At Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, marketers kept returning to one inconvenient truth: the job is getting bigger while the CMO title is getting smaller. Fortune reports that businesses allocated an average of 7.7% of company revenue to marketing in 2025, the same as 2024 and down from 9.5% in 2022, according to Gartner's 2025 Global CMO Spend Survey. At the exact moment marketing is being asked to do more than make great ads, the budget pie is not growing.

And it is not just budgets that are flattening. Fortune also points to a meaningful shift in how power gets labeled at the top: less than half (49%) of Fortune 500 marketers held the “CMO” title in 2025, down from 55% a year earlier, based on Forrester research. Separate research by Spencer Stuart found that a third of Fortune 500 marketing leaders did not have the word “chief” in their title, 16% carried dual-function titles such as chief marketing and communications officer, and 11% had no reference to marketing. So the question for boards and CEOs is not whether marketing is important. It is whether marketing leaders have enough seat, signal, and credibility to get decisions right when the remit widens but the money does not.

What’s driving this mismatch is exactly what Cannes participants say has changed about marketing. It is no longer “making great ads” as the headline function. Today, marketing leaders are expected to understand AI, build communities, and shape organizational culture. That broader remit shows up in organizational charts. UPS, for example, grouped the leadership responsibilities for sales, marketing, and communications under a single role of chief commercial and strategy officer. Last year, Reckitt folded marketing and commercial strategy into a single function and gave regional teams more power to build the brands in their own markets. Ryan Dullea, Reckitt's chief growth officer, tells Fortune, “This was an explicit attempt to break down silos and push brand-building power out to local markets,” and adds, “We need to stop running brand and commercial strategy as separate disciplines if marketing is to be viewed as a continuous business function.”

This is also where the boardroom tension lives. Marketing used to be treated as a creative and communications function that occasionally spoke data, often at war with the CFO over budgets. Mélanie Brinbaum, Nestlé Europe head of marketing and consumer communications, captures that old framing when she tells Fortune: “The traditional CMO was a steward of creativity and communications, occasionally fluent in data, and perpetually at war with the CFO over budget.” But the new framing is closer to “growth and value continuity,” and it changes what winning looks like. Fortune, in partnership with Morning Consult, finds that 46% of marketing and finance decision-makers surveyed say the most effective way to communicate marketing’s value internally is through profitability and revenue growth. In plain English: if marketing leadership cannot connect activity to business outcomes, they will struggle to defend both headcount and influence, even if creativity is still doing real work.

The C-suite identity problem gets worse because the internal language game has shifted. Communication with data and technology teams has taken on added importance for CMOs. Lynsey Woods, senior global brand director at Carlsberg, tells Fortune, “I used to need one language. Now I need several.” She explains that she talks to finance, data, and tech daily, and that “that’s not a soft skill anymore.” She adds that “the whole business is reorganizing itself around new technology and data,” and that marketing cannot “sit in a corner and lob campaigns over the wall.” Translation: marketing leaders who cannot navigate data, systems, and risk will increasingly be asked to justify themselves in terms that used to belong to analysts and operators.

But there is a creative downside, and it is not imaginary. Tim Ellis, executive vice president and CMO at the National Football League (NFL), believes marketing chiefs still need a voice inside the C-suite. “CMOs need to be at the table, listening and contributing to every decision the business makes,” he tells Fortune. “Yes, we have to be experts in the marketing world. But we also need to be experts in business. That requires completely new ways of thinking.” Meanwhile, Marcela Melero, chief growth officer for Dove in North America, warns that corporate environments can become grinders that turn “high-quality creative ideas” into “a generic product” via too many opinions. She argues that allies inside the C-suite help protect risk-taking, saying that before taking a risky idea forward, she looks for “at least one other person in the C-suite who believes in it.” She adds, “There was a project my Argentine team was convinced would kill the brand, but it worked.”

Overlay all of that with AI, and the job description starts to look like a moving target. Fortune and Morning Consult survey data says a third (34%) expect AI to replace some creative functions, and 19% think it could significantly reduce the need for human creativity altogether. Dullea says the “spirit of marketing hasn’t moved-you find an audience and persuade them-but the how has been utterly rebuilt around generative and agentic AI.” He adds that at Reckitt, internal AI tools surface insights and ideas in roughly a third of the time once required. Sephora US CMO Zena Srivatsa Arnold warns marketers against “surrendering” to the technology, telling Fortune marketers can use AI to inform them but must maintain their own conviction. Andrew Warden, vice president of marketing at Adobe, describes agentic AI as the “single biggest shift in marketing in 25 years,” saying it is changing not just how marketing works but who or what brands are talking to, and that they “didn’t expect bot traffic to overtake human traffic so quickly.” His conclusion for CMOs is blunt: stay focused on marketing to humans, but also to AI agents.

So what does all this mean for executives who live in boards, P&Ls, and org charts? The strategic stakes are immediate. When budgets sit at 7.7% of revenue and CMO titles slide below 50% at Fortune 500 firms, marketing leadership cannot rely on pedigree. It has to prove it belongs inside decision-making, not just campaign planning. And it must do it while AI pressures both the economics of creative labor and the channel reality of who attention goes to. The most effective CMOs, as Fortune frames it, will adapt to an expanded brief and still communicate marketing’s value to the business, without turning creativity into a checkbox or letting AI redefine the brand voice by default.