The rock-star CMO is dead, but the post-rock-star CMO is quietly living pretty large. The era of the high-profile, big-personality, high-production-value chief marketing officer -- which was already going wobbly as the recession began -- has ended definitively with the departures in the past year of the likes of Unilever's Simon Clift and Kodak's Jeff Hayzlett. Yet the less-ostentatious personalities that increasingly populate CMO slots have something their rock-star forbears lacked: power.
