Thirty-six per cent of the Fortune 500 still use the title Chief Marketing Officer.

A year earlier it was forty-nine.

That’s not churn. Churn is one CMO leaving and another arriving. This is the nameplate being taken off the door and the work being distributed to a Chief Growth Officer, a Chief Commercial Officer, or somebody in operations.

The usual response to that number is defensive, and I understand the instinct. Marketing is more important than ever, boards don’t understand it, short-termism, and so on.

I think the uncomfortable reading is the more useful one.

The seat isn’t being abolished. It’s going to whoever can answer for the commercial number.

And for thirty years we’ve been unable to.

Here’s how it happened, and nobody involved was acting in bad faith.

Marketing needed to prove its worth, so it measured what it could measure. Leads. Then qualified leads. Then pipeline. Then influenced revenue. Each step felt like getting closer to the money, and each one was presented to the board as progress.

The trouble is that every one of those numbers is borrowed from sales. Marketing was showing its contribution to somebody else’s result.

That worked for as long as nobody pushed. Then finance got more sophisticated, and somebody eventually asked whether the pipeline would have arrived anyway.

There was no answer. There was never going to be one, because the measurement framework had been built to demonstrate involvement rather than to establish return.

A seat at the table is a seat in a conversation about capital.

That’s what those conversations are. Where should the money go, what will it produce, and how will we know.

Sales can answer it. Finance can answer it. Operations can answer it. Marketing arrives with attribution.

So the chair gets given to somebody who speaks the language, and the title gets folded into a broader one, and nobody is being unfair.

Which is why I don’t think the answer is a campaign to defend the CMO title.

Titles follow accountability. They always have.

The number that would settle it isn’t complicated and it isn’t owned by anybody else. What it costs to win a customer, fully loaded, against what that customer returns. It’s the one measure of marketing that finance would accept without argument, and almost nobody is producing it.

Produce it, and the conversation about what the seat is called becomes irrelevant, because you’d be the only person in the room who can say whether growth is worth what it costs.

The chair is disappearing. We helped.

Which also means we can stop it.