This article was originally published in 2017 and was last updated on June 9 2025.
- Tension: CMOs are celebrated for “owning the customer journey,” yet every new slice of ownership raises the question of whether one executive can steward culture, data, and revenue without losing sight of humanity.
- Noise: Industry decks trumpet “full-funnel accountability,” vendor roadmaps blur mar-tech and ad-tech into alphabet soup, and boardrooms chase AI shortcuts—drowning out the slower work of translating insight into felt experience.
- Direct Message: Robin Ritenour’s 2017 reflections point to a truth still unresolved in 2025: a CMO’s real power equals the willingness to steward every silo that shapes trust—and the courage to refuse tasks that would break it.
Read more about our approach → The Direct Message Methodology
Back in 2017, I met Robin Ritenour for a hurried coffee outside a Dublin conference hall. She had just added Marketo to a résumé already stamped by SAP, Salesforce, and Adobe, and she was mapping the expanding territory beneath the CMO’s feet. Her notebook margin carried a quick sketch—awareness, acquisition, adoption, advocacy—a funnel we all knew by heart.
Then she drew a second line beneath it and labelled it “operations.” The point landed without flourish: tools were becoming less important as logos and more important as connective tissue. CMOs who treated them like trophies, she predicted, would drown.
At the time, “ownership” meant campaign orchestration, rough-hewn data lakes, maybe the first wave of account-based marketing.
Eight years later, the docket is heavier: privacy governance, AI-content pipelines, e-commerce checkout, even slices of customer service now sit in marketing because budgets followed the promise of lifetime value. Ritenour’s napkin diagram reads like prophecy: if the same leader doesn’t control the operational line, every promise up top risks collapse.
Her 2017 perspective on consolidation looks even sharper in hindsight. Venture capital has cooled, and point solutions sprinted toward M&A safety. Adobe’s absorption of Figma is still digesting; Salesforce’s Genie CDP now feeds Commerce Cloud price logic in real time. Ritenour warned that post-merger purgatory often hides behind tidy quadrant slides.
One fintech client, she recalled, bought an AI copy generator only to shelve it after Marketo’s rebuilt content hub shipped similar features. Duplication, she said, is the tax a company pays for collecting promises faster than it sunsets assumptions.
She also flagged a cultural blind spot: many brands shouted “omnichannel” while compensation plans still pitted digital against field sales. Her litmus test was simple—ask any CMO who approves the data-model changes needed for real-time personalisation. If the answer falls outside marketing, ownership is theatrical.
Confusion has thickened since that conversation. AI demos claim to create ninety-second persona segments; state privacy laws fracture like cracked porcelain; CFOs who once skimmed marketing spend now demand incremental profit attribution cell by cell. Vanity metrics didn’t vanish—they just slipped into new dashboards.
During the pandemic, one telco celebrated a 40 percent open-rate spike, only to discover the lift came from mandatory outage notices. Ritenour’s framework would have flagged that as distress, not success.
Her prescription then—and now—begins with a single customer-data spine that respects both brain and heart. AI can orchestrate touchpoints, but consent is a renewable license.
Over-personalisation erodes the relationship faster than under-personalisation ever did.
The direct message
A CMO truly “owning more than ever” delegates bravely—but never abdicates responsibility for the customer’s feeling of being seen rather than surveilled.
That lens reframes mar-tech consolidation as a boundary exercise. Adobe’s latest integration bakes consent strings through every cloud—unsexy work, Ritenour considered foundational. Without such guardrails, she said, personalisation would inevitably tip into creep.
She also argued that the role’s scope demands newsroom-style talent: data stewards fluent in identity graphs and brand tonality, product marketers who pivot between creative ideation and regulatory nuance.
Technology alone will not cut it; the next-wave CMO must curate translators able to glide across code, culture, and cash flow.
Burnout looms, of course. But Ritenour believed consolidation, handled wisely, could reclaim focus. Fewer vendor road trips; deeper cross-functional pilots; more mental space for value design instead of license negotiation.
The leaders who survive will be those willing to shoulder consequences, not just capability.
I closed my notebook that afternoon in Dublin with one lingering paraphrase of her outlook: if marketing dares to know the customer more intimately than any other function, it must also dare to accept full accountability for what that knowledge does in the world.
In 2025, the dare still stands — and the silence that follows her challenge remains the most revealing metric on the dashboard.
Ownership, after all, is not an abstract KPI but a living practice that shows up in how we name trade-offs, escalate mistakes, and defend the customer’s attention against internal shortcuts. Tech roadmaps will keep expanding—voice, VR, quantum analytics—but the gravity of trust will not lighten.
CMOs who survive this decade will be fluent in both Python and pastoral care, equally ready to optimize a model and to veto a campaign that betrays its own insight. And boards that back them will discover that the surest ROI still comes from honoring the promise implicit in every first-party data field: We asked because we intended to respect what you told us.
