To Build to Last, Digital Communications Teams Should Build to Change

The impact of digital is usually described too small, too contained. It is treated as a series of new channels bolted onto marketing: a website, then social, then mobile, then whatever is next.

But what happened, and what is still happening, is that digital became the medium of communication. Now every means by which an organization reaches a person, whether a client, an investor, a candidate, a regulator, or a patient, runs through a digital environment, and that environment is constantly rewriting its own rules.

It's not that communication added a digital wing. Communication migrated onto ground that will not hold still.

Consider the shaky ground under the chief marketing officer. As measured in 2024, average CMO tenure at Fortune 500 companies was 4.3 years, against 4.9 across the broader C-suite. Of those same companies, the number that kept an enterprise marketing leader at all fell to 66%, down from roughly 74% in 2009.^1,2

A reflex read might take those numbers as a story about hiring, or about marketers themselves. It is closer to a story about the ground beneath them. Look at what a company's communication now sits on top of, and the turnover starts to look less like a talent problem than a problem of terrain.

Three measures of the same instability

Look at the tools. The apparatus a communications team runs on is rebuilt continuously. The marketing technology landscape catalogued about 150 products in 2011. In 2025 it counted 15,384, a hundredfold increase in fourteen years. In a single year alone, about 1,200 products, nearly 9%, disappeared through acquisition or closure while some 2,500 new ones qualified to take their place.³

Notice the behavior. The way people find and trust information is changing under the function in real time. In the first causal test of the effect, a 2026 randomized field experiment by the Indian School of Business and Carnegie Mellon University found that Google's AI Overviews cut clicks to outside sites by 39.8%.⁴ As SEO's job changes, so does every adjacent communications function that depends on search.

Now the leadership numbers make sense. Tools that churn at nearly 9% a year and audiences that keep changing how they take in information do not add up to a post one person holds for a decade. The CMO tenure average is the predictable result of placing a fixed role on top of a domain in flux.

The revolving door is a misread

Why does the turnover persist if the cause is structural? Because the reflex when results wobble is to change the person rather than the approach. So the company runs a search, brings in a leader whose expertise fits the moment, and repeats the cycle when the ground moves again.

Leadership that lacks domain context makes this kind of misread more likely. Only about 10% of Fortune 250 chief executives have marketing experience, roughly 4% have held a CMO-level role, and more than 70% of Fortune 100 CEOs come from operations or finance.² A landscape shift shows up first as softening numbers, and softening numbers read most easily as a hiring mistake.

The same instinct drives the quieter trend of dissolving the role into a chief growth or commercial officer, as UPS did in December 2023 and Etsy, Walgreens and others have done since.² Rebundling the title reorganizes the org chart, but it doesn't steady the ground.

Reconfiguration as the missing capability

Writing in the Strategic Management Journal in 1997, David Teece, Gary Pisano and Amy Shuen argued that in fast-changing environments durable advantage does not come from any fixed stock of competences, but from what they termed "dynamic capabilities," a firm's ability "to integrate, build, and reconfigure internal and external competences to address rapidly changing environments."⁵

Digital communication is a clear example of such an environment, and of the capacity it demands. Most functions rest on relatively stable ground; finance, for one, answers largely to accounting rules that change slowly. Communication does not, because it is built on meaning, which shifts with its audience. That makes digital communication the function most exposed to a rapidly changing environment, and the one where static mastery depreciates fastest. A leader hired for command of the current landscape is, by the theory's own logic, a fixed competence in a domain that rewards reconfiguration.

Building the function to change

The implication reorders how a communications function should optimize, and what it should optimize for. The goal is not a leader who has mastered this year's channels, or a technology stack tuned to perfection for them. It is a function whose core competency is adaptation: processes documented well enough to run and loosely enough to be rebuilt, expertise refreshed on purpose, and the standing habit of noticing a shift early and reconfiguring in anticipation, not after the numbers have forced the issue.

The live test is already here. The teams that spent a decade mastering search engine optimization are watching SEO give way to AEO and GEO, and the ones who come through the transition will not be those holding on to an outdated playbook. They will be the ones built for re-learning: the teams that train their adaptive capacity, invest in their people, document their systems, and understand their own best practices well enough to recalibrate them.

The useful question for any organization is not whether its communication can win the game in front of it, but whether it is built to anticipate and adapt when the rules are suddenly different. That is the paradox the leadership data has been describing all along: in a digital world, the communications function built to last is the one built to change.