Most founders, CEOs and business owners that I speak to aren’t short of marketing information. In fact, they’re drowning in it. And everyone seems to be an AI expert, because they live on their ChatGPT or Claude tab on their browser, and whatever they need access to, they simply tap a few questions and get the answers they were looking for. Whether the answers they get back are right or wrong for their business, they feel that because they got a detailed response... you know, a silicon chip gave you an answer that feels good because you’ve got a 12 page report on it all, it doesn’t mean that it’s right.

And for those not dabbling in AI, it’s no different. You’ll subscribe to dozens of newsletters, sat through seminars and webinars, bought the courses, stacked up the books. You’ve even jumped into some lifetime or annual high ticket program that gives you access to a mentor at an unprecedented level.

Information on marketing is not something you need more of. What you’re short of is implementation that actually fits your business.

What worked for that bro marketer, or that course creator, or the guru that you followed for the last decade, it won’t drop into your business and work out of the box. Their audience is different. Their offer is different to yours, and their context is different to yours.

So how do you take what you’ve learned and actually use it?

Because I’m a trainer, I’m a coach. I do a lot of this, and I want people who listen to me to actually implement some things and get things working. So what I tell them to do is three simple things.

1. Test whether it’s even relevant for their business or not, because actually, most strategies aren’t, and you only need one or two strategies for your business to actually make things work well.

2. You run a simplified version of it to see if your market responds, and you can do that through your email list or your already existing audience.

3. And then you measure success based on the sales that you make, not on the metrics that make the strategy look good on paper, like likes or comments or clicks or something like that. You actually need to count the money.

I see this all the time. When running strategy sessions with business owners to create a simplified strategy for growth, they’ve followed the mentor’s playbook for the last 90 days and seen nothing move, and then blame the marketing, not the strategy.

Their ego is so great they can’t admit that what they’ve bought into is the wrong person, who operates a business that is totally different from theirs. But they still keep plowing on because they think they’re going to get a result eventually.

Let me tell you, if over 90 days of maintained visibility you keep the calls to action sharp, you’ve communicated your message consistently and shown up, the marketing didn’t let you down. The strategy was wrong for your business.

The strategy should always be the thing that gets tested first, not the execution.

That’s why I do the work inside of a strategy session with clients. Before we even get into implementation, we map out four 90-day sprints across 12 months, built around what will work for you in your business. And as your fractional CMO, I can work with you over the next period of time to help you implement, or you can keep them and work on them yourself with your team.

If you want to understand strategies that will work for your business right now, then simply book a call with me over at www.anthodges.com and let’s see what we can do to actually make a plan that will work for your marketing efforts in your business, not just on paper or from the horse’s mouth of that mentor or coach that you’re listening to thinking, “Will this work?”

Let’s find a strategy that will work for your business. Book that call over at www.anthodges.com.

My focus is on one thing, one thing only, simplification, and when we simplify, we streamline things. Part of the first job that I do is I look at how we connect the marketing activity to revenue, because it has to be linked.

When marketing is seen as a cost center, it’s because marketing has not been linked to revenue.

I was on a call a few months back with a founder who said something that stuck with me all weekend. He said, “I need to cut my marketing budget by 30% because revenue is down.” I asked him, obviously the right kind of questions, “what’s the return on your current marketing spend?” and things like that - I was trying to dig into the challenges. But his response was, “I don’t know the answers to these questions, but it just feels like it’s too much at the moment”,” and that’s the moment I knew we had a bigger problem than just marketing budgets.

In businesses where marketing is treated as a cost center, the first thing that gets cut when revenue dips is marketing. The logic goes, revenue’s down, costs need to come down, marketing is a cost, so let’s cut marketing, let’s even chuck AI into the mix and reduce headcount.

There’s all kinds of different things that happen, and what happens then is when revenue drops further because the one engine that was bringing in new customers got throttled. Then there’s a bigger challenge!

In businesses where marketing is treated as an investment, the conversation is completely different. When revenue dips, the question becomes, which marketing activity is producing the best return, and how can we double down on it - together with and how can we simplify and strip back the activity that isn’t producing revenue?

The difference between those two conversations is not the size of business, it’s not the industry, it’s not the budget, it’s whether the CMO has done the work to prove that marketing is an engine, not an expense. That is on us as CMOs.

If the CEO and CFO see marketing as a cost, it’s because marketing has presented itself as a cost, campaigns, creative agency fees, video studio time, platform subscriptions, headcount, all of it shown as money going out, but there’s no clear picture of money coming back in.

The modern CMO has to flip that switch. Every dollar of marketing spend needs to be tied to revenue, outcome, a pipeline, contribution, a customer lifetime, value, not as a post event report, but as a live view that the finance team can see at the same time we see it.

When marketing is an investment the CFO becomes your ally, not your enemy. This is because the CFOs job is to align capital to the highest returning activities, and if marketing is one of those, the CFO will fight for your budget harder than you will.

So if you’re a founder and you’re about to think about cutting marketing because revenue’s down, just pause for one moment ask the question…

“What’s working? What’s not? And what could happen if we doubled down on the things that were working and stripped back the things that weren’t?”

That’s a very different conversation to let’s cut 30% of the marketing budget.

If this resonates with you and you want your marketing to turn from just a cost center to an investment with measurable returns, email me cmo@anthodges.com or find me on LinkedIn.

We need to make sure that we’re stepping into the right situation, the right conversations, with the right numbers to show a return on investment, not just showing our pretty graphs and campaigns, which all just really talk about the costs that are going out.

Please share this with colleagues who also need to hear this message.

I was in a boardroom a few months ago, sat on a quarterly review meeting with a business I’d been advising. The CFO, quite a calm guy, no drama, asked the CMO one question “What’s the cost of acquiring a customer this quarter, and how does it compare to last quarter?”

The CMO froze - not because she didn’t have the data, she had tons of data. She had a 40-slide deck full of it ready to present impressions, reach, engagement, stats, follower, growth, email, open rates, website sessions, bounce rates, top performing posts, all of it, but she couldn’t answer the one question the CFO actually asked.

Here’s what’s going on in so many businesses right now. The marketing team is producing beautiful reports. The CMO is presenting dashboards from six different platforms, and none of it rolls into one single number that CFO can drop into a spreadsheet and work with.

When the board is making decisions about where to put the next dollar of investment, they’re not weighing up reach against pipeline. They’re weighing up marketing against sales, hires against product development, against R&D, and marketing loses the argument every single time when it can’t speak in a language of finance, the modern CMO has to learn to translate.

That’s every campaign, every channel, every activity - it has to have a traceable revenue number that sits in the same system the CFO is using not a marketing attribution tool that produces its own version of the truth, the actual finance system.

And if you can’t answer the CFOs question about the cost of acquisition, lifetime, value, payback period and contribution margin to your top campaigns, you’re not running marketing. You’re running a content operation, there’s a difference.

If you’re a CEO or you’re watching your CMO present dashboards that don’t connect to the P&L it’s a warning sign. The fix isn’t more dashboards, the fix is rewiring the measurement so that marketing activity and revenue are in the same conversation.

Email me cmo@anthodges.com, or find me on LinkedIn. Let’s have a conversation about how to simplify the measurement and get marketing speaking the language of finance. Step away from vanity metrics and into the numbers CFO actually cares about.

If you’re a CMO realise that we’ve got a different job to do today than we did yesterday. As a CMO in the modern marketing world, it’s about connecting revenue to the marketing activity that’s being produced. That’s what’s going to keep your job longer than the average one and a half year position.

Side note… You know, a CFO, on average, is around 4.5 years in tenure. The average CMO is a 1.5. Start talking the language of finance, and you’ll keep your job.

There’s a conversation running through almost every forum, comment section, and LinkedIn thread I see. I hear it at events and on stages. It goes something like this: AI is getting better and faster - so why would any business pay for a senior marketing leader when they can get the same input from a tool?

It’s a fair question. But I think it’s the wrong question.

And most of the answers being given are defensive. Lists of things AI can’t do. Arguments about human creativity. Reasons why the role is safe. That defensiveness is very telling. Why would you get so defensive about something if you weren’t a little worried yourself?

AI won’t replace judgment. That’s the one thing it can’t do. It amplifies whatever is already present.

In a business with a clear strategy, a well-understood customer, strong offers, and a team that knows what it’s doing - AI is genuinely powerful. It accelerates execution. It reduces friction. It produces more output.

But in a business without those things? AI produces far more noise, far faster.

I’ve been watching this play out in real time inside businesses I work with. Teams are adopting AI tools enthusiastically. Output is going up. In some of those businesses, results are moving with it. In others, they’re not.

What’s happening in the ones that aren’t moving? Everyone’s getting lost in the activity - doing things, making movement - without building momentum. We don’t need movement and action. We need momentum and results.

That’s the real mistake in the ‘AI versus marketing leader’ framing. The right question is whether AI running on top of good strategic leadership produces better outcomes than AI running without it. The answer is consistently yes.

Harvard Business Review published research this year on where senior leaders are struggling with AI adoption. The core finding was that the problem isn’t the tools - it’s the clarity gaps underneath them. When leadership hasn’t made hard decisions about positioning, offers, audiences, and priorities, AI surfaces those gaps rather than filling them.

It’s like boiling a pan - all the imperfections come to the surface. That’s what AI is doing. You end up with sophisticated output that doesn’t convert, because the strategy it’s executing was never clear to begin with.

What AI is genuinely replacing is the execution layer. The tactical work. Content at scale, campaign variations, data analysis, reporting, automation. A lot of what junior marketing teams spent their time on is now being automated. And that’s fine.

What it isn’t replacing is the decision-making layer. What to say, who to say it to, where to prioritise, what to stop, how to read a market that’s shifting. That layer still requires someone with experience and accountability.

You can’t build a house on sand. Build AI on weak foundations, and when the storms come, it washes away.

The fractional CMOs who should be worried are the ones operating at the execution layer anyway - the ones calling themselves CMOs while doing the work of a marketing manager. Those carrying genuine strategic authority? AI isn’t a threat. It’s about to become the best productivity tool the role has ever had.

So to answer the question at the top: will AI replace the fractional CMO? In some cases, yes - it will weed out those who aren’t actually performing at a true CMO level. Those who are connecting marketing activity to revenue, doing the real leadership work, they’re going to win. AI will amplify what they’re doing and make it even better.

Everything I do as a fractional CMO starts with simplification. We start with a Simplify Day before any retainer. Then 90-day sprints over 12 months. We get into work straight away - subtracting, focusing, simplifying - to bring revenue in as quickly as possible. No pink fluffy dice. No crayons in the first 90 days. Just revenue.

Head over to www.anthodges.com if you want a conversation. There’s a chat button or you can book a call. Wherever you’re listening to this - subscribe, comment, let me know what you think. Three of these a week. Short, bite-sized, straight to the point.

I’m Ant Hodges. Let’s simplify.

The whole point of these field notes is something short and snappy. A nugget you can take and use in your business. I wrote Simplify the Funnel because I wanted to help you simplify - so I’m simplifying this too. No production. Just me talking to you.

Today I want to talk about why the CMO market, whilst it seems to be growing fast, has a real problem for founders and CEOs.

Some of the stats I’ve seen show that the fractional CMO market has doubled in the last two years. There are now around 120,000 people carrying that title, up from 60,000 in 2022. The market itself is valued at over a billion dollars, and it’s forecast to nearly double again by 2031.

On the surface, that sounds like good news for founders. More supply means more people, more choice, and better access to senior marketing leadership - without it costing a full-time hire.

But in reality? I think what we’re seeing in this marketplace - and from working with companies who’ve had previous CMOs - is that those CMOs weren’t necessarily all they were cracked up to be.

I recently checked ten random fractional CMO profiles on LinkedIn. Only one out of ten had held a CMO title or any kind of marketing leadership within the last five to ten years.

The other nine had renamed themselves into this market. Some had come out of fairly senior executive roles in companies that had nothing to do with marketing. A couple had some experience as graphic designers or web designers, and now they’re marketing themselves as CMOs.

That’s not the same as the twenty years of experience I’ve had agency-side before I decided to stop running an agency and focus on CMO work. There’s a real credibility gap in this space.

And here’s why that matters. When you as a founder or CEO are looking for a fractional CMO, that decision carries real weight. You’re handing someone strategic authority over your marketing function. You’re trusting them to make decisions about budget, positioning, team structure, and channel investment.

Done well, it accelerates growth. Done badly, it burns months of budget and leaves the business further down the drain than before.

You know what I see in the first 90 days of most fractional CMO contracts? Things like: we’re going to spend the first three months getting your messaging right, getting your offers sorted, looking at your brand positioning - and maybe considering a rebrand.

All of that may well be relevant at some point. But the reason a founder or CEO brings a CMO on board is to connect revenue directly to marketing activity. It has to be about the numbers from day one.

The question worth asking before you hire anyone in this space is very simple. Have you actually held a CMO role? Have you had experience running campaigns like this, and what were the results?

If the answer is no, or it’s evasive, or the experience just isn’t there - move to the next person. The market is expanding quickly, which is great because it gives you choice. But when you’re sifting the wheat from the chaff, it gets hard to find someone who genuinely has the experience and expertise.

The easiest way to protect yourself is to look at their profile. How long have they been in the game? Were they transitioning from a corporate position - maybe a redundancy or a golden handshake - and now they’re branding themselves as a CMO? Were they head of distribution or operations before this? It matters.

The fractional model works when the person carrying the title has genuinely done the job. When they haven’t, you’re paying executive rates for a very expensive experiment.

If you want to know more about the role I play as a performance-based fractional CMO, head over to anthodges.com. Subscribe to CMO Field Notes wherever you’re listening - Substack, Apple, Spotify. Drop a comment and let me know your thoughts. I’d love to hear them.

I’m Ant Hodges. Let’s simplify.