GuideHow marketing gets bought
Fractional CMO
Definition
A senior marketing leader who runs a company’s marketing on a fixed share of the working week, with a full-time CMO’s authority over budget and team. The fraction describes the calendar; the accountability is whole.
How you recognize it
The real thing is testable. A fractional CMO approves spend and briefs the agency without routing through you. They sit in the leadership meeting and read the same P&L as the CFO. A consultant hands over recommendations and leaves the running to you. An interim CMO takes the chair five days a week, with an end date. Fractional sits between the two: ongoing ownership, fewer days.
It fails in two ways: the company withholds decision rights and the role decays into advice, or the CMO takes on too many clients and nobody gets an owner.
Two situations call for something else. If you already have a strong head of marketing, back them and buy the specialist skills they lack. If you are early and the work is making ads and pages every day, hire the person who makes them; a two-day owner will frustrate you both.
What to watch for
All four are checkable from your own calendar and inbox. Media spend and agency briefs still come to you for sign-off, which means the ownership you are paying for has stayed where it was. The CMO is absent from the leadership meeting, or has never asked to see the P&L. The engagement keeps producing documents while nothing ships past kick-off. And the client count is high enough that no single company gets an owner; ask how many days a week each engagement has, and where yours sits.
The question you ask
“Which decisions will you make without asking me first?”