The playbook starts from an uncomfortable number. Fewer than half of chief marketing officers report an effective partnership with their chief information officer, at a point when organizations depend more than ever on marketing technology.
It connects the 2024 Impact Study findings with qualitative interviews from sixty senior marketing and technology leaders across industries and geographies, and organizes the guidance around the study’s five drivers of humanized growth.
Key findings
- The technology relationship is the outlier across the C-suite. Forty-six percent of chief marketing officers actively engage with the chief information officer, against seventy-four percent for the chief commercial officer, seventy-two for finance, and seventy for human resources.
- Overperformers invest far more in the long view. Seventy-three percent invest in a long-term vision against twenty-three percent of underperformers, and they spend twice as much on foresight as on insight.
- Half of overperformers are successfully removing silos, against twenty-four percent of underperformers.
- The consensus from the interviews on artificial intelligence is bounded. It can improve efficiency, streamline tasks, create content and assist media buying, but it cannot replicate the creative intuition and emotional intelligence behind emotionally resonant narratives.
- The prescription for the language gap is not fluency but conversance. The aim is bilingual leaders who can translate technical expertise into actionable marketing strategy.
Why marketing and technology, specifically
The argument for the chief marketing officer’s orchestrating role is about position rather than authority. Marketing acts as the organization’s link to its stakeholders, supplying an outside-in perspective, gathering insight, and giving voice to stakeholder needs.
The pairing with technology follows from the objectives. Data-driven decision-making, better customer experiences and digital transformation all require both functions, and the playbook frames this as integrating a human-first with a digital-first mindset.
The failure mode is described plainly. Marketing focuses on storytelling and technology on maintaining systems, and without shared language or mutual understanding progress stalls. Joint strategic planning, shared measures and collaborative processes are named as the fix.
Ground: starting from what each function actually does
The first driver is grounding the organization in stakeholder reality. The recommendation is a joint learning agenda to understand stakeholder needs and serve them through technology, along with defining the technology stack and analytic tools that make sense of the world and predict market shifts.
Before any of that, the playbook asks two blunt questions about how each function is understood. Is technology critical only at the enterprise level, or does it contribute to customer understanding. Is marketing limited to communications, or does it play a strategic role in driving growth.
The recommendations are relational as much as procedural: align on the roles of the two functions, sustain a joint learning agenda, over-invest in the relationship with a give sixty take forty mindset, and always consider the external partners’ perspective. One interviewee describes the learning agenda literally, taking the marketing chief to a technology conference and being taken to a creative festival in return.
Reimagine: from can we to should we
The second driver is a future-backwards vision. The method described is picturing a dystopian or utopian future for the organization, understanding where technology is going, and then deciding what role the organization can play for stakeholders in that future with technology as an enabler.
The reframing offered is a change in the question being asked. Organizations are moving from asking whether technology can do what they want to asking whether they want what technology can do.
The caution attached is that the question of technology’s future becomes irrelevant if the technologies never find real-world use. Purpose is offered as the thing that guides the exploration, and the recommendations include making marketing technology tangible, democratizing solutions, and turning the long-term vision into short-term experiments.
Focus: governing the money
The third driver is an integrated strategy, and the observation behind it is that many good visions lose their edge because they are never translated into strategic priorities.
Investment is sorted into three types with different governance. Infrastructure and architecture is led by technology with C-suite alignment. Strategic growth initiatives require full collaboration so digital investment matches business strategy. Use case investments run as a business-led dialogue between the two functions.
The distinction the playbook keeps returning to is between adaptive and transformative change. Generative artificial intelligence is placed in the second category, and it is noted that unlike traditional top-down transformations its democratization often starts from the bottom. Overperformers are described as merging business, marketing and technology metrics into shared growth measures.
Organize and unleash
The fourth driver is organization, and the claim is that the old sequence no longer works. Briefing, proposal, decision and execution has given way to co-creation sessions, hackathons and multidisciplinary discussion at every level.
The structural fixes named are a point of contact on each side to streamline communication and prioritization, and in some organizations a product owner role that bridges the two functions while owning the product itself.
Whole-brained teams blend analytical, creative and empathetic perspectives, and the playbook is explicit that success is not about equal representation but about a mindset of interdependence in which both sides recognize what collaboration is worth.
The fifth driver is unleashing, which here means role modeling the partnership: endorsing and celebrating each other through joint sessions and presentations.
The exercises
The benchmark exercise puts three positions on a line. Independence sounds like not needing the other function at all. Dependence sounds like needing a brief with clear requirements, or needing to be told what is possible. Interdependence is collaboration at each step, with each side bringing its own expertise.
The team exercise runs in two parts. One asks how marketing and technology could partner on the Sustainable Development Goals the company already focuses on, connecting brand purpose to that goal and exploring how technology accelerates it. The other works stakeholder by stakeholder, with marketing defining needs, technology defining the data and systems in place, and both connecting the two to find new growth opportunities.
Scope and limitations
The qualitative base is sixty interviews rather than a survey, and the case examples are illustrative. The file is a working version: one driver section repeats the text of an earlier one and is marked as still to do, and several case pages still carry placeholder text.
Source
This page summarises CMO x CIO Playbook: Unlocking the CMO x CIO collaboration to drive Humanized Growth, by Institute for Real Growth, January 2025.