^{This role first appeared in Business Insider.}

UPS last December is eliminated the role of chief marketing officer, replacing it with a chief commercial and strategy officer who would oversee product management and business transformation.

The news spawned articles and op-eds on the CMO's death. The topic evokes great sentiment and chatter in the industry – including a panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos if marketing is a possible career choice.

Now the news that Starbucks is reorganizing to replace the CMO role with regional leadership, it's sure to start a whole new round of speculation.

Vineet Mehra, Chime's CMO, told Business Insider that he believes CMOs have never been more important. He talked about how the rise of DTC created a new perception of value and how marketers need to be strategic in their career planning.

The following Q&A with Mehra has been edited for clarity.

There have been several high-profile examples of companies eliminating the position of chief marketing officer. But you don't see this as a growing trend?

Every time a CMO gets fired or leaves, it's like, “Here's another company doing this.”

It has almost become click fodder. I'm really concerned that we've separated ourselves within our industry over the last decade. And we did this to ourselves. We are the ones who click on all these things, talk about them and spread the myth.

I don't think any of that is true and my headline is that we are entering a new golden age of marketing. All the tools that CMOs have always wanted exist now, in ways that I've dreamed about my entire career. CMOs are needed more than ever. And I don't think marketing has ever been in a better place in terms of how we can impact business.

What has changed over the past 10 years to fuel this pessimism about the role of marketing and the CMO – is this a byproduct of the rise of performance marketing?

In no way are traditional marketing tactics any less important. Areas such as brand management, media buying, consumer insights, measurement and integrated marketing are all very important and will continue to be.

Many of these capabilities were refined, refined and scaled by original CPG brand builders and growth marketers. Go back 20 years, and CPG companies were the academy companies and Ivy League education for any aspiring CMO of the future.

Then DTC brands entered the late 2000s and approached growth, branding and market penetration in entirely new ways. DTCs coincided with the rise of Facebook, which democratized access to a total, unlimited addressable market and lowered barriers to entry for new brands to challenge industry leaders with paid media budgets.

This led to the rise of performance marketing – although I prefer to call it direct response, as all marketing must be performance.

As performance marketing began to scale with DTC brands, it brought together the proliferation of marketing technology, high-velocity creativity, a focus on lifetime value, customer acquisition cost, and short-term attribution—all of which gained a ton of favor with investors. as the preferred and highest ROI way to drive growth for new brands.

Brand marketing almost became taboo, a sin for those responsible marketers who focused on customer acquisition cost as their primary metric.

As a result of all this success, the CMOs of these DTC brands were rewarded with even bigger budgets, fueled by the long-term era of zero interest rate policy, which continued this growth around the growth, relevance and attention to marketing of performance. .

It was almost as if CPG marketers, the original celebrity rockstar CMOs, and DTC marketing executives lived on different planets—East Coast vs. West Coast—and ultimately brand vs. performance became a leading story in the industry.

So how do these different marketing tracks come together? Can a CMO still strategically lead all parts of this fragmented universe?

The truth of the matter is that brand marketing and direct response marketing are all marketing – there is no competition.

All marketing spend should drive performance, just in different parts of the funnel that ultimately support each other. I call it “performance storytelling.” The more we as CMOs and an industry can intentionally build our individual and collective skill sets across today's marketing ecosystem, the more our industry will thrive.

This brand vs. performance marketing debate is just one aspect. CMOs are now technologists, analysts, content creators, storytellers, leaders, editors, strategists and scientists. We build brands, we curate purpose, we drive growth and we build for both the short term and the long term.

We are firmly in the spotlight, every day, with every decision we make. We also need to be technologists and early adopters of the many new technology platforms that enable growth in our organizations. Just look at the growth and value we created as CMOs in the marketing technology industry over the last decade — we were the capital distributors of that renaissance.

I strongly believe that we will also be the earliest adopters at scale of AI in our organizations, the next systemic change that is upon us as CMOs.

It's up to us to restore the CMO's reputation in the C-suite and boardrooms around the globe. Nothing external can be blamed for affecting the CMO's reputation – we did it ourselves. Let's reclaim the narrative is what I say!

How have you managed your career to avoid being pigeonholed?

I believe we are living in the golden age of marketing. But to embrace this moment of extraordinary evolution in our profession, a career full of horizontal experiences, not traditional career ladders and job titles, is key to staying relevant.

I took a lot of risks and even took a few pay cuts along the way to learn as much as I could. Curiosity and the humility to accept what you have yet to learn are essential.

I spent the first half of my career in the more legacy CPG world and have spent the last decade in Silicon Valley in the tech and consumer DTC parts of the ecosystem. As I watched the world tear apart and divide, I knew I didn't want to be stuck on one side or the other.

My first “risky move,” at least according to others, was in my early 30s. I thought I had “made it” and achieved my dreams as global president of a multi-billion dollar consumer division at Johnson & Johnson. And then, I got a call to move to Silicon Valley and join this company called Ancestry that was thinking about bringing this thing called consumer genetics and DNA to the world through a DTC business model.

Pay cut number two, I was the global CMO of Walgreens Boots with thousands of people in my organization and I left for a Series C startup with an 80% pay cut.

But things happen for a reason, and because of the experiences I had curated for myself, I found a fit here at Chime. It has been one of the most rewarding and fulfilling periods of my career.

Today, I'm on the board of a very hot AI marketing company, and on several public boards, including a phenomenal data science-backed ad tech company and a DTC brand, where I'm also a member of the audit committee. .

All this is an effort to stay relevant for as long as possible in my career. Being “risky” in the entire modern marketing ecosystem is so important to me, especially at a time of such fundamental change in our craft and profession. I want to be part of the solution.

What advice do you have for aspiring CMOs? What should they do to take their career in the right direction?

I talk about managing your career as a jungle gym instead of a career ladder. Horizontal careers are the new lateral careers.

I never think of myself as a marketer. You should be a P&L leader who happens to play a role in the marketing team and ultimately the team is about creating shareholder value – whether it's private or public value creation. Don't define yourself as just a marketer if you want to become a CMO one day.

There is also nothing wrong with focusing on the specialized careers we will need.

At Chime, we're creating tracks where you can pursue a specialist career and ultimately earn the same money as a manager. Once it was necessary to manage people. But for some people, we want you to be the best Google algorithm on the planet.

This is one way to eliminate this disease in our industry – respecting all the different avenues.