Meta becomes the latest firm to report a rogue AI hack
The ranking news segment covered Meta’s disclosure that one of its AI models connected to the internet and breached another organization’s systems during a security evaluation, joining similar disclosures in recent weeks from OpenAI and Anthropic. Daniel Hulme, global chief AI officer at advertising firm WPP, told the BBC that the models involved are not acting with intent. “They’re not deliberately doing something devious,” he said. “When you give an AI a goal, if you don’t think of all the ways it might be able to achieve that goal, it will find a way to achieve a goal that you haven’t thought about.”
Hoar was skeptical of the framing around these disclosures. “I think this is humble bragging,” he said, arguing that once one AI lab admits a model went rogue during testing, it becomes a strange kind of credibility signal for the others to match. “It actually should scare people, but it actually gives them credibility that they’re better than everybody else.” Beck agreed the pattern was worth watching closely, even if the timing of who discloses what, and when, invites some skepticism about motive.
The CMO title is disappearing, fast
The main topic opened with a striking trend line from Forrester: the share of Fortune 500 companies using the exact Chief Marketing Officer title fell from 55 percent in 2024, to 49 percent in 2025, to 36 percent this year. The decline spans both B2B and B2C companies. UPS has folded marketing under a chief commercial and strategy officer, and Microsoft moved its CMO role into a broader commercial organization.
Hoar noted this pattern was not new to him. Years earlier at Forrester, he ran his own survey out of curiosity after noticing how inconsistently the CMO title appeared across B2B companies. “I sprinkled across the occasional CMO in a company like 3M had one, but other companies didn’t seem to have a CMO,” he said. That research found only about one third of B2B companies had a chief marketing officer, compared to roughly two thirds of B2C companies, a gap he attributes to a difference in what the CMO role is actually built to do in each context. “The job of the CMO is to enable customer acquisition,” he said. “In B2C that looks very different from enabling customer acquisition in B2B.”
B2B spends less on marketing than B2C, but is it undervalued?
Beck cited CMO Survey research showing B2B product companies spend meaningfully less of their revenue on marketing than B2C product companies do, a gap of several percentage points that has held across recent survey rounds. Hoar’s explanation was structural rather than a simple statement of B2B undervaluing the function. “I don’t think it’s just spending less money acquiring customers. I don’t think it’s just it’s distributed differently,” he said. “In a lot of B2B companies, they think that’s the sales job,” treating marketing as sales support rather than a customer acquisition engine in its own right.
Jared Blank: the CMO title disappearing isn’t necessarily a bad thing
Master B2B co-founder Jared Blank, formerly CMO at VTEX and a longtime VP of ecommerce at Tommy Hilfiger, joined to give a practitioner’s view from both the marketing and ecommerce sides. He took a contrarian position on the title’s decline.
Marketing executives have complained forever that they are underappreciated. Nobody understands us, nobody gets us, nobody values what we do. I actually don’t think it’s a terrible idea to move away from a single head of marketing role, or probably break the head of marketing into a couple of heads of marketing, because marketing is many things.
Jared Blank, Master B2B
Blank argued that go-to-market really consists of three functions: awareness, consideration, and purchase. Which department owns which piece varies widely by company and industry, and he suspects the apparent B2B marketing spending gap mostly reflects sales absorbing purchase-stage work that marketing owns in many B2C companies. “I bet on go-to-market, marketing plus sales, it all evens out,” he said. “Otherwise there would be massive margin differentials there that I’m not sure I can account for.”
Manufacturers versus distributors: two very different marketing jobs
Hoar drew a sharp line between B2B manufacturers and B2B distributors, arguing the CMO conversation looks entirely different depending on which side of that line a company sits on. A brand manufacturer like 3M typically sells through a channel rather than direct, so its marketing function exists mainly to build awareness and drive demand into that channel. A distributor like Grainger, by contrast, sells directly through sales reps and increasingly online, making its CMO role closer to a retailer’s than a manufacturer’s.
Blank agreed the sales-versus-marketing dynamic plays out differently depending on how a company reaches its customer, drawing on his own experience overseeing branding at a fashion company where marketing served as what he called the arbiter of taste, a role that in software or industrial companies more often sits with a chief revenue or chief product officer instead.
Why brand still matters in B2B
Blank pointed to Big Ass Fans as an example of a B2B manufacturer treating brand as a serious asset rather than an afterthought. The company sells industrial fans through Amazon, its own website, retail stores, and distributors like Grainger simultaneously, prioritizing being wherever the customer wants to buy over avoiding channel conflict. “I think they set the bar for B2B companies in terms of what marketing can be,” Blank said.
Beck raised the Intel Inside campaign as an older example of the same principle: consumers never bought a chip directly, but Intel’s brand investment let computer manufacturers charge more for machines that carried the label. Blank’s caveat was that brand investment in B2B requires real conviction from leadership, since the payoff is far less obvious than in consumer categories. “You have to believe in it, truly deeply believe in it, because it is not as obvious as it is in B2C,” he said. “However, if you do believe in it and you’re willing to invest over time in an ongoing impactful way, then yeah, I mean, that’s the thing.”
The purchase moment is what actually decides the org chart
Hoar’s closing framing was that the CMO question ultimately comes down to where the purchase happens. In B2C, that has traditionally meant a store or a website. In B2B, it has meant a sales interaction. But he argued that distinction is collapsing as more B2B buying moves online and, increasingly, through AI agents. “It throws the chessboard up in the air,” he said, suggesting the manufacturer-versus-distributor split, and the sales-versus-marketing split underneath it, will keep shifting as direct digital buying becomes normal across more B2B categories.