Fractional CMO Show

Casey runs 11 Claude Code windows at once right now, across four live projects, with an orchestrator agent coordinating domain-specific agents below it. This episode gets specific: the exact folder structure, the soul.md file that makes an AI agent actually behave, and the real reason his wife's agentic work started going sideways before they fixed it on a Friday. But the AI stack is only half the...

AI is eating marketing from the bottom up, and most marketers don't see what that actually means for their career. Casey isn't talking about AI replacing creativity or strategy in some distant future, he's talking about what's already happening inside companies right now, where a single marketing coordinator armed with Claude is lobbing what one executive called 'slop grenades' into the business,...

Right now, experienced marketers are spending hundreds of dollars a month on AI tools they barely use, or bouncing between platforms every time a new model drops, and wondering why they're not getting more out of any of it. In this episode, Casey breaks down the exact AI stack he runs today as a fractional CMO, including why he has 12 Claude Code windows open at any given moment, why he thinks the...

The primary sources that marketers have relied on for years are quietly disappearing from AI. News organizations, forums, and media companies are locking down their content from the bots that power the tools everyone is rushing to adopt. What that means for how you serve clients, and for your own relevance, is something most fractional CMOs haven't thought through yet. This episode digs into why t...

Are you actually worth what you're getting paid? It's a question most senior marketers never ask themselves honestly, and the answer is getting harder to dodge as the tools, the tactics, and the competition all shift beneath your feet. This episode opens with a provocation aimed squarely at the folks making $200K, $300K, $400K a year, and asks whether the experience behind that number is still cur...

When a developer ships AI-generated code that quietly starts misfiring, the technical team moves on. What's left is a customer experience problem, a reputation problem, and a relationship problem. All of which land in the lap of the one person who wasn't even in the room when the code got written. This episode gets into why that's happening more often than anyone wants to admit, and what fractiona...

Someone wrote a blog post arguing that calling yourself a Fractional CMO is pricing yourself out of the market. The argument isn't wrong, exactly, it's just aimed at the wrong target. What gets unpacked is the real question underneath the debate: what kind of problems do you want to solve, and for whom? The episode traces the difference between companies that need a web designer and companies that...

The marketing industry is fracturing fast, and the break isn't happening where most people are looking. The bottom is getting cut out from under SEO agencies, PPC shops, funnel builders, and copywriters, not slowly, but all at once. What gets unpacked is who survives that collapse, and why the answer has almost nothing to do with your technical skills. The argument is about positioning at a level...

There's a certain kind of client who will never want what you're offering, no matter how good your pitch is. The episode opens with a story about a roadside crab shack in Maryland with 178 reviews and a 4.8-star rating,  and why Casey walked away from it as a hard no. What that moment revealed about positioning as a fractional CMO is the whole argument of the episode. He also draws a sharp line ar...

A question showed up in a Facebook group that's been sitting with me ever since: is anyone else noticing that Claude is writing really mid copy? What followed wasn't a rant about AI. It was something more interesting, a diagnosis of what separates marketers who can catch bad work from the ones who can't, and why that gap is about to matter more than almost any other skill you have. The episode get...

Most fractional CMOs have the skills to succeed. What separates the ones who actually do from the ones who quietly fade out isn't intelligence, experience, or even the right niche. The gap is something harder to name, harder to manufacture, and almost impossible to borrow from someone else. This episode digs into why so many people with real marketing talent give up before the compound interest ki...

Most fractional CMOs aren't failing because they lack skill. They're stalling because they're busy doing everything except the one thing that actually moves the needle. This episode opens with a gym analogy that's almost too accurate, then goes somewhere more uncomfortable: the real reason experienced marketers spend weeks building websites, booking headshots, and dreaming about book signings befo...

The best fractional CMOs in the room aren't the ones talking the most. This episode makes the case that silence, in negotiations, in pricing conversations, and especially around how you get your work done, might be the sharpest tool in your practice right now. What gets unpacked is a real situation: a CMO who cut their rate, earned their upside, and then watched it potentially slip away because no...

What happens when experienced marketers get honest about where they're stuck and ask for unfiltered coaching on how to move forward? That's the premise of this episode, and the answers get uncomfortable in the best way. The questions are real, the resistance is real, and so is the pushback.   What gets unpacked is a pattern that shows up again and again across marketers trying to build a fractiona...

Most fractional CMOs aren't struggling because they're lazy or undisciplined. They're struggling because they keep solving the wrong size of problem, and the market is about to make that very expensive. This episode draws a sharp line between the work that keeps you busy and the work that actually moves you forward, and the gap between those two things is wider than most people want to admit. What...

AI's arrival in the marketing department isn't the threat most fractional CMOs think it is. The episode opens with a provocation: the marketers who are scared of AI are scared for the wrong reasons, and the ones who are leaning into it with the wrong instincts are making a mistake that's harder to walk back. What gets unpacked is the real role that experience, taste, and discernment play when ever...

The argument is a counterintuitive one: the thing holding most experienced marketers back isn't a lack of knowledge or skill. It's something they'd never think to look for. The episode opens with a challenge, think of someone in your life who isn't as smart as you, yet is more successful, less stressed, and more free, and then builds the case for why that gap exists and what's actually responsible...

The hardest thing about building a fractional CMO practice isn't the marketing work itself. It's knowing how to talk about what you do in a way that makes the right clients say "that's exactly what I need" before you've even finished the sentence. This episode gets into the mechanics of positioning a fractional CMO practice, why most practitioners get it wrong from the start, and what it actually...

The marketing department is shrinking from the bottom up, and most fractional CMOs are running straight into the part that's getting cut. In this episode, Casey breaks down the one quality that separates the CMOs who keep their seat from the ones AI is about to replace, and it isn't strategy, an AI tool stack, or a $29 a month SaaS tool you build on the weekend. It's leadership. The bigger picture...

AI is moving fast. So why are so many fractional CMOs spending their nights vibe coding SaaS tools that nobody's paying for? In this episode, Casey draws a hard line between eating your dinner and eating dessert — and explains why most marketers are choosing the wrong one.   He breaks down the two camps: the ones who feel behind and don't know how to talk about AI without sounding lost, and the on...

As a Fractional CMO, you're not supposed to do everything. So who — or what — does? In this episode, Casey breaks down the five-resource allocation framework: the exact model he uses to staff a marketing department without becoming the person who handles it all. He walks through each layer in plain terms — full-time hires, contractors, agencies, fractional talent, and AI agents. When to use each o...

AI isn't just changing how marketers work — it's changing who gets to work at all. In this episode, Casey goes live inside Claude Code and builds a full conference PowerPoint from a single prompt. The product is fake. The lesson is very real.   He walks through the whole thing in plain language — no coding, no agency, no waiting. Deck built. Formatting fixed. Converted to a scrollable website. Upl...

We're in separation season—and Casey wants you to feel that. In this episode, he breaks down why the rise of AI isn't just a productivity upgrade, it's a fundamental reshaping of entire industries. The fractional CMOs who thrive won't be the most experienced. They'll be the ones who understand what's actually happening and move accordingly.   Casey walks through the legal world's e-discovery trans...

Casey's heard the question too many times: What should I take on from the client's plate? In this episode, he explains why that's the wrong question entirely—and what a CMO should be asking instead. Real strategic thinking doesn't start with what exists. It starts with where the company wants to go and what's actually required to get there. Everything else is just inherited chaos.    Casey also wa...

Casey has been tinkering with AI tools for years—paying for subscriptions, defaulting to ChatGPT, getting marginal value. Then February 5th, 2026 happened. That's when Opus 4.6 dropped, and something clicked. In this episode, Casey breaks down what finally changed, why it matters more to CMOs than anyone's talking about, and why the demarcation between before and after is real—whether you feel it...