CMO Alliance

Building one brand that works the same way in 15 different markets sounds simple on a strategy slide. 💻 It rarely holds up once local teams start executing it. Most companies still plan for language like they plan a shipment: how many languages, what it costs, and how long it takes. The real value lies deeper. Every language is an opportunity to build a brand experience that truly belongs in that market. 🎙We sat down with Jason Hemingway, CMO at Phrase, who has spent the last 4 years watching global brands work through exactly this. A few of his best points:👇 1) Good customer data doesn't guarantee a better experience. "Understanding the customer isn't enough on its own. The real test is whether that understanding actually improves engagement, the overall brand experience, or satisfaction." One of Phrase's fintech clients added more cultural nuance and tone to regional alerts. Satisfaction rates went up 70 to 90%. 2) Central campaigns don't scale the way most teams assume. "You're not scaling the content. You're scaling all of that rework." 3) The agent adoption curve is moving fast. Jason points to Gartner data: 40% of enterprise applications are expected to embed AI agents by the end of this year, up from about 5% a year ago. 4) Treat language like a growth lever, not a cost to manage. "How do you use 15 languages to create 15 different distinct brand experiences?" What mindset shift do marketers need to make to go global? Jason says it’s to "Design for global from day one." The full conversation goes deeper: how AI is reshaping brand strategy and localization, and the mindset shift marketers need to actually go global. 👋 P.S. Read it, watch it, or listen here: https://lnkd.in/eRgNvhET

The CMOs who’ve already had the hard conversations walk into 2027 planning with a head start. On November 17, 75+ senior marketing leaders are meeting in Chicago to have them. The agenda is the questions that will shape marketing’s next year: → Brand vs. demand: how to turn full-funnel marketing into a budget allocation your CFO can actually defend (Marta Bowles, NielsenIQ) → Where growth really comes from when markets, regulation and buyer expectations keep shifting: new markets, pricing moves, or the customers you already have (Donald (Don) Polite, SKYGEN, Bonnie Habyan, X-Caliber, and Kim Gallagher, Nuuly) → What the best CMOs will do differently in 2027 (Jocelyn Johnson, American Bar Association) And then there’s the part no recap can give you: the peer across the table who’s already solved the problem you’re stuck on, and the people you’ll be texting for the rest of the year. Complimentary CMO passes are available. 🎟️ Apply here: https://lnkd.in/eTHrdDYn

93% of searches in Google’s AI Mode end without a single click to anyone’s website. Which means for a growing share of buyers, you’re not being judged on your website anymore. You’re being judged on how an AI chooses to describe you. The problem is that only 16% of brands currently track whether they’re being described in AI answers at all. The rest are flying blind; producing content, publishing it, and hoping it’s being seen in the places that matter. On December 3, Jennifer Griffin Smith (She/Her) (CMO, Acquia) is running a free live session on how to fix exactly this: The AI Visibility Action Plan. You’ll walk out with: → A clear read on how AI platforms decide which brands to cite → The fundamentals of Answer Engine Optimisation that work across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity → An accessibility action plan you can start on this quarter → A roadmap for what to fix, build, and measure Worth an hour for any CMO watching traditional search traffic shift and wondering what the right first move is. 📅 December 3 💻 Free live and OnDemand access

If you had to move 10% of your budget into AEO tomorrow, where would it come from? We asked in the CMO Alliance Slack. Paid got the most votes, and it wasn’t close. One lone member picked “nowhere, I’m not convinced yet.” Respect. That was a Weigh-in Wednesday in #ai-for-marketers, the channel we spotlighted last month. All September we dug into AEO and AI discovery with Monday memes, Weigh-in Wednesdays, Throwback Thursdays and some very honest threads. This month, the spotlight moves to #budgets-and-board-reporting, our brand new channel for budget planning, proving ROI, board decks and those all-important CFO conversations. Already in there: a paid keynote fee that got rerouted into a $50K boost for paid media, and a poll on the first question your board asks about marketing. Pipeline won. Which brings us to the follow-up. Does your board trust the pipeline number you show them, or do you spend half the meeting defending it? Come and tell us 👇 Join the CMO Alliance Slack here: https://lnkd.in/gW66rqkn

Questions on a CMO's desk right now: How do you show the board what marketing returns? Where does pipeline come from when buyers ask an AI assistant before they search? How do you protect brand spend when everyone wants short term numbers? What should a marketing team look like when AI sits at the centre of it? Those are the questions the CMO Summit London agenda is built around, on December 1 at InterContinental London, The O2. Here's what's in store: → Marketing as an investment: speaking the language of the CFO, with Jon Burke, CMO at Dals → Balancing brand and performance under short term pressure, with Michael Edelmann, CMO at 111SKIN → Demand in the age of AI search: a panel with leaders from Lamda, Bango, ADB SAFEGATE, Ninox Software and DigitalOcean → AI and the future of marketing capability: a panel with leaders from Said Business School at the University of Oxford, Proofpoint, Hark Consultants and timextender → From invisible to unmissable: rebuilding a global tech brand at AI speed, with Madlen Nicolaus, CMO at Hexagon AB After lunch you'll get interactive roundtables with fellow marketing leaders, then a closing working session on what keeps CMOs up at night, led by Virginia (Gins) Ford-Young, CMO at S&P Global Ratings. Attendance is free and by invitation only. Request your invite here 👇 https://lnkd.in/es9NQtii

Scientifically accurate 💀 From your first week in the seat to your last, the question never changes. Only the Slack channel it arrives in. You can't make the question go away. But... You CAN change what happens after it. The marketing leaders who survive that question walk in with an answer the CFO can audit: which tools touch pipeline, which spend moves revenue, and which half of the stack is decoration. The ones who struggle are stuck defending a martech bill nobody fully understands, including them. That's exactly what we built our MarTech Summit around. We'll be in Boston on October 27th! 100+ senior marketers (80% senior management, 75+ companies) spending one day on the stuff behind the eternal question: 1) Proving your impact on pipeline and revenue velocity, with evidence finance will accept instead of attribution dashboards they can't audit 2) Simplifying your stack so it stops needing a rebuild every time a new trend drops 3) Governing AI so every decision is transparent and easy to defend when the board asks Ft these incredible speakers: - Tom Capone, Director of Marketing Technology, Strategy & Operations at the NFL - Shoeb Shaikh, Global Head of Campaigns and Strategic Programs at Lenovo - Ellen Silveira, Director of Brand & Content Strategy at Philips - Allyson Barr, CMO at ActiveState - Abby Koble, VP of Global Marketing Operations at Cornerstone OnDemand Your ticket also unlocks all 6 co located summits in the building that week btw: product marketing, rev ops, sales enablement, customer success, product led growth, and AI for customer support. Bring the team, split the tracks, compare notes at dinner. -- Follow CMO Alliance for more Part of The Alliance

Is it the end of the em dash? All I know is that leaving even one in my copy feels illegal these days 😂. #marketingmemes #marketing

Tell me you're a marketer without telling me... We ship a TON of launches at The Alliance. Earlier in Q1 alone, we ran 36 of them. (NOTE: these are all different tiers across digital product launches, new communities, co marketing partner campaigns, etc) Three quick learnings for you 👇 1) Align your offer CTA by segment maturity We A/B tested direct CTAs like "register for a webinar" VS more value first offers like "get the 2025 benchmarks deck" or "grab our campaign template from this event." Value first outperformed direct asks by 42 to 76 percent depending on the buyer segment. Friendly reminder: segmenting by buyer maturity and aligning the offer to funnel stage is a massively underrated way to improve your initial offer conversion rate when you bring it to market. 2) Your sequencing and channel layering matter. We tested single touch campaigns versus multistep nurture. Our top performing sequences included: - A short-form POV post or meme - Followed by an executive quote carousel or teaser clip - Then a direct CTA with calendar or gated offer That three touch structure drove 4.4 times more booked meetings compared to the single CTA format. Our average cost per qualified meeting dropped by 53.4% using the multistep sequence. 3) Invest in your sales handoff We built auto routing of leads enriched with Clearbit and Clay to segment by ICP match, engagement depth, and survey response. Leads that received a personalized SDR touch within 48 hours of attending a launch event were 57 percent more likely to convert to an opportunity than those touched after 3 days. There's so many new tools on the market that let you do meaningful personalization at scale today. That's why I'm a big believer marketers should start investing more into the GTM Engineering / RevOps side of the world. Speaking of launches... We just launched a new CMO dinner coming up soon! "Marketing leaders dinner in Boston" on December 1st 👋 P.S. Request your spot here: https://lnkd.in/e5k8HBFn An exclusive evening for marketing leaders. Join your peers for an intimate evening of meaningful conversations, valuable networking, and fresh perspectives on the future of customer research. Connect with industry peers, exchange ideas, and discover the strategies shaping modern marketing, all in a relaxed and elegant fine dining setting. Don't forget to invite your Boston marketing BFFs too. Hope to see you there! -- Follow CMO Alliance for more Part of The Alliance

Brand or demand? Budget season loves a binary. Marta Bowles, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at NielsenIQ, is taking it on at CMO Summit Chicago on November 17, in a session called 'The CMO’s impossible trade-off: Brand vs. Demand'. Three things she’ll dig into: 👉 Why consumers aren’t making either/or choices, and why marketers can’t either (including Gen X, who control trillions in spending and are still chronically under-marketed to) 👉 How agentic commerce is creating a new consumer operating model, and what it takes for a brand to be legible and trusted by humans and machines 👉 Why the CMO’s real job is closing the valuation gap: showing how today’s marketing investment compounds into tomorrow’s growth, resilience, and enterprise value If you’ve ever had to defend a brand budget in a demand-gen world, or the other way round, this one’s for you. You’ll be in the room with 75+ senior marketing leaders working through the same trade-offs. 🎟️ Apply for your complimentary CMO pass: https://lnkd.in/eVvSMyWy

A+ Copywriting Clearly written by a human What's the delta between AI vs human copy? New research from Smartly for you: From their latest study, they found only 13% of consumers trust ads created entirely by AI. But when humans co created with AI support, that number goes up to almost half at 48%. IAB Research been continuing that exploration and, in a similar research study, found a 37 point gap between how positively ad executives THINK consumers feel about AI ads and how customers actually feel. AKA... Your audience can smell the meh in AI copy. So what makes human copy distinct? Two core pillars behind this: 1) Human written copy is better at taking a stance AI models are by default, trained to regress to an average outcome. By their very nature, they tend to sand off the edges, which is where the best copy lives, right? Those edges are statistical outliers where the best humor and wit comes from that humans are able to identify wayyy better than bots. 2) Humans know what copy to leave out AI fundamentally still needs to take a lesson from coco chanel and know what copy to leave behind. It tends to be more verbose by nature. Precision is still a fundamental skill that a managing editor has in a way Claude doesn't quite grasp yet at the level it needs to. P.S. What would you add as # 3? Let us know below -- Follow CMO Alliance for more Part of The Alliance