A new survey from Boathouse dropped this week, and if you work in marketing or PR, it deserves more than a scroll-past, because CEO confidence in CMO performance is down, but the more interesting take away doesn’t fit into the headline.

The Fifth Annual CEO Study surveyed 150 CEOs, and the numbers are uncomfortable. Only 15% gave their CMO an A grade, down from 24% last year. CEO confidence in their CMO fell to 43%, from 50% the year prior. And 60% of CEOs now view marketing as a cost center. Last year that number was 35%.

A 25-point swing in one year. Forget disruption, that’s pure rupture.

But I don’t think this comes down to CMO competence. When I look at the context, the AI disruption picture is everywhere in this data, and it explains a lot. The good news? Through my lens, I see some answers.

The AI Impact Arrived Before the ROI Did

Only 1 in 10 CEOs say AI is already delivering measurable impact on marketing. More than a third don’t expect measurable impact for at least a year. But AI’s impact on marketing effectiveness has already arrived, even if the ROI hasn’t. CAC is up. Organic click-throughs are down. The channels CMOs have relied on for years are mid-disruption, and CMOs are being graded on results during the disruption itself.

The good news is that CEOs seem to understand their CMOs are at least showing up. 79% said their CMO showed strong commitment to the CEO and the board, the highest since the survey began in 2021. 74% credited their CMO with pushing the organization forward. The message from CEOs is clear: you’re here, you’re committed, but the results aren’t landing yet.

That distinction matters.

CEO Confidence in CMO Performance: Who Actually Owns Narrative Transformation?

47% of CEOs cited transforming the company’s narrative in the marketplace as a top priority this year, more than double last year’s 23%. At the same time, only 43% see the CMO’s primary role as strategic. The majority see CMOs as leading execution.

So CEOs want narrative transformation, but they don’t see marketing as the function to lead it. I’ve watched this exact tension play out my entire career.

Narrative transformation lives in PR. If there’s no separate PR function, it lands in marketing by default. The challenge is that every stakeholder sees the narrative problem differently. A CMO wants a narrative shift that drives click-throughs. A Chief Communications Officer wants one that builds trust and authority. Investors and boards want to see narrative changes show up in revenue, stock price, or valuation.

Connecting those dots requires a new way of thinking about ROI. I address this in detail in my upcoming book, The Invisible Asset, but the short version is this: PR and marketing have to stop running as separate lanes. The companies getting this right are the ones where authority, trust, and commercial metrics are finally speaking the same language.

The Metric That Actually Belongs in the Boardroom

I want to make the case for something that got buried when digital dashboards took over: Share of Voice in earned media.

SOV got brushed aside in favor of faster, more immediate digital numbers. Click-throughs, referrals, session time. Those are campaign health metrics. They matter to the marketing team. They don’t move a board.

SOV in earned media coverage is a leading indicator of market share and growth, and the research behind this is decades deep. Les Binet and Peter Field analyzed effectiveness data from the IPA databank and found that an excess share of voice of 10 percentage points produces roughly 0.5% to 0.7% of annual market share growth. Nielsen’s analysis of 123 brands landed on approximately the same number. The B2B Institute confirmed the relationship holds in B2B markets as well.

Four decades of research. Hundreds of brands. The relationship keeps holding. We just stopped paying attention to it because click-throughs were easier to report.

When a CMO or CCO walks into a board meeting and shows how SOV is moving ahead of improved CAC, ahead of increased branded search, ahead of loyalty gains, that’s when the cost center conversation starts to change. SOV is the only forward-looking indicator that captures the full value of narrative. And right now, almost nobody is using it that way. CEO confidence in CMO performance radically shifts when that CMO-CEO gap starts to close.

Authority Is the Edge That Compounds

The survey found CEOs are prioritizing narrative transformation precisely because we’re in a volatile moment. That instinct is right. But most companies are still acting like visibility is the goal. It isn’t. Authority is.

Here’s what I’m seeing with clients right now: incoming traffic from LLMs is still a small share of overall search, sometimes around 10%. But it’s growing at 300%, 400%, 500% year over year. That growth doesn’t come from paid placement or SEO tricks. It comes from whether AI systems trust your brand enough to cite it. And that trust is built through reputation, credibility, and authority, which has always been a PR function.

We’re also buried in choices as consumers. For any product you can name, the options outpace anyone’s ability to process them. Buying decisions are increasingly outsourced to AI, to trusted sources, to brands that have already done the work of being credible. Decision fatigue is real, and authority is the answer to it.

The CMOs who figure this out, who stop optimizing only for immediate metrics and start building brand authority that compounds over time, will have a very different conversation with their CEO next year.

The data is telling us the current playbook isn’t enough. The question is whether marketing and PR leaders are ready to build a new one together.

 

The Invisible Asset, written by Avaans Media founder Tara Coomans, is the PR ROI framework that builds brand equity, drives valuation, attracts capital, and wins high-stakes moments. It’s built for CMOs defending budgets, CEOs preparing for a capital event, and operators in regulated categories. Get the book →