By Jeffrey Hayzlett
I say it all the time – adapt, change, or die. But here’s the thing I’ve learned after decades in business: the tools change; the fundamentals don’t. I was reminded of that in a big way when I sat down recently on All Business with Jeffrey Hayzlett with someone who’s had a front-row seat to marketing leadership longer than just about anyone I know.
Jenny Rooney is the Chief Brand and Community Officer at ADWEEK, and if you want to understand where marketing is headed, you need to be paying attention to what she’s seeing. Jenny and I go back about ten years; she actually interviewed me when I was CMO at Kodak, and she was at Forbes. We picked up right where we left off, and the conversation did not disappoint.
Does the CMO Role Still Have Panache?
I had to ask her, does the CMO title still carry the weight it used to? Because when I was in that seat, there was a real mystique around it. Jenny called it the era of the “celebrity CMO,” and she’s right. The mid-2000s brought a fascination with that role that the internet and social media only amplified. But it also created tension; CEOs started asking, “Where do I fit in this conversation?” And frankly, you can make a strong argument that the CEO should be the ultimate brand steward.
What Jenny pointed out that I found spot-on is that the CMO role is more like a liberal arts degree than any other C-suite position. A CFO or CTO; those roles are defined. The CMO is fluid, dynamic, and constantly evolving. And I’d argue that’s exactly why it matters more now than ever. With AI companies now hunting for people who can write and communicate, the skills a great CMO brings to the table are only going up in value.
AI Is a Tool. Full Stop.
When I asked Jenny about the biggest shift she’s seeing in marketing leadership, she didn’t hesitate with her answer: AI. But what I appreciated about that is that she didn’t fall into the trap of treating it like the change to end all changes. We’ve been here before. The internet was going to upend everything. Then, mobile. Then social media. We said social was going to kill websites. None of those things killed anything, they just became tools we had to get smart about using.
AI is the same. It’s a tool. A powerful one, yes, but a tool. And the best CMOs I know are treating it exactly that way, using it to speed up processes, enhance their work, and get smarter with data. What they’re not doing is handing over the keys to the kingdom and walking away.
Jenny raised something I think is critically important: most of the dialogue around AI right now is coming from the tech community. Marketers need to step up and help guide that conversation, not just react to it. The humanity piece, the authenticity, the integrity, that’s the CMO’s territory. I call it putting bumpers on. Knowing when to use AI, when to use people, and holding the line when someone wants to automate what shouldn’t be automated.
We also talked about disclosure. When Coca-Cola unveiled a holiday ad at BRANDWEEK that was created entirely with AI, should they have disclosed that? Jenny and I both agreed, yes. AI-created, AI-enhanced, AI-aided, we should be labeling this stuff. There’s nothing to be ashamed of, but people deserve to know.
Fake Fatigue Is Real
Here’s a concept Jenny introduced that I think is going to define the next few years: fake fatigue. We are heading toward a moment where audiences are exhausted by polished, perfect, algorithmically optimized content, and they are hungry for something real.
I’ve been saying this in my own way for years. I misspell words on social media sometimes, and I let it go. People write back and say, “Whoever’s running your accounts misspelled that.” I write back: “That was me.” That’s the point. Imperfection signals authenticity. Jenny, an English and creative writing major who spent her whole career chasing perfect prose, even said the new directive is “don’t make it so perfect, because we want it to feel human.” That’s a remarkable shift. And it’s one, smart brands need to lean into now, before the AI glut makes genuine human expression the most valuable commodity on the market.
Community Is Not Optional
I’ve always believed that content leads to communities, and communities lead to commerce. Jenny is living proof of that model in action. At ADWEEK, she’s built Marketing Vanguard, an executive community for CMOs, and recently launched Agencies Vanguard for c-level agency executives. These aren’t networking events. They’re environments where people drop the title, show up as human beings, and actually learn from each other.
ADWEEK even brought CMOs to Davos for the first time this year, what Jenny called the Marketing Vanguard Inspiration Excursion. The idea was simple: if you want to make better decisions, you have to push beyond the bounds of your own swim lane. CMOs need to be in rooms with world leaders and CEOs, not just other marketers. I was at Davos fifteen-plus years ago as a business leader, and I can tell you that exposure changes how you think.
The community ADWEEK is building is grounded in something else Jenny and I talked about at length: credibility. She was a journalist for most of her career, and she’s never let go of that editorial integrity. You can’t build a real community without trust. And you can’t have trust without being willing to cover the hard stories alongside the success stories. That tension, being a media brand that also builds community with the very people it covers, is one she navigates carefully, and she does it well.
What Separates the Great CMOs from the Rest
I’ve asked this question of a lot of smart people over the years, and Jenny’s answer was one of the better ones I’ve heard. The great CMOs are focused on the work. They’re passionate about what they’re putting out in the world, not just about putting themselves out there. Their visibility is substantiated by results.
She also hammered home something I’ve preached for years: stop talking to the CFO and CEO in marketing jargon. Nobody in that room cares about your brand awareness metrics. They care about one thing, is it moving the top line and the bottom line? Speak that language or lose your seat at the table. And for too many CMOs, that seat is still not guaranteed.
The great ones are also fearless. They experiment. They take bold risks. In a world where cycles are instantaneous, hesitation is its own kind of failure.
The More Things Change
Here’s where Jenny and I landed at the end of our conversation, and I think it’s the most honest thing either of us said: a lot of what we talked about isn’t new. Relevance, community, authenticity, earning a seat at the table, speaking the language of business, we’ve been talking about these things for twenty years. The tools around us keep changing. The fundamentals do not.
The next generation of CMOs is going to face AI, whatever comes after AI, and things we haven’t even named yet. But the ones who win will be the ones who understand that those are all just tools. It takes a smart CMO, a smart CEO, and a smart C-suite to recognize that and use those tools to their advantage.
That’s not cynicism. That’s experience. And it’s exactly why conversations like this one with Jenny Rooney matter.
Watch my full conversation with Jenny Rooney on All Business with Jeffrey Hayzlett on Spotify and C-Suite TV.
