A number stopped me this week.

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In 2025, 49% of Fortune 500 companies had someone with the title Chief Marketing Officer. A year later it's 36%. That's a 13 point drop in 12 months, from Forrester's analysis of the list.

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The easy read is that marketing leadership is being cut. I don't think that's what's happening, and since I run a business that sells one version of the alternative, I'll show my working so you can check it.

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Spencer Stuart looked at the same companies and found the job hasn't gone anywhere. 40% of the senior marketing leaders still carry the CMO title. 16% have a combined chief title, marketing and communications or marketing and customer. A third lead marketing without the word "chief" anywhere near them. And 11% sit under growth, commercial, customer or brand.

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The work is still being done. What's changed is how businesses choose to package it and pay for it.

The same shift, closer to home

You're probably not running a Fortune 500 company, so here's the UK picture.

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FlairRepublic surveyed 450 senior UK business leaders last year. 59% had a full-time senior marketing leader. 6% used part-time or fractional senior marketing leadership. 13% outsourced marketing entirely. 18% had no marketing leadership at all.

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Read that next to another line from the same study: 74% said senior strategic marketing leadership was important or critical to growth.

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So around 4 in 10 businesses don't have a full-time senior marketer, and most of them know it matters. That gap is where nearly every founder I speak to lives.

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When I set up The Scale Up Collective, "fractional" barely existed as a word in UK marketing. My best estimate (and it is an estimate, nobody publishes a clean series for this) is that under 1% of UK scale-ups used part-time CMO-level leadership in 2016. By 2021, perhaps 2 or 3%. Today, among businesses with 50 to 1,000 people, I'd put it somewhere between 6 and 9%.

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Marketing is the one I see up close, but finance directors, people leads, heads of product and RevOps are being bought the same way. A 2026 study of 180 UK fractional executives describes a market that's growing quickly and still runs mostly on referrals, which tells you how young it is.

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The door swings both ways too. Taligence found 8.8% of CMOs appointed in 2025 had previously worked as a fractional CMO, up from 7.4% the year before.

Why this happened when it did

The funding reset after 2022 made a £150k to £250k C-suite package a much harder line to sign off, at exactly the moment boards started asking harder questions about growth.

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The job itself split. Brand, demand, product marketing, data, and now AI in every workflow. One person rarely covers all of it well anymore, so the "one big hire" logic weakened.

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Senior people moved. A lot of experienced marketers chose portfolio careers after 2021, first in SaaS and increasingly in professional and financial services. The supply appeared.

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And investors got comfortable with it. If you've raised recently, your board has almost certainly seen fractional finance or marketing work somewhere else in the portfolio. Your 100 day plan probably says "commercial leadership" without saying what shape it should take.

You now have four ways to get the same judgement

Historically a founder had two real options: carry marketing yourself until you could afford a marketing director, then build a team under them. Now there are four.

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Hire full time. A CMO or marketing director on payroll, building and leading a team. Best when marketing is a permanent lever in your business, there's already a team of 5 or more to lead, and you can offer a budget worth leading. A good permanent CMO wants both of those. Without them, you tend to end up hiring someone mid-level with a senior title, and paying for the title.

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Stretch or promote. You hold it, or your head of marketing steps up, or someone from sales covers. I understand the pull, and sometimes it's right. It works when the person has already shown judgement and you buy them senior cover for the decisions they've never made before. It goes wrong when "covering" quietly becomes the plan.

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Outsource to an agency. Right when the direction already exists and the problem is delivery in a channel you don't want to staff. Agencies are brilliant at the brief they're given. They're rarely positioned to write the brief, and they'll struggle to be the person who says no to the board.

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Fractional. Senior leadership for a day or two a week, on its own or with a delivery team behind it. Fits the 12 to 18 months after a raise when the foundations need setting, decisions need making quickly, and a permanent package can't yet be justified. It's the wrong choice when you actually need hands rather than direction, or when the need is clearly permanent and you can fund it.

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I sell the fourth one, so discount my view accordingly. I've also talked founders out of it (the 13 August issue was about exactly that). Stage and the shape of the need decide this, and the same budget can't buy direction and delivery at once. Around £3k a month funds one of them.

How to choose

Before you look at any of the four, answer these honestly.

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• What is the board actually asking marketing for in the next 2 quarters: a strategy, a pipeline number, a repositioning, a launch? Name one
• Is this need a phase or a permanent job? Setting foundations after investment is a phase. Running a 15 person team for 5 years is a job
• Do you need direction, delivery, or both, and does the budget cover what you've written down?
• Who do you want in the room when the board challenges the marketing slide?
• Could you attract the full-time hire you'd want at this stage, with the team and budget you have today?

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Your answers will usually point at one model. Occasionally two. If they point at all four, the problem sits upstream of the hire, in what you've decided marketing is for.

The one thing to do this week

Write down, in one sentence, what you need from marketing leadership over the next 6 months. Then hold it against the four models and ask which delivers that sentence at a cost you'd defend to your board.

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Drop me an email and send me the sentence. I'll tell you honestly which of the four I'd choose for it, including when the answer isn't us.

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PS. The fractional model is one of the four, and it's the one we've built the business around: a fractional CMO to set the direction and a delivery team under the same roof to carry it out. If your sentence points that way, reply and I'll show you what the first 90 days look like. If it points elsewhere, I'll tell you that too.‍