reporters Robert Klara, Jason Notte and Rebecca Stewart—explores a more heartening shift.
According to a 2023 study from Duke University, senior marketers say they’re increasingly responsible for fields such as pricing, innovation and competitive intelligence.
This multidisciplinary mastery makes the job more challenging, but it also makes the people holding the title more valuable to their firm, which in turn makes them more likely to take on even more elevated roles in the boardroom.
The story cites a number of CMOs who have recently been tapped for the CEO role—including Kickstarter's Everette Taylor, Taco Bell's Sean Tresvant and Starbucks' Brady Brewer—as examples of the upward mobility made possible by the growing importance of marketing acumen.
Read more: CMOs Are Living Many Lives in the C-Suite
Related | Longtime Condé Nast executive Pamela Drucker Mann, who recently stepped down as chief revenue officer, was first elevated to the role after a stint as CMO.
e.l.f. Beauty Calls for Diversity in Boardrooms With 'So Many Dicks' Campaign
A cheeky new campaign from E.L.F. BEAUTY kicked off in New York this week with the aim of raising awareness about the homogeneity of executive leadership.
Put more wryly, there are too many Dicks in the boardroom, according to the beauty company.
e.l.f. Beauty teamed up with agency OBERLAND to crunch the numbers, and the results are uninspiring.
Out of 4,429 publicly traded companies, there are 566 men named Richard, Rick or Dick, compared to just 283 Hispanic women, the study found.
The ads, running on digital out of home touchpoints, are part of the company's “Change the Board Game” initiative, which aims to help double the rate of women and diverse members added to corporate boards by 2027.
"Our hope is that we can help spark a movement toward normalizing diversity," said chief marketing officer Kory Marchisotto.
Netflix Unveils In-House Adtech Platform at First In-Person Upfront
It was Upfront week this past week in New York, which means the biggest television companies in the country flocked to the city to stage massive marketing presentations in hopes of wooing ad buyers to their wares.
ADWEEK coverage of the goings-on has been thorough—and there has been a lot of news to break—but one of the biggest stories came from Upfront neophyte Netflix.
The streaming service, which only introduced an ad tier in November 2022, made several announcements. It successfully secured a series of Christmastime NFL games, marking its first major foray into the world of live sports.
It also shared that the number of subscribers to its ad tier has grown eightfold since last year—up to 40 million from 5 million.
But one of its more meaningful announcements from an operations perspective was the news that the company planned to in-house its adtech stack in the near future.
The company initially launched its advertising offering in partnership with Microsoft, as part of its effort to stand up the product as quickly as possible. But now that Netflix has learned the lay of the land, it plans to go it alone going forward.
“Bringing our adtech in-house will allow us to power the ads plan with the same level of excellence that’s made Netflix the leader in streaming technology today,” said advertising president Amy Reinhard.
Read more: While its ad tier is still small by comparison, 40% of new Netflix subscribers now sign up for the option, according to co-CEO Ted Sarandos.