CMOs aren’t exactly known for staying in one place very long.

But that’s not necessarily a bad thing: Richard Sanderson, marketing, communications, and sales practice leader at executive search and consulting firm Spencer Stuart, told us that short tenure “does not equal failure,” as the firm found that many chief marketers who left between 2019 and 2021 went on to a “similar or bigger role.”

Big picture: As executives consider their next step, some are considering whether they want to work full time—or, at least, full time for one company. Enter the “fractional” CMO.

Some see the role as a great opportunity for employees looking for flexibility and different opportunities, and for companies looking to potentially save money.

Wholly fractional

Chief Outsiders is a staffing firm that was created in 2009 to connect businesses with fractional CMOs.

• Deborah Fell, managing partner at Chief Outsiders, told us that the firm has worked with more than 1,550 companies to date and saw 25% revenue growth last year.
• “When we started, we were explaining what we meant by fractional and explaining the whole concept of how this could work,” she said. “We’re not doing any more education.”

Zoom in: Kristine Ford, fractional CMO at canned-seafood brand Scout, told us she recently decided to take on the role at 20 hours per week in search of work-life balance. “I do think that, especially for smaller companies or companies that don’t want to be in a position of potentially laying people off later, if there’s a lot of fluidity and fast growth, fractional can be a really wonderful way to be smart about staffing up,” she said.

Read the full story here.—KH

We all know the drill: When the market gets tough, marketing is often first on the chopping block.

Based on quarterly results from platforms and media companies, one could conclude that a number of advertisers are, in fact, pulling back spend:

• Alphabet missed revenue expectations, with Google’s ad revenue falling nearly 4% and YouTube’s down 8% year over year.
• Comcast reported a 5.6% decline in advertising revenue (excluding the World Cup).
• Meta saw a third straight quarter of revenue decline, with its average price per ad falling 22% despite impressions being up 23% year over year.
• Snap also missed revenue estimates for the third straight quarter, with CEO Evan Spiegel saying on its earnings call that “advertising demand hasn’t really improved, but it hasn’t gotten significantly worse.”

Some companies, like Match Group, told investors that they reduced their marketing spend in the last quarter. Others, like SiriusXM, said they’ve started making marketing cuts and plan to continue doing so in the coming months.

But then…there are companies like McDonald’s, which attributed revenue growth to its marketing investment (in addition to “strategic menu price increases”). On its earnings call, CEO Chris Kempczinski said McDonald’s is “in the strongest position it’s been in years,” due in part to its “best-in-class marketing engine.” The fast-food giant highlighted last year’s Cactus Plant Flea Market and McRib campaigns as particularly successful.

And while some platforms are seeing slowdowns, podcast streamers appear to be less affected. Despite missing estimates, Spotify reported a 14% YoY growth in quarterly ad-supported revenue and a “mid-30% range” YoY growth in podcast revenue.

Agency holding group Publicis also reported 9.4% growth in organic revenue. While CEO Arthur Sadoun acknowledged some “traditional marketing spend cuts at the local level here and there,” he said the company has not seen “a major change in client behavior when it comes to their spend so far.” Other agency holding companies, like Omnicom and IPG, are set to release their Q4 results in the coming week.

So what’s the overall takeaway? Like Nancy Meyers’s 2009 sleeper hit, for now, it’s complicated.—KH

Retail Brew’s Jeena Sharma recently talked to Forever 21’s CMO about the company’s new “one-click checkout solution.” Read a snippet below or click here for the full story.

“If you look at a normal checkout, you go into your cart, create an account, a username and password, and once you do that, you then have to go through and fill out the steps,” Jacob Hawkins, chief marketing, digital, and omni officer at Forever 21, told Retail Brew. “It ends up being a five-step process. The nice piece with this is literally you go on…you’ve already created all your information there. You select your ship, [and] your default billing information pops up, and you’re right through it in one click. So it just abbreviates the process dramatically.”

There are a lot of bad marketing tips out there. These aren’t those.

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Listen up: A series of podcast marketing stats live inside this infographic.

Magnifying glass: A closer look at DOJ’s Google lawsuit.

Go glocal: The top-down approach to branding just doesn’t work anymore. Frontify’s report with WARC dives into all things global brand governance, plus how you can execute your global brand strategy and empower local markets.*

^{*This is sponsored advertising content.}

An Oreo ad from the ’60s. We’d like to see this doctor’s credentials.

Catch up on a few Marketing Brew stories you might have missed.

• Many advertisers seem to be taking a wait-and-see approach to TikTok’s search ads
• Netflix and GM will plug electric vehicles in joint Super Bowl ad
• Why the IAB’s CEO is in a “bazooka fight” with privacy activists, regulators, and Apple