CMOs think an increasing focus on digital marketing has been the biggest change to their roles over the past five years, according to Deloitte’s CMO Insights study.
The increased focus on digital marketing (23%) comes as for a second year running economic conditions are viewed as the most pressing issue facing senior marketers, closely followed by digital transformation.
Director of technology and transformation at Deloitte, William Grobel, believes economic pressures and the pace of digital transformation are major reasons for the increased focus on digital marketing.
“All those things are coming together to make digital marketing even more important,” he says.
“It’s slightly more easy to track and measure return on investment with digital media than it is with other forms of media. The definition of digital marketing is broader now also now that we have more AI adoption coming in.”
Jumping 9 percentage points from last year, the increasing focus on digital marketing is closely followed by CMOs believing their role has become more data-driven, with a focus on analytics (18%) and the use of AI growing (15%).
In last year’s CMO Insights report, remote working was ranked as the most significant change to the role over the past five years. However, in 2025 remote working has dropped to fifth place (13%) in the list of significant changes. The fact remote working has ranked lower is not a case of it being unimportant, says Grobel.
“It’s not as important because we’ve been through it,” he says. “It ranked high last year because it was still very fresh in people’s memory. It was a hot topic, but now patterns have normalised. Hybrid working has become the norm for many organizations. We know how to operate in this hybrid world.”
Why most marketers are using AI wrong (and how to fix it)
Another topic of interest for the CMO sample is the adoption of AI. Marketing leaders’ readiness to adopt AI has also significantly increased compared to last year.
AI readiness has risen by 15 percentage points, with 94% of marketing leaders now slightly to extremely ready to adopt AI in marketing. Of this percentage, a third are either very or extremely ready, compared to a fifth the previous year.
The number of senior marketers who say they are not at all ready to adopt AI has dropped by 15 percentage points from 21% in 2023 to 6% in 2024.
However, senior marketers still have concerns regarding the use of gen AI. Some 60% of respondents have data and privacy concerns around the use of AI, an increase of 7 percentage points from last year. Concerns around the use of gen AI and brand authenticity have risen by 10 percentage points to 52% in 2024.
Shifting priorities
Returning to the pressing issues for senior marketers, availability of talent ranked lowest on the list. The research also found senior marketing leaders and CMOs ranked the human resources as their least important partner.
Deloitte attributes this dwindling interest in talent to the decision among some organisations to cut costs and pause plans for recruitment, despite the need to invest in new skills.
When it comes to the most important relationships for marketers, the CEO is cited as the most important partner for CMOs, but not their closest collaborator.
Despite prioritising the strategic CEO partnership, the research finds both the chief strategy officer (29%) and chief technology officer (24%) rank above the CEO (21%) in terms of who CMOs work the most closely with. Some 15% of CMOs work with the CEO less than any other C-suite executive.
Grobel explains that when a senior marketer becomes CMO, the role changes from running the marketing function to helping run the business. He describes it as a big shift “many struggle with.”
“Because of this shift, it’s necessary CMOs work closely with the CEO,” Grobel adds.
