Hey👋,
I'm Giacomo

Last week, I published one of my most successful posts.

It took me almost eight hours to write.
My whole Sunday.

Eight hours for ~600 words??
Yes indeed.

The post was about the disappearance of the CMO title.

The idea came from the TLDR Marketing newsletter, which linked to an article by State of Brand.

As I checked the article’s sources, one claim caught my attention.

It said WHOOP had hired former Nike CMO Nicole Graham.
The link pointed to another marketing newsletter, CMORoom, which made the same claim.

But there was a problem.
Nicole Hubbard Graham is Nike’s current CMO.
She never moved to WHOOP.

WHOOP had actually hired Dirk-Jan van Hameren, Nike's CMO before Graham.

A small mistake.
But repeated across three reputable marketing publications.

Then it got more interesting.

I asked Gemini to fact-check the claim.
It confirmed it was correct, citing those same publications as reputable sources.

ChatGPT Pro (not Plus) did the opposite.
It traced the story to WHOOP’s official announcement and caught the error immediately.

But this isn’t about which AI is better.
It’s about what happens when the internet repeats the same mistake often enough.

This is why a LinkedIn post can take me a full day.
Writing doesn’t take eight hours.
Fact-checking and research does.

This time, the effort was rewarded with tens of valuable comments from CMOs and marketing practitioners around the world.

Other times, I spend eight hours on a post that nobody reads.

But that's ok, because I still enjoy the process.
The research, the thinking, the writing.
Doing things properly, not merely for the sake of doing something.

I'm very confident that my efforts will be rewarded in the long term.
Maybe not with likes and followers but with valuable connections, speaking engagements, and job opportunities. In fact, it's already happening.

Because AI has made output a commodity.
But the process behind an output still isn't.
And smart people can tell the difference.

Happy Sunday everyone!

So long, old money.

This year, self-made fortunes hit a record share of billionaire wealth.

Good news?

Not for me.

Back when billionaires were corrupt bastards born into old money, I had the perfect excuse not to be one.

I'm not a corrupt bastard, let alone born into old money.
No point in even trying to become a billionaire.

But now,
you don’t need political connections anymore, you don't need to inherit great fortunes.

Anyone can become a billionaire.
Even good people!

So, no more excuses my friends.

If I'm not a billionaire, it’s my own fault.
I should have worked harder instead of scrolling through another TikTok video.

Happy Friday, future billionaires!

Chart by The Economist

Good luck measuring this customer journey 😂

Source: Datos, A Semrush Company "How AI is reshaping customer journeys"

CMOs are an endangered species.

And marketers themselves are to blame.

Only 36% of Fortune 500 companies use the CMO title in 2026.
Down from 49% in 2025.
And 55% in 2024.

This does not mean companies have stopped believing in marketing.

Quite the opposite.
They are moving it under broader commercial leaders.

At UPS, marketing now sits under the Chief Commercial and Strategy Officer.
At Microsoft, the CMO moved into a broader commercial organisation.

CEOs are not abandoning marketing.
The opposite. They realised it is too important to sit in isolation.

And honestly, that makes total sense.

Corporate marketing has long struggled to prove its impact on revenue and growth. So teams built increasingly sophisticated ways to prove their value.

Complex attribution.
Marketing mix modelling.
Endless dashboards.

The measurement improved, but the connection to revenue did not.

Too often, metrics defended marketing’s narrative instead of serving the business.

Meanwhile, many CMOs controlled only one of marketing’s traditional 4Ps: promotion.

Product sat with the CPO or CTO (think of tech companies).
Pricing with strategy.
Distribution with sales.

The CMO was expected to deliver growth without controlling most of its levers.
No wonder some manufactured impressive metrics just to survive!

But that model was bound to break.

CEOs are now absorbing marketing into broader Commercial, Revenue or Operating functions, bringing the 4Ps under one chief.

The irony?

While large corporations may be retiring the title, high-growth challengers still recruit the people who held it.

WHOOP just hired former Nike global CMO Dirk-Jan van Hameren.
Food-Tech unicorn NotCo had hired former Burger King CMO Fernando Machado, who has since left and joined Chipotle as Chief Brand Officer (not CMO!)

In large corporations, marketing can become a political exercise.
At scale-ups, growth and top-line revenue is survival.

So,
the title may be endangered,
but great marketers who understand more than just promotion or manufactured metrics are definitely not.

Sources: Forrester CMO Tenure 2026 study; UPS, Microsoft, WHOOP and NotCo press releases.

Asking, "How many ping-pong balls fit in a Boeing 747?" during an interview is absolutely pointless unless the job actually requires someone to calculate how many ping-pong balls fit in a Boeing 747 on the spot.

Mark Horstman, The Effective Hiring Manager.

Really loving this book

First rule of hiring: don't hire.

The first line on the first page of the first chapter.
You probably don't need to read any further :)

Mark Horstman loving your books!

ChatGPT Ads could make as much money as TikTok in just four years.

Starting from zero.

New Street Research built 3 scenarios for ChatGPT Ads in 2030:

• Bear case: $24B
• Base case: $54B
• Bull case: $110B

So, if things go well, but not exceptionally well, OpenAI could make $54B from advertising by 2030.

TikTok made an estimated $33B last year.
Over the past 5 years, its advertising revenue grew at a 71% CAGR.
By 2030, it could reach around $60B.

TikTok would have taken roughly 10 years to get there.
OpenAI could do it in 5!

The bull case assumes an explosion in the AI search advertising market.
WPP estimates that the entire generative search ad market will surpass $100B by 2030.

• Base case means OpenAI captures roughly half of it.
• The bull case means OpenAI captures all of it, and more 😂

But everything depends on the definition.
Does WPP’s estimate include Google AI Overviews and AI Mode?
Probably not. Otherwise, the math does not really add up.

Google Search alone made $225B last year.
Some of that already coming from ads in AI Overviews and AI Mode. And that share will only grow.

So, by 2030, the total addressable generative search advertising market could easily reach $300B.

OpenAI could capture a big chunk of it.
The bull case says roughly one third. Is it crazy? maybe not.

Especially if CPMs and CPCs remain high.

Higher prices mean higher revenue per user.
New Street estimates that OpenAI’s advertising revenue per user could get close to Reddit’s by 2030.

Still far from Meta.
But unlike OpenAI, which has so far focused on large clients, Meta did not rely on large advertisers alone.

It attracted millions of small and medium advertisers.

OpenAI now appears to be following the same playbook:
Self-serve platform, conversion tracking, custom audiences, etc

Basically,
we’re witnessing the rise of a new advertising giant.

10 metres can turn a colleague into a stranger.

In the 1970s, MIT professor Thomas Allen studied how engineers shared technical information and communicated at work.

The finding sounded obvious:
The farther apart people sat, the less they talked.

But the curve was not gentle.
It collapsed.

Within a few metres, communication was very common.
Around 10 metres, it dropped sharply.

By 25–30 metres, it was close to zero.
After that, extra distance barely mattered.

Someone on the other side of the floor behaved, communication-wise, like someone sitting in another building or even in another city or state.

Fast forward to 2026,
a study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics followed 1'055 software engineers at a Fortune 500 company.

Some teams sat in the same building.
Some were split across two buildings, only a 10-minute walk apart.
Others were remotely distributed.

Same-building teams received 24% more code-review comments.
When offices closed during the pandemic, that advantage largely disappeared.
The estimated loss of proximity reduced online feedback by 18%.

Online feedback.
Despite Slack, Zoom, GitHub etc.

I see it every week in my work.
The people I learn from most are the people sitting right next to me.

Spontaneous comments, random questions.
Not to mention sneaking a peek at colleague's screens :)

I learnt more from those conversations than from most courses.

Remote work can improve productivity and efficiency.
This is fact.

But measuring only short-term productivity is dangerous.
An employee can look more productive today because nobody interrupts them. But they will grow much slower, ultimately delivering lower value in the long term.

And this is not just bad for the employee, it's bad for business too.

This doesn't mean 5 days in the office is the answer.
It means physical proximity has real value,
especially when equipped with enough unstructured space for spontanous conversations to happen.

Being forced to come in the office all the same day has no value if it feels like a chore. People will come disengaged and try to sit as far apart as possible not to be bothered.

It has to feel spontaneous.
Spontaneous conversations by the desk fuelled my career more than anything else.

Or do you feel like remote productivity trumps spontaneous learning?

Spotify is truly the king of audio.

I admit. I’m a very slow reader.
It takes me ages to finish a book.

That’s why audiobooks work so well for me.
I loved when Spotify added audiobooks to Premium last year.

But not every book works well in audio.

Some books require more focus than just listening.
Sometimes it’s easier to go back to a paragraph, or a highlighted section in a physical copy. Other audiobooks are poorly narrated.

So I've found a system.
I listen to the audiobook and buy the physical book as well.
Most of the time, I only read a few sections on paper, but I complete the book through audio.

I've always wanted a way to start listening exactly from where I left off in the physical book. Sci-fi, I thought.

Well, Spotify just made it!

Now they're asking me to pay extra for Audiobook+. I think I'm gonna do it, they've earned it!

Jenni Romaniuk glad your book is included :)

ChatGPT Ads are a different beast.

Even compared to other AI chatbot ads, like Google AI Mode.

Ads in Google AI Mode are mostly traditional Google Search ads with an AI flavour.

In AI Mode, someone types a rich-intent query and Google serves an ad immediately. Pretty much like on the traditional SERP.
Very often, the conversation ends there.

Because it was not really a conversation to begin with.

AI Mode often appears when users click “show more” under AI Overviews.
They wanted to read more, not to start a whole conversation.

But ChatGPT is different.
People come to ChatGPT to talk.

This means ads are more embedded in the user journey.
They appear inside a conversation the user is already invested in.

That's why ads don't disrupt conversations, but rather enhance them, making them very relevant.
On average, users complete 4 more turns after seeing an ad on ChatGPT.
In AI Mode, the "conversation" generally ends right after the ad.

On ChatGPT, conversations often don't start with clear commercial intent. Sometimes with no clear intent at all.

Intent emerges slowly. Question after question.

And this changes everything.

According to Similarweb, 46% of users who opened a conversation with zero commercial intent developed buying signals by the time an ad appeared.

So, AI conversations in ChatGPT don’t just capture intent.
They create it!

Which makes ChatGPT Ads a genuinely new form of advertising.

And an extremely powerful one!

Source: Similarweb "Ads in AI" report.