CMO Field Notes with Ant Hodges

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...

It’s an understandable reaction. More input should produce more output. But in most of the businesses I work with, that’s not actually where the constraint is. Leads are coming in. Pipelines look active. Salespeople are having conversations. And still, the revenue number at the end of the month doesn’t match the level of activity. Where are the gaps then? 1 - Lead response time is slow. Research a...

That cost, it’s the time, inefficiency, and missed opportunity buried inside a marketing technology stack that nobody fully understands. Most businesses that have grown to at least $5m in revenue have built their stack reactively. A new hire joined and brought their preferred tool. An agency recommended a platform as part of their onboarding. The founder bought something at a conference because it...

The easy assumption when sales drop and revenue flatlines, is that marketing is broken. You have the wrong channel, the wrong message, the wrong team. So you hire someone new, add another tool, or brief an agency to fix it. Here’s what I actually see when I get inside these businesses. The marketing isn’t broken. The decision-making is. PwC’s 2025 Pulse Survey found that 57% of executives say slow...

In this episode Ant explains why CMO Field Notes exists - and what makes it different from most marketing content you’ll come across. Not advice from the outside. Observations from inside growing businesses, written down and shared clearly. He covers the three areas the show returns to week after week: the decision-making that stalls marketing before it starts, the technology stacks that cost more...