How the CMO role is expanding beyond campaigns

This article summarizes an episode of Decoder with Nilay Patel’s video series featuring Amy Lanzi, chief executive officer of Digitas North America.

The CMO is now judged less by individual campaigns and more by how well the company learns.

Amy Lanzi, CEO of Digitas North America, sees the role shifting toward a wider growth mandate as platforms gain power, AI changes production, and brands work to protect their own customer knowledge.

Automation promises can hide messy work

AI has brought back an old hope in marketing. Many sellers now suggest that brands can use software to make more work, spend less money, and need fewer people.

Lanzi sees that promise as familiar. Programmatic advertising also promised cleaner buying through automation, yet brands still had to manage strategy, quality, pricing, and brand fit.

She argues, “The AI story is the new programmatic story: the promise that everything will be absolutely automated. That absolutely did not happen. Programmatic still needs people; it still has the nuance of brands and the marketplace.”

That lesson should guide how brands judge AI spending. AI should save time, improve learning, and raise work quality. Brands should be cautious about deals that assume people can be removed before the company has clear rules, checks, and accountability.

Cost pressure makes the choice harder. Free AI tools and results-based promises can appeal to buying teams. They can also weaken the talent base that understands brand tone, market conditions, and customer fatigue. Short-term savings can create future problems.

Use AI first where the work repeats

Once brands accept that automation still needs judgment, they need to decide where AI should be used first.

Lanzi separates production volume from narrative value. AI can improve product pages, personalization, and concept development, especially where assets are repetitive. The line appears when brands mistake faster production for the story customers actually remember.

She suggests that if routine work like product display pages isn’t automated, a brand is “not doing it right,” as these assets are just like “looking at the back of packaging.” Storytelling and larger creative concepts, however, still require human talent.

By automating repetitive commerce assets, brands free up human talent to do what platforms cannot. It still takes real people to connect emotion to product truth, and maintain brand consistency over time.

This division of labor also protects the brand from overreaching tech platforms. If a platform chooses the audience, generates the creative, and measures the results, the brand becomes a passenger in its own marketing.

The CMO job now connects the whole growth engine

Creators need room to work and clear rules