CMO Moves August 2026
August was a busy month for CMO departures, and some serious experience is walking out the door.
Microsoft AI CMO Andrea Mallard is stepping back just 6 months after joining from Pinterest, as she relocates her family to Europe to be closer to her ailing father. Microsoft does not plan to replace the role directly, instead consolidating Copilot marketing under Jared Spataro.
Kohl’s CMO Christie Raymond is leaving after 9 years, with the retailer replacing the CMO structure with a broader Chief Customer Officer remit spanning marketing, brand, loyalty, personalization and digital commerce. Dentsu’s Jeremy Miller is stepping down after 4 years as Global Chief Communications and Marketing Officer amid yet another reshuffling of the group’s global leadership (and we think it won’t be the last).
Then there are two genuinely long chapters coming to an end. Olivier François is stepping down as Stellantis Global CMO after more than two decades across Fiat and its successor companies, and 35 Super Bowl commercials along the way. Klarna CMO David Sandström willl eave in early 2027 after 9 years helping turn a Nordic payments company into one of fintech’s most recognizable brands.
There is subtext: Microsoft isn’t replacing Mallard. Kohl’s has folded marketing into a Chief Customer Officer role. Stellantis appears to be shifting toward more regional marketing leadership. Dentsu is redistributing responsibilities across communications and brand.
Cue another round of “Is the CMO dying?” We are not in quite that much of a rush.
Because while all of this was happening, companies announced 43 new Chief Marketing Officers in August. 23 were women and 20 men. Just 9 were promoted from within, while 34 were hired externally. Almost half (21 of the 43) are first-time CMOs. And only 5 are what we call “industry travelers,” making the rare jump into an entirely different vertical.
The U.S. had an especially busy month, with 33 CMOs appointed across 16 states. California led with 9 hires, followed by New York with 4. Georgia, Tennessee, Nevada, Texas, Florida and Missouri each added 2. Outside the U.S., India appointed 4 new CMOs and England 2, while the Philippines, Canada, Cyprus and the Netherlands each announced one.
Tech, as usual, was the busiest sector. Restaurants had a surprisingly active month too.
- Tech: 13
- Restaurants: 7
- Retail: 5
- CPG: 4
- Financial Services: 4
- Media, Sports & Entertainment: 3
- Government: 3
- Biotech, Pharma, Healthcare & Wellness: 2
- Construction: 1
- Manufacturing: 1
So, no. We are not ready to write the CMO obituary.
What is true, though: the job is becoming less standardized. Some companies are folding marketing into customer, commercial or regional structures. Others are hiring a CMO for the first time. And 43 companies decided they still wanted someone with the title last month.
Spotlight on Recent Appointments:
- Salesforce has promoted Erin Oles, whose career includes building Dreamforce and leading brand experiences, to oversee global brand, product marketing, communications and events. Her appointment puts customer interaction at the centre of the marketing strategy as AI makes digital outreach cheaper—and easier to ignore. Her challenge is to turn Salesforce’s promise of enterprise AI into something buyers can see working and justify paying for.
- Wendy’s has hired former McDonald’s marketer Tariq Hassan as it battles declining sales and a 12.5% fall in U.S. customer traffic in the second quarter. He brings experience turning cultural moments such as Grimace into transactions, but Wendy’s needs more than attention: it needs people back in its restaurants. His success will depend on marketing working alongside improvements to value, food and the customer experience.
- Twitch has appointed Christine Cassis, whose background includes Shopify, Pinterest, Reddit and Google, to broaden its appeal across music, fashion, sports and entertainment while protecting its gaming roots. She sees an opportunity to position live, participatory communities as an appealing alternative to increasingly synthetic social feeds. The challenge is to improve discovery and attract new audiences without losing the unpredictable, creator-led character that makes Twitch worth watching.
- Otter.ai has hired Alex Gay from Superhuman/Grammarly as it pushes beyond meeting transcription into company-wide knowledge, sales intelligence and coaching. With Microsoft, Google and Zoom building meeting summaries into tools customers already use, he must explain why Otter still deserves a separate subscription. His task is to make the broader proposition compelling while earning the trust required to hold a company’s most sensitive conversations.
- ServiceNow has appointed former Armis CMO Simon Mouyal following its acquisition of the cybersecurity company, bringing his experience at CyberArk, athenahealth and Microsoft to the wider business. His promotion signals the growing importance of security as ServiceNow expands beyond workflows into AI, customer management and other enterprise categories. His biggest challenge is to explain what this increasingly broad company does—and why customers should trust it to coordinate and secure their other systems.
- Flo Health has hired former Remitly CMO Rina Hahn, who helped scale a global marketing organisation and take the business through its IPO. Her mandate is to expand Flo beyond period tracking, particularly into perimenopause and menopause, giving women reasons to keep using the app as their needs change. Sustaining that relationship will require both disciplined growth marketing and confidence in how Flo handles intimate health information.
- AI cloud provider Nebius has appointed Lindsey Irvine from Square, following earlier CMO roles at Benchling and MuleSoft. She is tasked with building demand across enterprise buyers and developers, giving customers a clear reason to choose Nebius over larger cloud providers and specialist rivals such as CoreWeave. The commercial test is to turn substantial infrastructure investment and major contracts into a broader, durable customer base.
- Vanta has promoted Sarah Scharf, its first product marketer, to succeed Scott Holden after helping shape the company’s expansion from automated compliance into broader trust management. She now needs to make its growing offer—including third-party risk and AI governance—as clear and compelling as its original promise to simplify compliance. The challenge is to reach a bigger market while preserving the humour and specificity that helped Vanta stand out.
Read more about each CMO and the scope of their new mandates via the links below:
