Two studies landed within a few months of each other, and together they describe the person who signs off on most reputation engagements better than any persona document ever has.
The first is Boathouse's Fifth Annual CEO Study: 150 US CEOs surveyed in January 2026 about their marketing leaders. The relationship numbers are the best in the survey's history. 79% of CEOs say their CMO shows strong commitment to the CEO and board, up from 44% when the study began. 71% believe the CMO puts the company's interests ahead of their own. 85% say the CMO builds trust inside the organization. And then the floor drops out: 60% of those same CEOs now classify marketing as a cost center, up from 35% a year earlier. Only 15% grade their CMOs' performance an A, down from 24%. (Chief Marketer, May 2026) In one year, marketing went from profit engine to overhead line in the minds of the people who set budgets.
The second study explains what marketing leaders are doing about it. Worldwide Partners' Confessions of a CMO, released in December 2025, interviewed thirty CMOs across industries and continents under Chatham House rules. Anonymity produced honesty. One confessed: "I call everything a pilot." When everything is a test, debate ends, and data decides. Another described success as everyone believing the idea was theirs, the outcome feeling inevitable, and nobody recalling exactly what role the CMO played. A third had marketing dismissed in a leadership meeting as "the coloring-in department" and won the room back with a quip about how expensive the crayons were. A few minutes later the same executive was asking marketing for input on a pricing brief. (Confessions of a CMO, Worldwide Partners)
Read together, the picture is uncomfortable and useful. The executive who commissions reputation work is trusted, liked, personally secure, and quietly unable to spend political capital defending anything that looks like marketing. David Baker, whose analysis of the two studies is worth reading in full on LinkedIn, put it plainly: you are no longer selling to a buyer with confidence and power. You are arming an operative.
That changes how reputation work gets sold, scoped, delivered, and reported. This article covers what changes and why.
Your Category Is Your Fate
Start with the finding that should change positioning before it changes anything else. 60% of CEOs filed marketing under overhead. Whatever gets sold as marketing inherits that filing.
Reputation management sold as a marketing service walks into the meeting wearing the wrong label. The CEO has already decided what marketing spend is: a cost to be managed, defended annually, cut when the quarter gets tight. An ORM engagement pitched as brand health, sentiment improvement, or share of voice lands in that mental category and gets that category's scrutiny.
The same engagement described differently lands somewhere else entirely. What does it cost when a lawsuit is the first search result for the company name? What does ChatGPT tell a board member who looks up the CEO before the meeting? What happens to enterprise deal velocity when a prospect's due diligence surfaces a Reddit thread from 2023? None of that is marketing. It is risk. Risk sits in a budget category that CEOs do not describe as overhead, because the cost of ignoring it is a number nobody wants to own.
This is not spin. It is accuracy. Reputation work is genuinely closer to risk management than to demand generation. The deliverable is the protection and control of a narrative surface, not leads. Practitioners who describe the work accurately get filed accurately. The ones who borrow marketing language because it feels familiar inherit marketing's budget position, which, in 2026, might just be the worst in the building.
THE TWO SENTENCES THAT FILE YOU
Pitch A: "We improve brand sentiment and search visibility, strengthening your share of voice against competitors." Pitch B: "Three of the top ten results for your company name are within your control. Seven are not. Here is what the seven cost you in pipeline, and what it takes to change the ratio." Pitch A is marketing. It gets the crayon budget and the annual defense of it. Pitch B is risk quantification. It gets a different meeting, often with the CFO in it, which is exactly where reputation work should want to be.
The Big Reveal Is Dead
Agencies love the unveiling. Brief, disappear, build, present, ta-da. One CMO in the Worldwide Partners study called this out directly: the ta-da moment forces a choice on the buyer. Champion the idea publicly, which is exposure they cannot afford, or kill it. Neither outcome serves the practitioner.
The alternative is co-building, and it fits reputation work unusually well because the work is already iterative. A search landscape audit is a natural co-review session, not a deliverable to unveil. A suppression strategy develops over months of check-ins, during which the client contact sees the thinking form. An AI answer baseline gets captured together on a call, with the client running the prompts on their own screen. Every one of those touchpoints puts the client's fingerprints on the work.
Fingerprints matter more than credit now. The CMOs who survive have learned that the more people who feel ownership of an idea, the safer the idea becomes. A reputation strategy the communications director helped shape is a strategy the communications director will defend in the budget meeting. One that arrived as a finished deck from an outside firm is an expense with a vendor attached.
The practitioner ego takes a hit here, and it should. If the work succeeds only when everyone knows it came from you, it is fragile. Let the client present the search recovery as theirs. Your credit arrives with the renewal and during the phone call when that contact moves to their next company. Following the buyer to their next job has always been the best pipeline in professional services. It runs on exactly this behavior.
Reporting for an Audience of One (Plus the Person They Report To)
Every reputation report now has two readers: the person who receives it and the person that person must convince. Building for the second reader changes the report.
The Boathouse data show that only 13% of CEOs are confident that marketing can deliver ROI. Assume the client's CEO is in the other 87%. A report full of sentiment scores, mention volumes, and coverage counts asks the client to translate soft metrics upward to a skeptic. Most will not attempt it. The report gets filed, the engagement becomes invisible, and invisible engagements get cut.
The metrics that survive the translation are the ones covered in the measurement article in the Earned Media pillar: branded search lift after coverage moments, deal attribution captured in the sales process, AI citation presence when prospects research the category. Add the risk frame on top. Not "sentiment improved 12 points" but "the negative result that appeared for your name in March now sits on page three, and here is the traffic differential between position 4 and position 24." One is a marketing metric. The other is a before-and-after on a business exposure.
Baker's sharpest advice applies directly: talk about enterprise outcomes, not your function's contribution. A reputation report that opens with what the engagement protected (pipeline, a financing round, an executive hire that almost fell through on a search result) gives the client ammunition for a conversation they were going to have anyway. That is the actual product. The PDF is packaging.
Shorter Leash, Sharper Scope
An operative cannot afford a vendor that wanders. The nervous buyer has less internal cover for engagements that drift, underdeliver, or take longer than promised to show movement, which describes a fair amount of reputation work honestly scoped.
The answer is not overpromising. It is scoping to visible checkpoints. Suppression timelines are long and partially unpredictable, and the honest practitioner says so. But every long engagement contains short milestones that can be named in advance: the audit delivered in week two, the entity corrections live in week six, the first movement on the target term by month three, the AI answer re-baseline at month four. A client who can show their CEO a scheduled checkpoint hit has a defensible engagement. A client who can only say "these things take time" has a line item.
This also means declining work that cannot produce checkpoints. The engagement that depends entirely on outcomes outside anyone's control (a Wikipedia notability case with thin sourcing, a suppression target with overwhelming news authority) endangers the buyer who sponsors it. The DON'Ts of this practice exist partly for the client's protection. No guaranteed clearance, no guaranteed timelines, no absolutes. The nervous buyer needs that honesty more than the confident buyer ever did, because they are the one holding the promise when it breaks.
What This Buyer Actually Needs From You
Pull the threads together, and the shape of the relationship is clear.
They need work that files as risk, not marketing. They need their fingerprints on the strategy and yours invisible in the room. They need reports written for the skeptic one level up. They need checkpoints they can hit publicly and honest scoping about what cannot be promised. And they need a practitioner who understands that every recommendation they carry forward is spent from an account of political capital that the Boathouse numbers say is running low.
None of this diminishes the work. It clarifies it. The practitioner who arms the operative well becomes something more durable than a vendor: the person the client brings to the next company, the next crisis, the next board conversation about what the AI tools are saying. That relationship compounds. The ta-da moment never did.
Related reading: Measuring Earned Media for Reputation: The Metrics That Actually Matter to Boards | Client Communication Standards for ORM Engagements | Social Listening and Monitoring Tools: A Practitioner's Guide for Agency Use | The DON'Ts of Reputation Management