Chapter 5: Scene One. The CEO. The Silent Accomplice
Place: The CEO Office, 2025. The Interrogation Continues
Mary Marketing was starting to receive life support.
Ivor had already exposed Victor, the Venture Capitalist, who had drained Mary Marketing with unrealistic expectations of hypergrowth; Charlie, the CFO, who had starved her of investment; and Ronnie, the CRO, who had seized control and reduced Mary to a lead-generation factory.
The air was thick with the scent of mahogany polish, power, and quiet denial.
Billy, the CEO, was already in the room. He lounged in an overstuffed leather chair, feet propped arrogantly on the polished glass table that had seen a thousand investor decks and just as many marketing post-mortems.
A cigar smouldered in his hand — a signal of control, or maybe just distraction. Smoke curled lazily toward the ceiling, as though time itself had slowed down in this room. He stared out the window, eyes distant, watching the city buzz beneath him. Or maybe avoiding what was unfolding inside his own business.
He barely turned as Ivor entered.
The detective stood still for a moment, letting the silence speak. The tension was unmistakable. The CEO hadn’t flinched during any of the earlier interrogations. Not when the CRO was exposed. Not when the CFO’s case file landed with a thud. Not even when Mary Marketing was found bleeding on the boardroom floor.
But now it was his turn.
Billy finally glanced up, eyes glassy, guarded. He took a long draw from his cigar and exhaled with slow deliberation.
“You think I shot marketing?” he said flatly, his tone more bemused than defensive.
Ivor didn’t blink.
“I’m yet to conclude who pulled the trigger,” he replied, his voice low, steady. “But I’m certain you let everyone else take their shot.”
A beat passed. Then another. Billy’s expression didn’t change — but the tension in the room did.
Because this time, there were no spreadsheets to blame. No re-orgs. No budget meetings. This wasn’t about brand metrics or pipeline attribution.
This was about accountability.
And Billy, the CEO, had been in the room the entire time.
Billy leaned back, cigar still perched between two fingers, and reached for a cut-crystal decanter sitting on the credenza behind him. No urgency. No remorse. Just ritual. He poured himself a generous glass of his finest whiskey — the kind reserved for celebration or crisis. No one was sure which this was anymore.
He took a slow sip, then rested the tumbler on his knee. The ice clinked gently, the only sound in the room besides the steady hum of the air conditioning and the distant echo of a marketing department in disarray.
“We used to talk about five-year plans,” Billy muttered, rubbing his forehead with the back of his hand. His voice was rough, worn, not just from the drink, but from the weight of years spent leading through chaos. “Now? We talk about next quarter. Maybe next month if we're lucky.”
He didn’t look at Ivor. He didn’t have to. The room itself carried the confession.
The detective stayed silent, letting the moment breathe. He’d seen this before. The fatigue masked as pragmatism. The detachment masquerading as decisiveness. When confidence plummets in a business, so does patience. Forecasts shrink. Horizons disappear. Leadership becomes reactive, not strategic.
“Long term growth? Great,” Billy continued, as if to himself. “But first, let’s make sure we’re still here in 12 months.”
There it was.
The great unspoken fear. Not just of failure, but of irrelevance. Of being overtaken, outpaced, out-innovated. And in that fear, Billy had stopped listening to the only voice that could have helped him steady the ship: Mary Marketing.
Because in the CEO’s bunker mentality, marketing wasn’t a long-term investment. It wasn’t a lever for differentiation, trust, or demand creation.
It was a cost centre. A gamble. A luxury.
And so, Mary was first on the chopping block.
Her shooting wasn’t personal. It was collateral damage in the war for survival.
But survival without strategy is just a slow collapse. Ivor knew that. And deep down, Billy did too.
The detective picked up his case file, the weight of it thick in his hands.
It was time to go through the evidence.
Exhibit A – Marketing Blind Spot
The light in the boardroom dimmed slightly as a passing cloud cast a shadow across the city skyline. Ivor took a moment before speaking, letting the silence stretch, a technique he'd perfected over years of extracting truth from the reluctant.
Billy sat back in his leather chair, lips pursed, eyes cool. But the tension was building.
“For decades,” Ivor began, voice calm but cutting, “Mary Marketing’s team was seen as a core strategic function. She built brands. She drove demand. She earned her place at the boardroom table.”
He tapped the file on the desk in front of him, deliberately slow.
“But somewhere along the way, that changed. You stopped seeing Mary as the engine of growth and started seeing her as a liability. A cost centre.”
Billy didn’t flinch — not yet — but the twitch of his jaw said more than words ever could.
Ivor flipped the file open and laid out the first page of evidence, the paper crisp and damning.
📌 Only 4% of FTSE 100 CEOs come from a marketing background. The rest? Finance, operations, engineering — disciplines that favour control, precision, and short-term accountability.
📌 80% of CEOs don’t trust their marketers, believing they focus too much on “fluffy” metrics instead of real business impact.
📌 And more than half of CMOs admit their CEO simply doesn’t understand marketing’s role in driving long-term growth.
The detective looked up. “That’s a pretty big trust gap, Billy.”
The CEO swirled the amber liquid in his glass, trying to stay composed. But Ivor could see the storm gathering behind his eyes.
“You once famously said,” Ivor continued, “‘Our product is so good, we don’t need Mary Marketing.’ So you poured everything into engineering and sales. You let the numbers speak. And for a while, they did.”
Billy didn’t respond. He didn’t have to.
Ivor turned the next page.
“But then the market changed. Competitors invested in brand. In positioning. In emotional connection. They didn’t just sell products. They built loyalty. Visibility. Trust.”
He laid down a final sheet of paper — a share price graph showing a steady decline.
“You were overtaken. Slowly. Quietly. Fatally.”
Billy’s expression hardened.
“You tried to build brand equity too late,” Ivor added. “And it never recovered.”
He stepped closer, lowering his voice like a warning. “Great products don’t sell themselves forever. Not in a noisy, commoditised world. But CEOs like you — blinded by your own expertise, only realise that once it’s already over.”
Billy folded his arms, defensive now. “If Mary Marketing was doing her job, we wouldn’t have these issues.”
Ivor didn’t blink. He simply slid the next file across the table, the thick manila folder landing with a muted thud.
Another exhibit. Another failure. Another wound inflicted not by malice but by negligence.
Exhibit B: The CEO’s Role in The CMO Massacre
Ivor didn’t speak right away.
He let the weight of Exhibit A hang in the air like a fog — heavy, uncomfortable, undeniable.
Billy reached for his drink again, trying to disguise the tightness in his jaw.
“You didn’t just stop trusting Mary,” Ivor said at last. “You made her disposable.”
He opened a second folder and began to read aloud, voice clipped, clinical.
📌 The average CMO tenure is just 3.3 years — the shortest of any C-suite role.
📌 57% of CMOs don’t last beyond two years in a new role.
📌 70% of CEOs believe their CMOs focus too much on brand, and not enough on revenue.
Billy said nothing. But his silence said everything.
“This isn’t about poor performance,” Ivor continued. “It’s about poor understanding. About setting up marketing leaders to fail by expecting magic in months, when brand takes years.”
He walked slowly to the head of the table, placing a photograph in front of Billy.
“Do you remember this one?” Ivor asked.
It was a news clipping from a nearby city. A familiar face, a fellow CEO, smiling beside their fifth new CMO in six years.
“Each one was promised influence,” Ivor said. “Each one entered full of ideas, full of potential, ready to lead.”
He paused.
“And each one was fired when revenue didn’t double fast enough.”
The detective folded his arms, staring down the room.
“CMOs are being treated like failed experiments — rotated out in favour of the next ‘growth wizard’ or ‘brand saviour’. But the issue isn’t with them.”
He looked directly at Billy.
“It’s with you!
Billy sat frozen, staring at the image on the table, a smiling CEO beside a doomed hire.
“You don’t understand what marketing actually is, so you measure it like sales. You expect strategy to yield overnight results. You confuse noise for effectiveness, and presence for profit.”
Ivor’s voice softened, but the steel in his tone remained.
“And by the time you realise what Mary Marketing was trying to do — what she could have done — she’s gone. Along with your brand equity. Your market momentum. Your long-term growth.”
He leaned over the table, lowering his voice to a near-whisper.
“And now? No credible CMO wants to work for you. Because they’ve read the post-mortem.”
He closed the folder with a decisive snap.
“Marketing’s influence wasn’t just diminished, Billy. You oversaw a massacre.”
And from the look in Billy’s eyes, somewhere between guilt and defensiveness, Ivor knew the next exhibit would hurt even more.
Exhibit C: The CEO’s Obsession with Short-Term Wins
“You have to understand,” Billy said, pouring himself another whiskey. “Marketing can’t just be about long-term brand-building. We have revenue targets to hit.”
Ivor raised an eyebrow.
“And who set those targets?” he asked calmly. “The board? Or you?”
Billy didn’t respond.
But Ivor didn’t wait for an answer.
Because that—that—was the problem.
Under Billy’s leadership, short-termism wasn’t a necessary evil. It was a leadership philosophy. One that had been embedded into every KPI, every budget decision, every hire and fire.
CMOs, once trusted with shaping long-term growth, were now expected to prove impact within 6–12 months. An impossible timeline for brand-building. An impossible timeline for credibility.
📉 80% of marketing budgets now go to performance marketing, which drives clicks, conversions, and short-term pipeline spikes but fails to build long-term equity or customer loyalty.
📉 CEOs are now more likely to invest in sales enablement tools and last-touch attribution tech than in brand storytelling, emotional connection, or market orientation.
📉 Most see marketing not as a lever for long-term positioning but as a sprint team for revenue emergencies.
And Billy? He didn’t just follow the trend. He set it.
Case File: The CEO Who Bet Everything on Performance Marketing
A high-growth B2B company, similar in size and stage to Billy’s, shifted its entire marketing budget to paid performance.
No brand campaigns. No strategic comms. No thought leadership. Just digital ads and retargeting.
At first, the pipeline grew fast. Leads rolled in. The board was thrilled, and the CEO was triumphant.
But within two years, costs per acquisition had doubled. Brand recall had plummeted. The market was flooded with identical value props and “schedule a demo” CTAs.
Customers couldn’t tell one brand from the next. There was no reason to stay loyal. Competitors who had invested in brand and customer experience pulled ahead - quietly but definitively.
The CEO had built their growth engine on a leaky bucket, and now, nothing was left to fix it.
Billy looked weary but not remorseful.
He shifted in his leather chair and stared past Ivor, through the floor-to-ceiling glass, as if hoping for a lifeline somewhere on the skyline.
But Ivor had none to give.
He opened a fresh folder. This one heavier than most. And not just with stats or testimonials, but with a slow-burning truth.
A truth about negligence. About wilful ignorance. About the silent cost of not knowing what you don't know.
“The thing about CEOs,” Ivor muttered under his breath, “isn’t just that they don’t understand marketing.”
He looked Billy square in the eyes.
“It’s that they don’t even realise they should.”
He dropped a final stat onto the table like a gavel.
📌 Only 4% of FTSE 100 CEOs come from a marketing background.
The rest? Finance. Ops. Product. Engineering.
They don’t know how to build a brand. They’ve never run a campaign. They’ve never stood in front of a board and justified brand investment without a conversion graph.
And worse, they don’t ask.
They expect Mary Marketing to speak in numbers that match their own. And when she doesn’t? They silence her.
Billy’s brow furrowed, but Ivor could see it now, the defensiveness was giving way to something else.
Doubt.
He just might be getting through.
But the case wasn’t closed yet.
There was more. And Ivor wasn’t going to stop until he found the moment Mary Marketing’s fate had been sealed.
To Be Continued…
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