November 2–5, we're hosting Season 2 of CommaCon, our free event series for B2B marketers, to give you expert tips on all things exec social. We're talking a lot about LinkedIn... so our headliner's straight from the source. Desperate to find out who? Save your spot here.

Two truths and a lie, for anyone stepping into the first CMO seat:

1. Executive buy-in is the hardest part.

2. Your biggest skeptics don't need to become your biggest fans.

3. The fastest way to a bigger marketing budget might be a smaller one.

Choose carefully.

One of these has burned more than one perfectly good marketing plan.

Let’s get into it.

The lie is #1.

Executive buy-in matters. But getting leadership to say yes doesn't mean the rest of the organization is coming with them.

Sangeeta Prasad has learned that firsthand as a company’s first CMO hire — twice.

Today, she's the first-ever CMO at Slalom, a global technology and business consultancy. Before that, she held the same role at Russell Reynolds Associates, an executive search and leadership advisory firm, after spending more than two decades in B2C at P&G, American Express, and JPMorgan Chase.

She led major rebrands at both Russell Reynolds and Slalom. The assignment was similar; the resistance wasn't.

At Russell Reynolds, the CEO had the vision for where the brand needed to go, but some tenured leaders weren't convinced the company needed to change. Sangeeta met with them one by one, listened to their objections, and built support.

At Slalom, leadership already wanted the rebrand. The challenge was getting individual markets, each used to doing what worked for them, to show up as one brand.

“The process was the same, building the trust and the one-on-one relationships,” Sangeeta told us. “But the objections underneath them were different.”

Which brings us to truth #2: Your biggest skeptics don't need to become your biggest fans.

At Russell Reynolds, Sangeeta saw three groups emerge as she worked to build support for the rebrand: early supporters, a much larger group in the middle, and the naysayers. Rather than trying to personally convert every naysayer, she focused on getting influential supporters to help move the middle.

“Getting leaders ... who have big influence in the company to become your voice when you're not there is super important.”

Your job isn't to be the only evangelist. It's to create more of them.

And then there’s every marketer’s favorite conversation: the budget. 

When Sangeeta became the first CMO, she discovered that leadership sometimes thought hiring her and building a marketing team was the marketing investment. 

It wasn’t.

“In marketing, people are just a part of the investment,” Sangeeta says.

Which makes what happened at Slalom even more interesting.

Sangeeta eventually got the company to invest roughly 100x more in Zero Legacy than it had in any previous campaign.

Not because she walked in asking for 100x.

“My CEO and my leaders had seen the impact we'd made to date,” Sangeeta says, “and were willing to take the risk on doing this.”

So, truth #3: The fastest way to a bigger marketing budget might be a smaller one.

Read Sangeeta's full first-CMO playbook.

Campaigns that got us talking: Dunkin’ found the long-lost sixth Spice Girl. Pumpkin Spice (Rachel Dratch) reunites with Baby Spice and Ginger Spice to reminisce about old hits like “Don’t Squash My Love” — total banger — before revealing why she left the group: a solo career in lattes.

We respect the commitment to the bit.

Stuff that makes us scroll back up: OpenAI introduced Astra. Goodwipes introduced Asstra.

The wet-wipe brand spoofed OpenAI’s ad almost shot for shot, swapping AI’s vision of a future spent commanding technology from an armchair for the place we’re apparently already doing it: the toilet.

“The future of butt wiping has arrived.”

No notes.

Spooky: 88% of comms leaders have gotten grilled by leadership about their brand’s AI visibility strategy.  

Spookier: 96% of B2B companies are invisible in AI discovery. Oofta. 

Spookiest: We looked at a ton of AEO audit tools, and we liked what they said about visibility scores…except then none of them said what content would help you move those stats.

Which is why, this spooky season, we launched Foreshadow — our 30-day AEO consultation product. 

In a month, you’ll walk out with a 90-day editorial plan (including keywords, topic clusters, and SMEs to interview), unique brand voice recommendations, an exec findings deck to bring to your boss, and a website audit to hand off to your web guy.

All to make you more readable, visible, and trustworthy. 

Check it out.

Frameworkification.

Not every decent thought needs three pillars, a flywheel, and a name you can trademark.

Sangeeta left us with one more thought:

“The science of marketing can only take you so far,” she says. “The magic is in the combination of the science and art.”

A useful reminder in a profession that really, really likes a dashboard.

See y’all next time. 

— the storyarb writers’ room 🫡

P.S. Go to content school with the execs and creators doing it best. Register for CommaCon: Social Season now.

Oh! And another thing... Humans are remarkably bad at spotting lies. A review of more than 200 studies involving more than 24,000 people found that we're getting Two Truths and a Lie right about 54% of the time. Only slightly better than flipping a coin. So if you got ours wrong, statistically, you're doing great.

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