Brian Chesky said something on TBPN a couple of weeks ago that made many headlines in the marketing world. He explained why the CMO is the highest-turnover executive role in Silicon Valley. Tenure is under 3 years on average. Lower than the CFO, the COO, the CTO and every other executive position.
Chesky’s explanation is something every marketer has experienced many times in their career. The second a marketing tactic works, everyone copies it. And when it starts being copied and plugged into every companies marketing stack, that’s when it stops being effective.
Examples include: Facebook ads in 2018. Google ads in the early 2,000’s. The Apollo + Clay outbound stack of 2023. Each one printed cash for about 18 months, then got run into the ground by every B2B company rushing to replace it once it dies out.
Chesky calls it banner blindness. After a buyer sees the same play twice, they stop seeing it at all.
Now think about every other C-suite role. A CFO builds a system, refines it, and gets sharper over a decade. A great CTO from 2018 is still using mostly the same fundamentals today (now with the help of claude code).
Marketing is the opposite. The half-life of every tactic shrinks every year. The moment a play is clean enough to write down in a playbook, that’s when you know it’s shelf life is expiring.
It’s like surfing on a wave that collapses the second you stand up. The only way to stay upright is to spot the next wave before this one breaks.
So how do CMOs and other B2B marketers actually stay sharp in 2026? Here are 5 things to do:
1. Spend 5 hours a week consuming news: I spend (what most consider) an unhealthy amount of time on Linkedin and X reading through posts of other marketers talking about industry trends and what’s working for them. Some people look at that as a bad habit, but I see as a crucial part of my job. In fact, when hiring for a marketer, one of the key questions I ask is how much time they spend reading through industry-related social media posts, and from who they get their insights from.
2. Run a 30-day channel test every quarter: Pick one emerging channel or tactic. Could be a new ad platform, a new outbound motion, a new content format. Run a small, structured test with a defined budget and a clear success metric. If it works, scale it. If it doesn’t, kill it and move on.
3. Build the stack to be modular, not monolithic: Stop signing 3-year contracts on “category-leader” software that locks you in. Build your stack with tools like Clay, Zapier, and a flexible CRM that let you rewire workflows at the speed you need.
4. Talk to your customers every month: Not survey data. Not NPS scores. Get on 5 calls a month with real buyers and ask them how they found you, what they almost bought instead, and what made them pull the trigger. This is the highest-leverage activity a CMO can do, and 90% skip it because it doesn’t scale. That’s exactly the point. It’s signal your competitors don’t have.
5. Have in-person chats with other marketing leaders: Some of the most insightful ideas I’ve had have been attending conference panels, or having dinner with industry folks. In fact, closed rooms in many cases will give you playbooks that don’t exist online.