CMO Field Notes with Ant Hodges

In a growing business, your best people are often quietly carrying work that nobody ever actually gave them. I'm seeing this all the time. As a fractional CMO, I'm working with business owners and CEOs at that higher level of leadership. But when I spend time one-to-one with team members, this comes up again and again. Picture someone reliable in your team. They're good at their job, and they care...

A few episodes ago, I told you about a client I gave a full refund to, a few weeks after she'd paid us $19,000, and I promised I'd tell you what happened next. It's one of my favourite stories about keeping marketing simple. It's also exactly how I work now as a fractional CMO with founders and business owners, whether they've got a big team or operate on their own. Here's a quick recap of the sto...

Big launches and campaigns are rarely won on launch day. They're won weeks earlier, in the boring work of building and testing the machine behind them. Working as a fractional CMO, this is what I try to do with clients. We build out the campaigns way in advance. If you have a team, or an agency you outsource some of your marketing to, and you're planning campaigns, I really want you to listen to w...

A few episodes ago, I talked about keeping the human in the front office and AI in the back office. In this episode, I want to come back to that, because there's a grey area in the middle that I think a lot of businesses are getting wrong right now. It's the automated message, the chatbot, the form and the follow-up that goes out on autopilot. Done well, these things save hours. Done badly, they q...

As we get ready for the week ahead, I want to talk to you about hiring. One of the most expensive mistakes a growing business can make is hiring someone who interviews brilliantly for a job they were never going to do well. As a CMO, I'm involved in hiring decisions and conversations about hiring within the companies I work with. But let me tell you about a hire that went horribly wrong for me, in...

Before the week starts, I want to take a few minutes to talk about something that really matters to me, more than any kind of marketing tactic. It's about what you do when doing the right thing costs you money. Before I closed my agency in 2023, there was a project that tested this in a very real way. I actually write about it in my book, Simplify the Funnel. A client had bought a high-ticket prog...

It’s the weekend, so I’m going to take this one a little bit slower. Wherever you’re listening, just take a breath, and let’s talk about something that quietly costs businesses more than they realise. In the last episode, I promised you the first proper field note I’ve published for a while, and I said it was about a message nobody answered. Picture this for a moment. Someone reaches out to your b...

It’s been a few months since the last episode of this show, and I wanted to start by telling you why. Back in June, I recorded an episode about whether a CEO’s decision to use AI was the right one or not. Then the summer arrived, and I made a deliberate choice to step away for a while. Some of that was for family. We took proper holidays together, and I protected that time on purpose. I’ve spent o...

When it comes to using AI in your business, there are two ways that you need to look at it as a CEO and founder, which will help your team grow your business and help and really serve your customers. And we’ve got to get this right, because the world is already changing from the dawn of AI and what things have been done with AI and how we do it. My name is Ant Hodges. I’m the creator here at the C...

I want to really unpack something that came up from a conversation with a client just yesterday. I was talking to them about an A/B split test we did on a campaign. This is something, if you’re not familiar with A/B split testing, an A/B split test is effectively running maybe some traffic to a particular landing page that maybe will serve a different landing page for 50% of the traffic and anothe...

The thing for me this week is I was trying to look at LinkedIn. And LinkedIn, we all know, is a great tool for business to business, marketing, lead generation, engaging with the right kind of audience that you want to grow your business if you’re a service provider in that sense. And as you start to talk about subjects on LinkedIn, as you start to talk about things, you will see more of those sub...

Some of you may have noticed there was a bit of a gap in the podcasts from probably the beginning of May to the beginning of June. We had almost a month off. Crazy, crazy busy times. I’m back in the habit, and we’re getting back into the swing of things again with the three short episodes per week. These are meant to be bite-sized insights into the world of working as a fractional CMO, specificall...

“Logo guidelines and messaging documents take priority over commercial outcomes for the first stages of any CMO’s contract.” Yeah! That was a trainer who is there helping CMOs grow their business. And what she told me on a webinar this week… well, she didn’t actually just direct it to me, but to the whole webinar audience. She went on to say that “marketing exists to look good and to be attractive...

Welcome to another episode of CMO Field Notes. My name is Ant Hodges. I’m a fractional CMO, and I work with clients, both large and small, who are looking to have definitive marketing leadership in play in their business, so that there is a coordinated strategy around marketing. And it’s not just a constant battle in that Monday morning, 11am marketing meeting to go, “What are we going to try this...

Most founders, CEOs and business owners that I speak to aren’t short of marketing information. In fact, they’re drowning in it. And everyone seems to be an AI expert, because they live on their ChatGPT or Claude tab on their browser, and whatever they need access to, they simply tap a few questions and get the answers they were looking for. Whether the answers they get back are right or wrong for...

My focus is on one thing, one thing only, simplification , and when we simplify, we streamline things. Part of the first job that I do is I look at how we connect the marketing activity to revenue, because it has to be linked. When marketing is seen as a cost center, it’s because marketing has not been linked to revenue. I was on a call a few months back with a founder who said something that stuc...

I was in a boardroom a few months ago, sat on a quarterly review meeting with a business I’d been advising. The CFO, quite a calm guy, no drama, asked the CMO one question “What’s the cost of acquiring a customer this quarter, and how does it compare to last quarter?” The CMO froze - not because she didn’t have the data, she had tons of data. She had a 40-slide deck full of it ready to present imp...

I’ve just come off a call with a client. And it’s kind of one of those calls that you kind of wish you’d had a few months before, because this client was somebody that I worked with. I acted as an interim CMO for a period of about 6 months while they were really looking at recruitment for a new full-time CMO in their business. It was as a direct result of somebody leaving the company. So, they nee...

My name is Ant Hodges. I’m a fractional CMO. I work with clients anywhere between $1m and $50m a year, under 100 employees, and they’re looking for someone to come in and take away the de facto marketing role that the CEO and founder has ended up doing. I take that away from them and bring in real marketing leadership. Fractional CMO work is one of the things I absolutely love, because it’s about...

There’s a conversation running through almost every forum, comment section, and LinkedIn thread I see. I hear it at events and on stages. It goes something like this: AI is getting better and faster - so why would any business pay for a senior marketing leader when they can get the same input from a tool? It’s a fair question. But I think it’s the wrong question. And most of the answers being give...

The whole point of these field notes is something short and snappy. A nugget you can take and use in your business. I wrote Simplify the Funnel because I wanted to help you simplify - so I’m simplifying this too. No production. Just me talking to you. Today I want to talk about why the CMO market, whilst it seems to be growing fast, has a real problem for founders and CEOs. Some of the stats I’ve...

But the operational reality is knocking on the door of every business that buys, ships, or prices anything. And apologies a little longer CMO Field Note for today. Since the closure of the Strait of Hormuz in late February, roughly 20% of global oil supply has been disrupted. Brent crude surpassed $100 a barrel for the first time in four years during March. The head of the International Energy Age...

That survey highlighted that 63% of marketing leaders are now reporting increased pressure from CFOs - up from 52% the year before. 61% are facing more scrutiny from CEOs. Board-level pressure on marketing has risen 21% in a single year. It reminds me of the days pf the global financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 - the CFOs then were pulling on the purse strings and cutting marketing spend. The new d...

The layoff numbers are still coming in. So far in 2026, over 60,000 tech workers have been cut. In 2025, the total was nearly 245,000 across the sector. Amazon cut 16,000 roles - while simultaneously reporting record revenue of $716.9 billion. Microsoft. Meta. Companies with strong financial performance making significant headcount reductions in the same quarter. The pattern is consistent. Headcou...

The tools are faster, better, and cheaper than they were twelve months ago. Teams are using them. Output is going up and everyone is busy telling the story of how AI is transforming their marketing. There’s a few things that I am actually seeing underneath that story that paint a different picture. AI is speeding up execution, I do not disagree with this. But in a business without clear strategic...