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CMO Field Notes with Ant Hodges

CMO Field Notes with Ant Hodges

By: Ant Hodges
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Field notes and insights from a Fractional CMO in the modern marketing world.

www.cmofieldnotes.comAnt Hodges Economics Marketing Marketing & Sales
Episodes
  • Ep 21 - Is The CEO's Decision to Use AI Correct?

    Ep 21 - Is The CEO's Decision to Use AI Correct?
    Jun 22 2026
    When it comes to using AI in your business, there are two ways that you need to look at it as a CEO and founder, which will help your team grow your business and help and really serve your customers.And we’ve got to get this right, because the world is already changing from the dawn of AI and what things have been done with AI and how we do it.My name is Ant Hodges. I’m the creator here at the CMO Field Notes podcast. I’m actually a fractional CMO myself, and I talk about these stories that I have from my working life, working with clients who are doing between a million and fifty million a year and wanting to seriously scale.I work with CEOs, founders and CFOs within businesses to connect marketing activity to revenue and really make sure that things are working in the best possible way.So what I really need everybody to understand who’s listening to this podcast, even if you’re a fractional CMO, is that I am very pro AI, but I’m very pro-human too.And I feel like there’s this dynamic within many boardrooms that is basically saying, how can we make savings by bringing AI in? And we’ve seen it across the board, with huge companies deciding to reduce resource in their organisations in order to bring AI in and save money. But now are bringing the human back in in many ways.There are companies now that are re-employing, because what they need is they need the better human judgement to manage AI, rather than just abdicating everything completely to AI. AI can help, but AI is not great at making the best decisions, and that’s where human judgement comes in.I’m a huge fan of AI in the back office of the business, but put the human in the front office. What I mean by this is the connection that customers have with your brand should be as human as possible.AI bots on websites that deal with customer service, that deal with enquiries. Get them out of that AI conversation and into a real conversation with a human being as quickly as possible. There may be a triage that the AI bot does initially to kind of work out what they want and stuff, but get them as fast as possible into a human conversation. Don’t just rely on AI to do the job entirely for you.Consumers are already switching off. Over 50% of consumers who engage with brands today can detect AI, whether it’s the content or the engagement that they’re having. So 50% of consumers can tell, okay? And of those 50%, over 75% then disengage and never engage with that brand ever again. This is a study that Gartner has just released.And if we model that number, if 50% of consumers can tell when content is AI, or the engagement is with AI, and 75% disengage, we’ve got 37.5%, if not more, of a consumer marketplace that disengages with a brand, simply because it can tell it’s using AI.You do not want to lose between 30 and 40% of your audience simply because the connection they’re having is with AI.Put AI in the back office around process, to assist your team with things that are mundane, to be able to programme agents that handle data, that measure things, to help with reporting. But you’ve then got to bring the human judgement in.So as an example, if you are using AI for processes within an organisation, let’s just take huge amounts of access data for servers, where you’ve got hundreds of employees, maybe thousands of employees around the world, and you want to look at the access data around all of that and the security data.To be able to have a human go through that kind of data, look at the pitfalls, look at the risks, it could take hundreds of hours. But if you can throw this through an AI that you’ve programmed to look at all of those statistical anomalies, look at the things that the data is saying, that could literally be done in hours instead of hundreds of hours. Just a couple of hours.But when it spits out the information for you and produces the reports and the tables and the data, you’ve got to check it. And there has to be a human reconciliation with this data. A human judgement based on that data. The data that comes out is not going to be data that can then be presented to a board and said, you know, this is it.We’ve heard stories of Deloitte in Australia, who produced this whole report and presented it to the Australian government. And literally, they ended up having to refund all of the fees, because all of the citations and all of the statistics in it were completely fabricated, because the whole thing was made up through AI.Yes, they say that they used AI to help to research and to produce this report, but there was no human check. So Deloitte didn’t have an AI problem. They had a human problem, because there was no human ratifying and bringing human judgement.As a CEO, founder, CFO, board member, if you’re looking at ways to bring AI into your business, do it from a back office efficiency perspective, but allow humans to make the human judgement and the human call at the end of the day.So we’ve ...
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    7 mins
  • Ep 20 - A/B Split Testing and Trusting the Data

    Ep 20 - A/B Split Testing and Trusting the Data
    Jun 19 2026
    I want to really unpack something that came up from a conversation with a client just yesterday. I was talking to them about an A/B split test we did on a campaign.This is something, if you’re not familiar with A/B split testing, an A/B split test is effectively running maybe some traffic to a particular landing page that maybe will serve a different landing page for 50% of the traffic and another landing page for 50%, and we’ll see what the conversion’s like. And you can do A/B split tests on things like email subject lines and all kinds of different things. If you’re listening to this podcast and you’re a CEO, founder or fractional CMO, you should really know what an A/B split test is.But fundamentally, I have talked to a lot of clients over the years, they’ve wanted to do this. This particular client, very good size email list, we took a tranche of 15,000 people from the mailing list and we put them through this A/B split test.And there was a gut feel from the owner and founder of the business that one side of this split test would win. And under my kind of breath and behind the scenes, I disagreed with him completely and I thought the other one would run. But I didn’t really voice it, because what I want to do is I want the data to actually tell us.We ran this A/B split test for 14 days for these 15,000 people, and we saw double the conversion on my side, let’s call it A, than his gut feel, which was B. And we were able to prove with real data that this worked.This is a really important thing. As a fractional CMO, you are there to bring marketing leadership. Founders and CEOs are amazing people. They’re entrepreneurs, they have ideas. They just go get it and it’s just like, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go. But sometimes that can exhaust a marketing team. That can exhaust a marketing director. That can really fatigue the activity within the business, because what sometimes happens is there’s an idea on a Friday afternoon that needs to be implemented before close of day, ready for Monday morning, because they just had an idea.And whilst we want to honour, respect, and choose to, you know, be led by the CEO and founder of the organisation that we’re working with, a fractional CMO’s role is to kind of pull the reins on some of these things sometimes and just pull back.The idea around this A/B split test came from me basically saying, well, how do we know that that idea is going to work? His gut feel for this promotion that could have gone out to hundreds of thousands of people? We had this sort of, he had this gut feel that this promotion would work in this particular way, and I said, well, let’s just, can we just put a pin in that for 14 days? Let’s just run a test with a segment of non-buyers, and let’s send that segment of non-buyers the same message, but send them to a page that then has a split test around that particular offer. And we’re going to test your gut feel, but I also feel like we need to test it against something else that it was almost like the direct opposite.And like I said, the conversion was amazing. The conversion on A, from those 15,000 was around 4%. And the conversion on B, which was his gut feel, was around 1.2%. And that for me, it was enough data to be able to say to the rest of the customer list, we need to now plan a campaign around A, because it’s proved that it works that way.If you do an A/B split test like this, you need good numbers. If we’d done it maybe on a sample of around a 1,000, we probably would not have got the statistical data enough to be able to make the intelligent call for this. And what I mean by that is sometimes data can be skewed if you don’t have enough of a data set to be able to actually help people deduce what’s going on. You can have statistical anomalies within a data set. So if the data set is too small, then you need to think about getting that data set a little bit bigger.Honestly, an A/B split test, for instance, on email marketing for email headlines, throw that A/B split test at 10,000 records before you make a decision. A campaign and an offer like this, again, 10,000 is a really good sweet spot for people to be able to come in, see, and you’re not going to get as many statistical anomalies in this.This is just from my own experience over years of doing this, with different clients in different niches, different industries, with different messages, very different products and services as well, but it always comes back to the same thing. We need to test over a period of time, rather than just an instant hit and just see what happens. We need to communicate and test in a good way.Plan that A/B split test as a campaign, not just as a simple promotion or a simple communication piece. Plan it, and run with it. Do that, you’ll find an offer that will, or a way in which your customers will respond, that probably goes against your gut, if you’re a CEO and founder, and you come up ...
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    8 mins
  • Ep 19 - Why Every Fractional CMO Sounds Exactly the Same

    Ep 19 - Why Every Fractional CMO Sounds Exactly the Same
    Jun 17 2026
    The thing for me this week is I was trying to look at LinkedIn. And LinkedIn, we all know, is a great tool for business to business, marketing, lead generation, engaging with the right kind of audience that you want to grow your business if you’re a service provider in that sense.And as you start to talk about subjects on LinkedIn, as you start to talk about things, you will see more of those subjects and people who are interested and talk about and engage in those subjects. We’ll also see more of your content. It’s an interest based social media tool now. It’s not necessarily just going to serve you the content that you’re connected from people that you’re connected with and following. It’s interest based.And so what I see a lot of CMOs doing is talking about how the world of the CMO has changed and how things have changed and how they do things differently. But the reality is, if every single fractional CMO is saying the same thing, then they’re doing nothing differently. They’re just blending in like the crowd.Founders and CEOs, they’re my typical target customer. They’re the people I want to speak to. I want to speak to CFOs who are struggling to kind of balance the books with all the money they’re putting in marketing, and they want marketing to actually produce a decent ROI. They’re the people I want to speak to.So if all I was doing was I was talking about how fast the CMO world has changed and how the modern day CMO needs to be different... I do talk about that a little. But I don’t talk about it an awful lot. But I see every fractional CMO popping up on my feed saying the same thing day in day out. Why don’t we change the record?I think a fractional CMO today should be out there telling stories, talking about how they’ve transformed the businesses that they are working with. Even if you can’t talk about it because you’ve signed a non-disclosure or there’s commercial things there, you can still talk about: I worked with this client and we had this challenge and we worked through it, this is the result that we got. You know, it’s legitimately sharing how you’ve transformed things. It’s not about trying to defend the role that you’ve stepped into, because that’s what I feel like all this content does. It’s a real defense mechanism, to go, well, I’m different. Look at me. I’m not the same as everybody else, when actually it doesn’t work.If you are listening, because I know I have a lot of fractional CMOs who listen to the podcast as well, do something different. Start talking story. Demonstrate your expertise in different ways. Don’t just jump on the bandwagon that everybody else is on. Zig when everybody else is zagging.And if you’re a CEO and you’re a founder and you’re looking for a fractional CMO, those people that are in that defense mechanism mode, I know you’re not listening to them, because I’m talking to my clients and they’re saying, well, yeah, I’m seeing that all over the place, Ant. A conversation I literally had with a client this week was about this whole subject, and he said it just puts people off more than anything else, when somebody is in LinkedIn and they’re just trying to flog their services by saying how they are standing out and they are different from the world when everybody else is saying the same thing.And I guess that’s the thing with any marketing, within any niche, within any industry. We’ve got to stand out in a way that demonstrates our uniqueness as an individual, or our uniqueness as a brand, as a service, as a product, however we want to position ourselves or need to position ourselves in the marketplace. Being just you, being unique, zigging when everybody else is zagging, all of that kind of stuff, going against the grain helps you to stand out.My challenge to fractional CMOs that might be listening to this podcast: what are you doing that is just the same as everybody else? And can you stop it? Can you flip it on its head? Can you do something else differently? Can you be a little contrarian against the other peers that you have in your niche and in your industry? Can you actually start talking in a language that your customers are actually having in their own mind? Talk about their frustrations and how you can help them. Talk about their ambitions and how you can help them. Talk about the challenges within team, challenges within structure, the MarTech stack that is completely underutilized and wasting budget where the CFO wants to make savings. Talk about the things that matter to your clients, not just about building you and your brand. Because your marketing shouldn’t be about you, your marketing should be about your clients.And as a CEO and founder, if you’re listening to this message, it’s really important to understand for your brand, it’s about connecting your product to your customer through story. And I really do not believe that you need to do anything more than ...
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    7 mins
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