CMOs share their biggest priorities for 2025

January is all about intention-setting. And boy, do CMOs have some big goals for the new year.

With potential pressures to marketing budgets, continued development of AI tools, and the never-ending pressure to win over new customers, CMOs and top marketers across categories have big plans for 2025.

We asked several of them what their biggest priorities are going into 2025 and compiled their answers below.

Audience growth and community development

Andy Judd, CMO, Poppi: Our biggest priority is continuing our mission to evolve the soda category; we have begun a transformation that “soda isn’t a dirty word anymore.” We want to lead the soda category, not the better-for-you soda category. This means expanding to new audiences and finding new ways to reach them.

Selby Drummond, CMO, Bumble: As always, we go into 2025 focused on helping our community find healthy and meaningful connections in new and inspiring ways. Unfortunately, even as the world has become more connected, people are continuing to face loneliness and alienation, so it has never been more important to us to help people come together in person. We are doubling down both on new and amazing features that will connect our members with others who share their interests, values, and goals, and also on creating safe and exciting opportunities for them to meet up IRL with interest-based events, singles nights, and special Bumble experiences.

Manu Orssaud, CMO, Duolingo: We’ve seen huge success from our strategy of tapping into our community insights and brand lore to create engaging content on short-form platforms, so diversification is our key word for 2025 across content, audience, and format. In 2025, we want to explore different facets of the Duolingo brand and new mediums. The Duolingo universe is rich with many characters that can help create new connections with our audience. We want to explore long-form content that opens opportunities for more depth of narrative and serialized content formats, while also letting the product shine through our engaging social strategy.

Cultural connections

Catherine Ferdon, CMO, Cash App: We want to continue strategically embedding the Cash App brand across culture—inclusive of sports, music, and entertainment—while offering unique benefits and personalized experiences that deepen our relationship with customers. We are always keeping a finger on the pulse of emerging trends and seek to collaborate with and uplift new and emerging talent.

Winning the category

Cathy Oh, CMO, TV and mobile service business and Samsung ads, Samsung Electronics: As we move into 2025, my priority is helping clients and partners fully harness the transformative power of CTV…As CTV’s lower-funnel impact becomes more quantifiable, our mission is to empower brands to capitalize on this growing measurability—driving both performance and deeper audience connections. 2025 is about positioning CTV as the “holy grail” of marketing, where performance and measurability meet.

Wanda Gierhart Fearing, chief marketing and content officer, Cinemark: Going into 2025, my biggest priority—which I will work toward with the entirety of our industry-leading Cinemark content and marketing team—is to continue to deliver the most innovative products and experiences within the exhibition industry and demonstrate to moviegoers why Cinemark is the superior immersive, cinematic experience.

Customer education

Sylvia Shubert, US therapeutic area head for obesity in commercial strategy and marketing, Novo Nordisk: At Novo Nordisk, our biggest priority overall is continuing to drive change to help address the world’s most pressing health needs, including how we, as a culture, look at obesity, and how we tie its connection to health overall including cardiovascular disease.

Part of that is working diligently to help break down the stigma around obesity and reinforcing widespread understanding of obesity as a chronic, progressive, and misunderstood disease that deserves long-term medical care just like any other chronic disease. Whether it’s reinforcing that message with HCPs or with patients, it’s also reminding folks that medication management for obesity is an option. If we’re successful at that, then hopefully even more transformational change can happen for the obesity landscape.