WHEN THE CTO IS ALSO THE CMO Sound strange? Think again. A natural link exists between technology and marketing. There's a lot of talk about the increasingly important intersection of the corporate CIO and CMO roles. Several years ago, Gartner projected that in 2017 the CMO would outspend the CIO on information technology, and there's little reason to doubt that projection. But here's a scenario you may not have heard of-the combination of the CTO and CMO roles, a joint position I've held at my company for the past two years. At first, this may sound like an unusual hybrid. But it actually makes a lot of sense to merge these two functions, at least in the types of companies where the two disciplines are intertwined in the mission of transforming technology into profitable growth. 49