Is the CMO the new Chief Connecting Officer?

What “Olympic tok” can teach brands

If Paris 2024 was the “TikTok Olympics,” the Milano Cortina Winter Olympics 2026 just made it official. Something fundamental has shifted. The Olympics isn’t just sport anymore, it’s a global stage for human stories. We no longer only watch athletes win. We watch them unbox their merch, explore the village, share inside jokes. A kind of proximity that feels almost personal.

Paris 2024 was the signal. The IOC reported ~270M social posts generating ~412B engagements, with meme-able human details travelling faster than sporting highlights.

The Winter Olympics 2026 was confirmation that the Olympics are now a relationship engine. NBCUniversal expanded its Milan Cortina Creator Collective with YouTube, Meta, and TikTok, giving 25+ creators on-the-ground access. And Netflix played the same game earlier, releasing a figure skating docuseries designed to build attachment before the judging ever started.

The lesson is: human connection is now the competitive edge. In a world of infinite content, people don’t share what’s “best”, they share what feels human, close, and worth rooting for, which is exactly why influencer marketing is so profitable for brands, because they don’t feel like marketing, they feel like people you know, building trust through presence, personality, and continuity day after day, not campaign after campaign. For brands, the bar has moved: it’s no longer enough to be known; brands need to be felt, earning the kind of relationship people naturally build with other people, not by pretending to be human but by designing for human proximity, access, POV, consistency, and real participation in the moments your audience cares about.

↓

The CMO role is being rewritten

For CMOs, March is not just another month. It is where ambition meets accountability. The first performance numbers land, budgets start to shift, and priorities get pressure tested. It is the moment that puts the modern CMO’s defining responsibilities into sharp focus.

The Chief Marketing Officer has evolved into a Chief Connecting Officer. No longer just the person who “leads marketing,” but the leader who connects the drivers of growth across the business while holding a constant tension: building long-term brand equity while being judged on short-term performance. And this expertise is especially tested in March!

So what does a best-in-class CMO look like today?

The strongest CMOs will not win by doing more marketing. They will win by shaping the conditions that make growth easier to create: clarity on what the brand stands for, trust across teams, and shared momentum around a few coherent choices. Their real craft is breaking silos, aligning the company around a story, and protecting distinctiveness in a sea of AI-generated sameness.

That is why Daniela Amodei, president of the AI company Anthropic, recently argued that in the age of AI, she would major in humanities, not computer science. Because when machines are incredibly smart and capable, the things that make us human become more important, not less. The most valuable skills are those that AI cannot replicate in the same way: perspective taking, ethical judgment, and making sense of messy human reality. For modern CMOs, those human skills are not soft. They are the new hard edge.

↓

Borrowed icons don’t build brands

Did you see Pepsi’s Super Bowl ad? Their tongue-in-cheek campaign generated buzz by borrowing someone else’s meaning. Attention-grabbing, yes. But we see a trap: when you lift a rival’s most iconic asset, you are borrowing their equity and refreshing it for them.

Provocation gets a reaction, but it rarely builds a brand. Sometimes it does the opposite: it reminds people why the other brand matters. At Innate Motion, we see competitor trolling as a shortcut to noise, yet what brands need is a path to meaning.

The real brand-building playbook is about creating something distinctive that is human-centred and rooted in tensions and beliefs people actually live:

Name the people you serve. Be specific about who you’re for.

Identify the tension they live with. The felt problem they’re navigating.

Take a point of view. A belief strong enough to shape choices.

Build the product that answers it. It must resolve the tension.

Subscribe now to read more on how Innate Motion contributes to a more humanized business.