Pretend you are the CMO so soft positioning claims and heroic channel forecasts fail before paid spend and public language go live.
Growth-hungry plans optimize for the operator who wants volume. The CMO seat does the opposite. It asks which audience claim is least sourced, which creative will be quoted against you, which channel CAC ignores support and refund load, and which brand promise you cannot keep after week one. A colorful funnel is not evidence that the message survives scrutiny.
Use this seat when the decision is a campaign, repositioning, launch narrative, or partner co-marketing pack. After you describe the upside, seat a careful brand and demand owner and make them try to decline. You want material objections, missing exhibits, and the smallest edits that would survive the real review.
Brief the seat with teeth
Give a mandate: protect brand consistency, hit an efficient growth target, or underwrite a launch without inventing demand. Add constraints: claims legal will reject, channels you will not fund, and a CAC or payback floor. Vague "be creative" briefs produce theater. Tight briefs produce objections you can act on.
Prompt shape: "CMO: list the top reasons to pause this campaign, the claim with the weakest proof, the brand or channel risk that worries you most, and the ten questions you would send before spend. Stay inside a realistic mandate."
Outputs worth keeping
- Reasons to delay, narrow audiences, or cut creative.
- The positioning line that sounds strong and is least evidenced.
- Support, sales, and partner fallout the offer creates in week one.
- What would earn approval instead of a kill.
- Written diligence questions for creative, media, and claims review.
Run the brief in Pingpong with the real brief, creatives, and metric plan attached. Add a response pass so home team edits claims and budgets rather than collecting fear alone. Sequence after product and finance seats when the campaign depends on a ship date or unit economics they already challenged.
If the pack leans on a single channel or a single influencer, force concentration math in writing. Ask what happens if CPM spikes, attribution breaks, or the partner posts off-brief. Appendix optimism does not count as a mitigation.
Related: stress-test a marketing campaign, war-game a brand repositioning, war-game a growth experiment, war-game a partnership announcement, pretend you are the journalist, and the war-game decisions hub. Process: how it works.