Expert Mode: The CMO’s Mandate—From Brand Steward to Profitable Growth Architect
Featuring insights from an interview with Ed See, Chief Growth Officer at Zeta Global
This article was based on the interview with Ed See, Chief Growth Officer at Zeta Global by Greg Kihlström, MarTech futurist, for The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. Listen to the original episode here:
The modern CMO‘s remit is less a job description and more an exercise in controlled chaos. The pressures are immense and coming from every direction: the board demands clearer P&L impact, the pace of technological change is relentless, and the fundamental nature of customer engagement is being rewritten by artificial intelligence (AI). As a marketing leader, you are expected to not only steward the brand but to be the primary architect of enterprise growth, a data scientist, a technologist, and a cross-functional diplomat. It’s a role that has expanded far beyond its traditional boundaries, demanding a new kind of leadership—one that is both strategic and deeply operational, visionary and relentlessly pragmatic.
In this landscape, the temptation to chase shiny objects is powerful. Yet, the most successful leaders are those who can cut through the noise and return to first principles, using new tools not as a solution in themselves, but as a way to execute on timeless business objectives more effectively. Ed See, Chief Growth Officer at Zeta Global and a former leader of McKinsey’s CMO practice, offers a clear-eyed perspective on this evolution. He argues that to navigate this complexity, marketing leaders must anchor themselves in their ultimate purpose: creating profitable customers. This isn’t a retreat from innovation; it’s the necessary foundation upon which all meaningful innovation must be built.
The Real Job: Delivering Profitable Customers
For all the talk of transformation, the core function of marketing has not changed, though it may have been obscured over the years. The C-suite and the board are increasingly looking past the traditional metrics of brand health and campaign performance to ask a more fundamental question: is marketing contributing to profitable growth? See emphasizes that this is not a new expectation, but rather a return to the original mandate of the marketing function. The ever-expanding list of responsibilities is not a replacement of the old job, but an addition to it.
“At the end of the day, what we need to do is deliver profitable customers. If the customer’s profitable, your ROI is good… A lot of times we’ve drifted to being chief advertising officers, chief coms officers, lots of those things, but at the end of the day, what we need to do is deliver profitable customers.”
This perspective is both clarifying and challenging. It forces a re-evaluation of where marketing leaders invest their time and political capital. While activities like advertising and communications are critical components of the marketing supply chain, they are means to an end, not the end itself. The ultimate product of the marketing engine is a profitable customer relationship. Framing the function in these terms shifts the conversation internally, especially with the CFO and CEO. It moves marketing from a perceived cost center, justified by intermediate metrics, to a direct and accountable driver of the bottom line. This requires marketers to think like general managers, understanding the intricate supply chain they manage—from initial awareness to profitable conversion and retention—and optimizing it for financial results.
A Pragmatic Framework for AI: From Hype to Execution
No conversation about modern marketing is complete without discussing AI, and no topic is more fraught with hype, confusion, and the lingering anxiety of “pilot purgatory.” Many enterprise AI initiatives stall not because the technology is flawed, but because they lack a clear, strategic framework for its application. See suggests that rather than viewing AI as a monolithic solution, successful CMOs are breaking down its potential into four core marketing competencies.
“You got to be able to recognize a pocket of opportunity. You have to be able to reach that pocket of opportunity. You have to be able to inform the relevance to that pocket of opportunity, and you got to be able to see the results. What I see successful CMOs doing is saying, how do I get AI to help me with each of those four areas?”
This framework—Recognize, Reach, Inform, and See Results—demystifies AI by tethering it to tangible marketing actions.
- Recognize: AI enables marketers to identify pockets of opportunity with a level of precision that was previously unimaginable, moving beyond broad segments to understand individual intent signals in real time.
- Reach: It allows for the management of customer touchpoints across a fluid journey, rather than being confined to rigid, siloed channels.
- Inform Relevance: This is where personalization matures from using a soft persona to delivering a message tailored to the specific time, place, and context that signals true intent.
- See Results: AI provides the connective tissue to measure impact across the journey, closing the feedback loop and enabling continuous learning and optimization.
By applying AI through this lens, leaders can move from scattered experiments to a coordinated strategy. It becomes less about “doing AI” and more about doing marketing better, faster, and more intelligently. It also provides a roadmap for incremental adoption, allowing teams to build momentum by proving value in one area before expanding to the next, thereby avoiding the all-or-nothing approach that so often leads to failure.
Speaking the Language of the Board: From Activity to Outcome
One of the most persistent challenges for CMOs is communicating their value in a way that resonates in the boardroom. The metrics that are essential for managing the day-to-day marketing operation—click-through rates, engagement, share of voice—often fail to connect with the board’s focus on financial performance. The disconnect arises when marketers present the inner workings of their supply chain instead of the final output. As See points out, this requires a fundamental shift in mindset.
“Think as a business executive first, as a marketing executive second.”
This simple directive carries profound implications. It means leading with the outcomes—customer acquisition cost, lifetime value, contribution margin—before delving into the activities that produced them. It’s about demonstrating a command of the business, not just the marketing craft. See humorously notes that marketers sometimes “like to show that we’re splashing in the pool,” focusing on the flurry of activity. The goal, however, must be to move from reporting on activity to reporting on outcomes. An organization that has learned from a failed experiment has achieved a valuable outcome, but it should be presented in terms of the progress it enables for the next initiative, not as a standalone “learning” KPI. This business-first approach builds credibility and positions the CMO as a strategic peer in the C-suite, one who understands that their ultimate accountability is to the financial health of the enterprise.
Preparing for the Future by Mastering the Present
The industry is abuzz with talk of “agentic commerce,” a future where customers deploy AI agents to negotiate and make purchases on their behalf. While it’s tempting to get lost in futuristic scenarios, the preparation for this shift is rooted in a timeless principle: customer obsession. The brands that will thrive in an AI-driven world are those that are building the deepest, most data-rich understanding of their customers today.
“Become customer obsessed. Build on your history with your customers and understand what this means to them… Don’t take a technology and just push it forward. Understand how the technology can become better than a classic personal shopper.”
This advice serves as a crucial grounding force. The development of sophisticated AI agents, whether by brands or consumers, will depend entirely on the quality and depth of the data they are trained on. For a brand to build a useful agent, it must first have a profound, historically-informed view of its customers’ preferences, behaviors, and needs. This makes a robust first-party data strategy not just a current priority, but the essential prerequisite for future relevance. The path to an agentic future is not paved with speculative technology projects, but with the diligent, day-to-day work of knowing your customer better than anyone else. The technology, when it arrives, should be an extension of that obsession, a tool to serve the customer in a more personal and effective way.
The evolution of the CMO role is not about abandoning the core principles of marketing, but about elevating them. It requires a relentless focus on creating profitable customers, viewing technology not as an end but as a powerful enabler of that fundamental goal. It demands a new language for communicating value, one that speaks in the terms of business outcomes and financial impact, earning the CMO a permanent and respected seat at the strategic table.
The leaders who will define the next era of marketing will be those who can maintain this dual focus—mastering the foundational elements of their craft while simultaneously architecting the future. They will build teams that are comfortable with experimentation, that see learning as a precursor to progress, and that are, above all, obsessed with the customer. The path forward is complex, but the guiding principle, as Ed See reminds us, is remarkably simple: ground your strategy in profitability, execute with precision, and never lose sight of the human you are trying to serve.
