The CMO-to-CEO Pipeline Is Finally Opening

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Last month, Hinge promoted Jackie Jantos from CMO to CEO.

Not "interim CEO while we find someone." Not "co-CEO with the founder." Full CEO, effective immediately.

Jantos joined Hinge in 2021. By March 2025, she was President. By December, she had the top job. The founder left to build an AI dating app. The board didn't look outside. They looked at their CMO.

This isn't an isolated case.

Eos Products elevated Soyoung Kang from CMO to President. Hotel Chocolat made Lysa Hardy UK CEO. Culver's promoted Julie Fussner from marketing chief to CEO back in April. Spencer Stuart's latest data shows CMO roles increasingly serve as pipelines to broader leadership appointments.

Something shifted.

Why Now?

For years, the narrative around CMOs has been bleak. Tenure dropping to 3.9 years. Titles getting absorbed into other functions. CEOs losing patience. Boards questioning marketing's contribution to the business.

All of that is still true. But there's a counter-trend emerging.

The CMOs who survive the tenure crisis aren't just surviving. They're ascending.

What separates them? Three things keep showing up.

Revenue proximity. Jantos didn't just run brand campaigns at Hinge. She oversaw product innovation rooted in user insights. She led geographic expansion into Europe and Latin America. She owned outcomes, not outputs.

Business translation. The CMOs getting promoted speak P&L, not impressions. They can sit in a board meeting and explain customer acquisition cost trends, retention cohort behavior, and pipeline contribution without a translator.

Cultural architecture. Jantos built "Designed to Be Deleted" into a positioning so distinctive that it defined how an entire generation thinks about dating apps. That kind of brand work compounds. It creates enterprise value, not just awareness.

The Selection Mechanism

Here's the uncomfortable part: most CMOs won't make this leap.

The same pressures that are shortening CMO tenure are also creating a filter. The marketers who can't demonstrate business impact get cycled out in 2-3 years. The ones who can are getting noticed by boards who realize that growth leadership might actually come from someone who understands customers. This is the K-shaped divergence playing out in real time.

It's a barbell outcome. More CMOs are failing faster. But the ones who succeed are succeeding bigger.

What This Means for You

If you're a CMO reading this, the question isn't whether you could be CEO someday. The question is whether your current role is building the evidence.

Are you in the room when revenue decisions get made? Or do you hear about them after?

Can you explain your function's impact without using the word "brand"?

When the CEO talks about growth, do they include you or route around you?

The path from CMO to CEO exists. But it's not automatic. It's earned by the marketers who refuse to stay in the marketing box.

Jantos didn't get the Hinge job because she was a great marketer. She got it because she stopped being just a marketer years ago.