Today, the most important conversations in brand storytelling have moved from the writer’s room to the boardroom, where marketing leaders are being asked to justify investment, demonstrate transformation, and deliver growth simultaneously. For brand storytellers, understanding what’s driving those conversations may be the most underutilized advantage available, especially to anyone whose work depends on a CMO saying yes.
This begins with seeing the current moment for what it is: one of reinvention for the CMO role. Algorithms are changing how brands reach consumers, which in turn has changed what marketing leaders are fundamentally accountable for. Dentsu’s CMO Navigator: Media Edition 2026, drawing from nearly 2,000 marketing leaders across 14 countries, captures this shift with acute clarity.
For those who work alongside, report to, or pitch to CMOs, this report presents an opportunity. Used properly, it can be a window into what those leaders need to hear, and how they need to hear it. The gap between a great creative idea and an approved, funded initiative is almost always a translation problem. This report helps close it.
The report’s core findings identify four pressure points that define the modern CMO’s decision-making environment, and therefore four dimensions along which any content-driven proposal can be strengthened.
The first is the AI accountability shift. CMOs are now directly responsible for redesigning their organizations for the age of AI. When creative and production partners demonstrate AI literacy, they are speaking directly to a core leadership priority. The question to ask before any pitch: does this work make the CMO’s AI transformation story stronger, or does it ignore it entirely?
The second is the media-as-system imperative. With media repositioned as a growth driver rather than a distribution channel, storytelling that arrives without a clear sense of how it functions within platform dynamics, algorithmic behavior, and consumer discovery patterns will struggle to earn confidence at the leadership level. Content strategy and media strategy, presented as integrated thinking, signals the kind of partnership modern CMOs are actively seeking.
The third is the cultural investment signal. Ninety-one percent of CMOs are increasing investment in sports, gaming, and entertainment IP. More than 85% are expanding into anime. Gaming partnerships have become mainstream. This is a deliberate reorientation toward the spaces where consumer attention is most concentrated and culturally resonant. Storytelling proposals anchored in these spaces, with a clear rationale for why a brand belongs there, are already aligned with where leadership attention is pointing.
The fourth is the performance-brand tension. CMOs openly acknowledge the difficulty of balancing short-term performance metrics against longer-term brand equity. This is the most human pressure point in the report, and the most actionable for storytellers. Creative work that arrives with a framework for how it serves both addresses a tension leadership is actively living with.
What the report describes is a CMO role that has become genuinely multidimensional in ways the organizational structures around it haven’t always caught up to. Many leaders acknowledge gaps in internal capability. Many are navigating decisions that sit at the intersection of creativity, technology, data, and culture simultaneously. The partners who thrive in this environment will be the ones who make the CMO’s job measurably easier and their ambitions more achievable.
There’s a version of creative excellence that starts with the idea and works backward toward justification. And there’s a version that starts with genuine understanding of the decision-maker’s world and works forward toward work that earns trust before it earns applause. Doing the latter does more to ensure that the CMO becomes your greatest champion, leading to the prioritization of media strategies that blend strategic intelligence and narrative excellence.
Getting there begins with cultivating a deeper understanding of what that leader is carrying, and what it would mean to genuinely help them carry it.
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