James Murray
October 08, 2026
Your last review went fine. Forty minutes, most of it warm. He said you were a strong partner and that the team had matured. Marketing was not on his worry list.
Six weeks later, the budget came back flat while two other lines grew. Planning opened in a meeting you found out about afterward. Finance sent a question about what last year's brand spend returned, copied the CEO on it, and the tone was not curious.
Nothing in that review predicted any of it, and he was not being dishonest with you when he gave it.
Boathouse has asked CEOs what they think of their CMOs every year since 2021. The 2026 edition surveyed 150 CEOs at US companies between January 6 and January 26 (Boathouse). Two of the answers came from the same people in the same three weeks. 85% said their CMO builds trust inside the company. 13% said they were very confident their marketing organization can demonstrate the incremental lift from its investments (CustomerThink on the 2026 Boathouse CEO Study). Those are not two different groups of CEOs. With 85% on one question and 13% on the other, at least 72 of every 100 gave both answers.
The Split Scorecard
Your CEO is keeping two cards on you, and only one of them gets read out loud.
The Relationship Card grades trust, commitment, financial fluency, and whether you put the company ahead of your function. The Results Card grades strategy leadership and proof of return.
Reviews and the CEO's answer when a recruiter calls come off the Relationship Card. Budget allocation comes off the Results Card, and so does the decision to reorganize the function. This year the two cards moved in opposite directions.
Relationship Card, 2026 against 2025 (CustomerThink, Chief Marketer).
85% say their CMO builds trust inside the company, down from 87%
79% say their CMO shows strong commitment to the CEO and board, up from 76%
72% say their CMO understands the company financials, up from 61%
71% say their CMO puts the company's interests ahead of their own, up from 55%
Results Card, same comparison (Chief Marketer).
15% grade their CMO's performance an A, down from 24%
38% call their CMO best in class, down from 45%
43% have great confidence in their CMO, down from 50%
60% now put marketing in the cost-center column, up from 35%
John Connors, Boathouse's founder and CEO, told Digiday that CMOs have "strengthened the relationship test, but weakened on performance and execution variables" (Digiday).
Strategy and proof
68% of CEOs say their CMO leads or actively contributes to the formulation of company strategy. Split that number and contribution is 60%, leadership is 8%. Boathouse scores those two separately, which puts 92% of CMOs in the room for a strategy they are not credited with setting.
Strategy also gets graded on its own, and that number fell further. Fewer than 20% of CEOs gave their CMO an A on strategy, down from nearly 35% a year earlier, fifteen points in twelve months on one question (CustomerThink).
Gartner asked a harder version of the same question. In a survey of 426 senior marketing leaders responsible for brand strategy and senior leaders from other functions, only 32% said their CMO makes compelling business strategy recommendations from market or customer data, and 34% said their CMO effectively identifies the marketing initiatives that will contribute most to growth (Gartner, February 2026).
The forecast built off that data is specific. By 2027, more than 40% of CMOs who push for larger brand budgets will lose influence with the C-suite, because they will be unable to demonstrate sufficient returns. The same survey found 84% of companies stuck in a loop where underfunded measurement produces unclear impact, unclear impact produces skepticism, and skepticism tightens the budget (Gartner, February 2026).
The proof question is the one that moves money. 13% very confident on incrementality leaves 87% of CEOs funding a line they cannot verify. McKinsey found the same gap from the CEO side. CEOs feel marketing metrics clearly tie to business impact less than 60% of the time, and when McKinsey asked CEOs and their own CMOs to name their top three marketing metrics, the same-company pairs agreed half the time (McKinsey, October 2023).
Two more Boathouse items sit underneath all of this. 59% said their CMO understands the company's business goals, which leaves four in ten who would not say that about the person running their marketing. And 32% of these CEOs named growth performance as the area where they feel most personally exposed, ahead of competitive threats at 21% (CustomerThink).
In Partnership with Wispr Flow
Your follow-ups are only as good as your meeting notes
The scorecard, row by row
What CEOs told the survey | What it means for you | The move | By when |
85% trust you, 13% are very confident you can show incremental lift | Your reporting is correlational | Run one holdout or geo test on your largest channel | Before the next board meeting |
68% say you contribute to strategy, 8% say you lead it | You supply the marketing section of someone else's plan | Bring one written growth recommendation to planning | Before planning opens |
60% now call marketing a cost center, up from 35% | Your line is modeled as a reduction candidate | Tie the budget to a revenue number you accept | This quarter |
59% say their CMO understands the company's business goals | Four in ten CEOs are unsure you do | Send the CEO the company's top three objectives | This month |
32% feel most personally exposed on growth performance | Growth outranks everything in your marketing section | Open your next business review with the growth gap | Next business review |
Each move has a default and a condition to deviate, and the table is too narrow to carry them. The incrementality test is 10% of spend held out for six weeks on your largest channel, reported in dollars of delta. Below $1M in annual channel spend the test will not read, so use an annual geo split instead. The growth recommendation is one page, sent three days ahead, and it names a segment, a price, or a product decision. Channel plans do not count.
The revenue commitment covers at least half the budget, and if you control less than half the drivers you negotiate the drivers before you accept the target. The objectives note is one sentence each, sent annually and again with any new CEO or new plan. The growth gap goes on the first slide of the business review, unless you are inside your first 90 days and have not earned the number yet.
Four of the five rows cost nothing but calendar time. The incrementality test costs real money, and it is the row that moves the cost-center line, so it goes first.
Why the signal arrives late
Average CMO tenure in the S&P 500 is 4.1 years, against 5.0 years for all C-suite roles, drawn from 346 named CMOs as of June 30, 2025. 31% of S&P 500 companies do not have a chief marketing officer (Spencer Stuart, 2026).
The exit is usually survivable. Of 218 CMO exits between 2021 and 2025, 62% were promoted or moved into a similar or larger role, and 9% became a CEO (Spencer Stuart, 2026).
Your CEO will not read you the Results Card. He tells you the relationship is good, because by his own scoring it is. Over the same twelve months his confidence in you fell seven points and his trust in you moved two.
The upside is on his side of the table. CEOs who put marketing at the core of their growth strategy are twice as likely to post annual growth above 5% (McKinsey, October 2023).
The conversation to have in the next 30 days
Ask for 20 minutes that is off the review calendar and carries no budget request. Write your own answer down before you walk in.
When someone outside the company asks you what marketing is for here, what do you tell them?
Nine in ten CEOs told McKinsey that marketing's remit is well defined at their company. When McKinsey asked CEOs and their own CMOs what that role actually was, only half of the same-company pairs matched (McKinsey, October 2023).
The second question follows it. Which three marketing numbers would you use to explain marketing to the board if I were not in the room?
Whatever he names is the scoreboard you are already being graded on. Put it next to what you report today and close the difference. Run the pair twice a year, at planning and mid-year, or in month one with a new CEO.
His answer also settles two fights I have written about here, whether you own a revenue line or a budget, and what you carry into the board meeting.
Book it before your planning cycle opens, because once the numbers are set he answers from them.