Marketing professional Karen Baker shares her story of starting her own company at just 24 years old to leading the social impact practice at Boathouse Group and how family legacy of civil rights activism has deeply influenced her approach to business, underscoring the need for inclusive representation in the industry.

This week, President Joe Biden signed a bill into law that will ban TikTok from US app stores unless its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, sells the platform within a year. The new legislation was bundled into a foreign aid package.

Over the past year, the ad industry has witnessed a deprioritizing of DEI initiatives through a series of events: CMOs are back to focusing on hard-hitting business goals, brands are hesitant to use LGBTQ+ marketing and the data shows women make up 37% of the industry employees, still down from 50% before the pandemic.

The tech industry bursts with innovation. It is acclaimed for its creativity and breakthrough approaches to solving age-old problems. And yet paradoxically, here in 2024, it still struggles with diversity and inclusion – especially when it comes to leadership.

By staying ahead of the curve, you can proactively adjust strategies and allocate resources accordingly. This may involve reallocating budgets, exploring alternative platforms, or investing in new technologies to stay competitive in a rapidly evolving landscape.

Some 26% of CEOs surveyed from top US companies gave their CMO a “grade A” for their overall performance, up from 16% who said the same last year.

“What type of language are we going to use to inform this community about what is coming?” says Karen Baker, founder and president of marketing agency Boathouse. “The Black community is very uncomfortable with generative AI and what it’s going to do.”

Driven by technology and a more informed consumer, CMOs are expanding their digital prowess into advanced analytics and tracking, generative AI, and consumer intelligence tools to adapt, execute, and measure their return on resources. This new evolution of Marketing is more foreign to CEOs, given that few come from a marketing background.

As AI becomes increasingly embedded in business, it’s interesting to consider the role senior marketing professionals can play in shaping how it’s implemented from the vantage points of ethics, transparency and corporate strategy.

CEO focus has moved from being stakeholder dominant to shareholder dominant, with significant changes occurring with the issues that influence decision-making compared to last year’s data.