Marketing leadership has never been more complicated to navigate, or more consequential to get right. The CMO role has expanded well beyond its traditional boundaries, absorbing responsibility for revenue, customer experience, technology, and organizational design, often simultaneously. The leaders doing this work are making real decisions under real constraints, and the thinking that drives those decisions rarely surfaces in the places most people are looking.
That’s the gap the CMO Series was built to fill.
Starting today, the CMO Series is live on Aivanta’s editorial platform: a growing archive of in-depth conversations with senior marketing leaders about how they actually think about their work; The real considerations, the genuine trade-offs, and the decisions that required judgment when the right answer wasn’t obvious.
Every piece in the series is built around a simple premise: the most useful perspective in this industry comes from operators, not observers. The leaders we feature are running marketing organizations at scale, navigating the same pressures their peers are navigating, and making bets they have to defend. That’s what we’re interested in: how they think, how they decide, and what they’ve learned that doesn’t fit neatly into a conference panel.
The series launches with two conversations. Michelle Esgar, Director of Marketing & Experience at Panasonic North America, makes the case that creative problem solving belongs at the top of the org, not just inside the creative function, and shares what it looks like to own the full customer journey including what happens after the sale. Eliza Sadler, Head of Brand Elevation at Ocean Spray, brings a framework for brand investment that most marketing leaders are still arguing around: that brand is the long tail of the consumer decision journey, and that the internal case for it has to be built on that logic, not on sentiment. She also speaks candidly about managing a multi-agency creative ecosystem without losing coherence, and where she thinks human creative judgment stays non-negotiable in relation to what AI can advance and provide.
We’re building something we think the industry actually needs: a record of how marketing leadership is being practiced right now, by the people doing the work. The archive will grow with each conversation we publish.
The CMO Series is available now at aivanta.io/cmo-series.
New interviews will be published on a rolling basis. If you’d like to be considered for participation, reach out to info@aivanta.io.
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