Marketing Leadership

Analyst relations is one of the larger fixed costs in an enterprise B2B marketing budget and one of the least examined. As buyers begin vendor research in AI assistants, and the analyst firms put generative interfaces over their own research, the path by which analyst opinion reaches a buying committee has changed. The briefing matters less than what ends up in writing. Here is how to evaluate the program honestly before the 2027 renewal, and where to move the effort.

Agency scopes for 2027 are being drafted over the next six weeks, and most of them still price deliverable counts and hours—the two things AI made cheap. Procurement has noticed and will ask for an efficiency discount. Taking that discount naively strips out the senior judgment you were actually paying for and leaves the production you could have automated yourself. Here is what is genuinely scarce in an agency relationship now, how to structure a scope around it, and the contract terms nobody has updated yet.

H2 review cycles open in the next few weeks, and most marketing rubrics still measure the thing AI made abundant: output. The result is calibration meetings where managers cannot explain why one marketer outperformed another, and promotion cases built on deliverable counts that no longer signal anything. Here is what to evaluate instead, how to rewrite one level band before the cycle closes, and why the shrinking junior rung is the harder problem underneath.

Planning season for 2027 is opening, and marketing leaders are walking into it armed with the wrong argument. Three years of efficiency narratives around AI have handed finance a simple counter-question: if AI made your work cheaper, why does your budget need to grow? Here is how to build an investment case that survives that question—and what to stop promising.

Traditional annual planning cycles are collapsing as market velocity accelerates. B2B marketing organizations at mid-year 2026 are discovering that rigid annual plans are becoming liabilities rather than guides, forcing a fundamental shift toward continuous strategic adaptation that balances direction with flexibility.

As marketing teams deploy AI at scale, governance failures are becoming public crises. The CMOs treating AI governance as a technical problem are setting themselves up for career-ending incidents. Here’s what marketing-led AI governance actually requires.

The skills that made CMOs successful five years ago are rapidly becoming insufficient. As AI transforms every aspect of marketing, leadership requirements are fundamentally changing—and many executives are struggling to adapt.

As 2024 ends, marketing leaders are planning for 2025. Here’s guidance on priorities that will matter versus trends that will disappoint—based on what we’ve seen work this year.

Planning for 2022 requires balancing strategic direction with adaptability. Here’s how to build marketing plans that work in uncertain conditions.