• Brandweek, Tuesday, June 9, 2009 11 AM

Chief marketing officers have always crunched numbers, Todd Wasserman reports, but the prevailing sentiment among observers of such things is that the job is getting more wonky. It's a noticeable departure from the CMO of lore, whose talent lay in dreaming up big ideas and commissioning multimillion-dollar TV campaigns.

"It used to be MadMen, but now it's Revenge of the Nerds," Tom Kline, chief scientist for the marketing firm Digital Scientists, tells Wasserman. Or, as Drew Neisser, CEO of Renegade Marketing and founder of thecmoclub.com, says, "The CMO has evolved from Chief Miracle Officer to Chief Minutia Officer."

Kline and Lynne Seid, a partner at recruiting firm Heidrick & Struggles, interviewed 111 top CMOs in December and found the realization that the idea that searches, trackbacks and tweets add up to valuable marketing data is just hitting a lot of companies. The explosion of social media and the impact of the recession have intensified focus on ROI analytics and prompted marketers to scrutinize Web-based data more than ever.

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