At AdAge's Business of Brands in Chicago last week, Naturium CMO Jake Galtere offered a tidy formulation: "human first, human last." AI and other automation tools belong to what happens in between - research, production, optimization - while the parts that touch the customer stay human on both ends. I believe he's sincere about it. But I'm less sure all his peers are; many seemed to reach for the same formulation as a hedge: values-forward about creativity without paying to defend it, AI-forward about efficiency without admitting that's now the whole job.

In my view, the AI conversation at Business of Brands wasn't really about AI. It's part of a longer argument marketers have been having for twenty-plus years, as successive waves of martech come online. Underneath every AI conversation, the same five questions kept surfacing:

A CMO as a “driver of growth”, accountable to revenue was the recurring theme throughout the conference. That makes sense: NielsenIQ's CMO Outlook 2026 found 74% of CMOs are under more scrutiny to prove ROI than a year ago, and CEO/CFO belief in long-term brand-building fell from 80% to 69% in a single year. Gartner's December 2025 survey backs it up: budget constraints are CMOs' top challenge, and revenue growth - not brand, not creativity - is the stated priority for 2026.

This focus on revenue was often paired with a little Byron Sharp name-dropping. Everyone can say the phrase How Brands Grow;  but marketers have not figured out how to make a persuasive case for what it takes to do build mental availability, perhaps because it seems diffuse and slow next to the immediate, legible logic of performance media. This inability to articulate the value of “the long of it” is perennial.

It’s also kind of nuts: NielsenIQ found creative ranked well behind targeting and reach as an ROI lever - even though NielsenIQ's own research elsewhere finds strong creative can lift sales up to 50%. The measurement focus ironically undervalues a foundational piece of the overall growth puzzle.

Boards and CFOs have long been inclined to invest in technologies that are meant to drive marketing efficiency; they seem to continue to have little capacity for evaluating marketing effectiveness. The “become best friends with the CFO” vibe of the conference suggested that top marketing leadership have largely given up trying to build that capacity. I don’t blame them – we’ve interviewed CEOs who’ve plainly told us they have no idea how to tell if a CMO is doing a good job; others told us they were skeptical about the ability of marketing to drive growth. If your boss (or more likely your boss’ boss) doesn’t really believe in what you do or know how to tell if you’re successful, it’s much easier to tell them stories they want to hear and are capable of understanding.

You could tell that marketers remain conflicted about it all. A running theme throughout the conference was the need for “human creativity”, particularly because they felt that consumers could easily sniff out non-human creative, and were likely to be turned off by it. The evidence for this, sadly, is mixed. A Columbia University study sponsored by Taboola's Realize division found AI-generated ads were clicked at higher rates than human ones (NB: it’s worth noting the CTR is still under 1%, and that Taboola sells AI ad-creative tools). NielsenIQ's own research turned up mixed findings: ads perceived as AI-generated underperform on memory, word-of-mouth, and purchase intent — but AI-generated imagery can match human imagery on click-through, provided it doesn't “look” AI-generated.

Consumers don’t have a vested interest in keeping copywriters and art directors employed; there’s nobody out here repping the need for human admakers. It’s just that right now, consumers are awash in slop, and they don’t care for it. Which means the "made with AI" disclosure advocates are possibly making the wrong point. The IAB and Sonata Insights found 73% of Gen Z and millennials say clear disclosure would either increase purchase likelihood or have no effect at all. Undetected, low-effort AI content is the threat; disclosed, high quality AI content probably isn't.

In a sense, the declarations that ads be made by humans - Aerie and Dove's no-AI pledges, He Gets Us shooting on film - acts more like insurance against looking cheap. But it also carries a reputational risk. Justin Booth-Clibborn at Passion Pictures put it plainly to Digiday: brands posturing as anti-AI is "a very dangerous thing," since AI is threaded through most production whether the final ad admits it or not. By that measure, Naturium's "human first, human last" is the most honest position - nobody can credibly claim AI plays no role anywhere in the process.

Another theme of the conference was the use of influencer and creator partnerships. Those relationships are complicated by AI. A Gartner survey out this week found 35% of consumers trust influencers less because of AI saturation, but 43% trust “real people” more as a result. When it comes to creator content, people are here for the verifiable humanness. All of this complicates the quest for a balance between “go all-AI" or “go all-human."

The moderators' questions kept circling a fear of replacement: which roles or tasks will AI take? But the anxiety in the hallway conversations wasn't really “I'll be automated out" even though NielsenIQ puts the share of marketers who fear that above 60%, and Menlo Ventures' 2026 consumer AI report finds 43% of all working adults see at least moderate job risk from AI. The version we heard in conversation with practitioners was that the job that's left won't be worth having. When I started out in advertising as a copywriter, I used to say I wanted to be a writer and have the pay stubs to prove it - the fantasy was never just having a job, it was having a job doing something interesting, and a little glamorous. If we’re all just prompting a bot to generate locations and actors and stories, where’s the fun?

We see the creativity and glamor leached out of the marketing discipline perhaps most starkly in the way we label its top leadership. Spencer Stuart's tenure study found only 40% of Fortune 500 marketing leaders are still titled plain "chief marketing officer," and 11% don't have "marketing" in their title at all. It’s an ongoing migration toward "commercial," "growth," "customer" that was underway years before generative AI showed up. AI is just the latest thing to blame it on. 

In our conversations with c-suite leaders, we think this has less to do with the available toolkit for marketers, and more to do with how skilled and strategic the lead marketer is, and how valuable marketing is to the rest of the c-suite. If there’s misalignment there, it doesn’t matter how much martech we throw at squeezing efficiencies out of the marketing budget.

With no commitment to solve the misalignment problem, and more of the job turned into automation, efficiency, measurement and ops, how much longer will our most experienced, expert and talented marketing leaders stick it out?

The CMO title was invented just as we entered an era in which it seemed possible to finally resolve John Wanamaker’s complaint about not knowing which half of the advertising budget was working. But the deeper problem now isn't really the tooling, it's executive trust in the CMO to access and use the data that exists to develop and execute a growth strategy. At the event, the advice for CMOs kept boiling down to: prove you're effective without the tools you need, then earn the right to the tools that would actually make you effective. But this is a trap if the CMO isn’t read in to the overall business strategy; it’s even more dangerous when every business function is working towards different goals. One consultant who works across C-suites described a problem that absolutely should not exist: the functional leaders are working with KPIs that don’t align. No amount of data access fixes that. But if what you’re doing isn’t pulling in the same direction the CEO wants to go - by design - then there is no foundation for the trust required.

Which leaves CMOs in the position of what sounded to me like begging for permission to do the job they hired you to do.

If you don’t have access to internal data, don’t expect your platform partners to help you out. Their goals are likewise misaligned - they want to keep your customers on their sites, not yours. Madison & Wall's numbers show Google, Meta, and Amazon capturing 56% of U.S. ad revenue in 2025, up from 53%, with AI-directed automated spend projected to go from 12% of the market to 27% by 2030. Even the raw material feeding audience to these systems is getting squeezed — publishers in Google's new AI licensing pilot describe the payouts as "peanuts" and the mechanism as a "black box." Meanwhile OpenAI is rolling out ad formats that keep users inside ChatGPT rather than routing them anywhere brand-owned; ChatGPT ad revenue hit a $1 billion run-rate 200 days after launch. The walled garden isn't going away in the AI era, it's just growing a chat interface — and the "AI is eroding search, so we need more brand budget" argument that State Farm, Mercedes-Benz, and Hoka are all making mostly ends up funding the very platforms it's meant to hedge against.

For the past year, Adriana and I have been researching the gap in knowledge, priorities, and communication between CMOs and their Executive Leadership Teams — a lot of CMOs don't report to the CEO, or sit on the ELT at all. Attending Business of Brands was meant to be a capstone on that work, alongside a deep dive into the academic and trade literature and interviews with over a dozen CEOs, CMOs, Chief Growth Officers, Chief Product Officers, and executive search experts. We'll be releasing our findings over the next few weeks, and we have as much to say to CEOs and executive leadership as we do to CMOs about closing the gap.

But if I had to bet on the odds of closing that gap, based on last week's conversations, I'd predict that most marketing leaders stay on the treadmill — running faster to stand still, held in place by misaligned goals, data territoriality, and an ecosystem hurtling toward synthetic marketers selling to synthetic customers in synthetic environments.

It doesn't have to go that way. But getting off the treadmill takes more than the CMO learning to speak CEO. It requires the rest of the leadership team to see the value marketing brings to the business — even when it's booked as an expense.

CMO Outlook 2026, NielsonIQ

CMOs' Top Challenges & Priorities For 2026, Gartner

An Army of Paid Creators Is Carpeting the Web With Political Content, NY Times Gift Link