Using the PESO Model© as Your Marketing Operating System

TL; DR

• IBM’s CMO Revolution study says the next decade will reward CMOs with operational courage—leaders who rebuild for AI speed, trust, and measurable outcomes.
• The PESO Model© is your marketing operating system because it integrates paid, earned, shared, and owned to close the execution gap, deliver precision, prediction, and protection, and scale enterprise-wide.
• From campaigns to continuous growth, PESO turns activity into an adaptive, AI-powered growth engine that strengthens relationships, optimizes first-party data, and balances AI + EQ.

Your Marketing Operating System

The next decade won’t belong to the marketers with the biggest budgets or the flashiest tech stacks. 

According to the IBM CMO Revolution study, it will belong to the CMOs who have operational courage—those willing to dismantle the systems holding them back and rebuild for an AI-powered marketplace moving at the speed of a microsecond.

The study shows that tenure continues to shrink, while accountability for revenue and profitability has never been higher. Most marketing organizations are drowning in fragmented tools, siloed data, and outdated processes—unable to execute fast enough to deliver on their own ambitions.

This is the execution gap. And it’s swallowing marketing leaders whole.

But there’s another way.

The PESO Model©—initially launched as a PR integration framework—has evolved in the last few years into a marketing operating system that can help CMOs close that gap. It works across functions, breaks down silos, integrates AI where it matters, and turns channel activity into measurable business outcomes. 

It’s the blueprint for building wholly integrated, AI-ready growth engines that deliver precision, prediction, and protection at scale.

Operational Courage + the PESO Model

IBM defines operational courage as the willingness to dismantle what’s comfortable—even what’s currently “working”—to build the systems the future demands. 

For CMOs, that means no longer treating AI as a bolt-on tool, no longer running channels as silos, and no longer measuring marketing success in outputs instead of outcomes.

That’s exactly where the PESO Model starts becoming a marketing operating system.

At its core, PESO is a growth architecture. It’s integrated by design. Paid, earned, shared, and owned aren’t separate disciplines—they’re interconnected gears in the same machine.

It’s measurable at the business level, which means every tactic maps to KPIs your CEO and CFO care about: revenue, market share, and customer lifetime value.

It’s scalable across the enterprise because it can flex from one brand to a portfolio and from a single geography to a global footprint.

This matters because the execution gap IBM warns about isn’t a creativity problem—it’s an operating system problem. 

Big ideas die in disconnected workflows, outdated tech stacks, and measurement blind spots. 

The PESO Model solves that by aligning strategy, execution, and measurement across every media type. When you make a change in one area, the entire system shifts with it.

For a CMO, that’s operational courage in action:

• Saying no to “more campaigns” or “more apps” in favor of continuous growth engines.
• Replacing vanity metrics with boardroom metrics.
• Architecting marketing to anticipate, adapt, and deliver in real time.

The PESO Model doesn’t just help you survive the revolution—it’s how you lead it.

Using PESO to Build Precision, Prediction, and Protection

IBM’s study calls precision, prediction, and protection the new table stakes for customer experience. 

Together, they form the “triangle of trust,” which means customers reward brands that master all three with loyalty, advocacy, and a share of the wallet.

The challenge? 

Most CMOs know these are critical, but lack the integrated systems to deliver them at scale. But never fear! This is where the PESO Model turns ambition into execution.

Let’s go through each of them.

Precision

Precision means to be exactly what the customer needs, exactly when they need it. 

In PESO, owned media becomes the single source of truth—structured, tagged, and AI-friendly so it’s instantly discoverable by humans, LLMs, and algorithms.

Earned builds credibility with authoritative mentions and endorsements, feeding both human trust and algorithmic authority signals.

Shared allows real-time message testing, iteration, and amplification in the channels where your audience is most active.

Paid ensures the right message reaches the right microsegment at the exact moment of intent.

Prediction 

Prediction means to anticipate needs before they’re voiced.

PESO’s unified measurement loop pulls performance data from all four media types, creating a feedback engine that’s far richer than channel-by-channel reporting.

AI models trained on this dataset can forecast trends, detect emerging behaviors, and trigger proactive content, offers, or engagement—before a competitor sees the opportunity.

Protection

Protection means to safeguard trust as fiercely as you pursue growth.

PESO embeds governance into every channel so that messaging is accurate, compliant, and consistent.

By integrating all media types, the PESO Model eliminates the risk of “rogue messaging” from disconnected teams and agencies.

It also ensures cybersecurity, data privacy, and brand safety protocols are embedded at the operating system level, not just as an afterthought.

When PESO powers the “triangle of trust,” CMOs don’t just meet rising expectations—they hardwire trust into the brand experience. And in an AI-driven marketplace where the “answer engine” decides who shows up, trust isn’t just a value. It’s a visibility advantage.

Moving Beyond the Customer Journey

For decades, marketers have mapped elaborate customer journeys. These were linear, research-driven roadmaps intended to guide messaging from awareness to conversion.

That world doesn’t exist anymore.

As IBM’s study points out, AI-powered answer engines (Google AI Overview, ChatGPT, Claude) intercept questions before they ever reach your website. Clickthrough rates drop by more than 30% when AI overviews appear. The journey isn’t a path—it’s a microsecond.

The PESO Model retools your marketing organization for this moment-based economy:

• Earned ensures your brand is referenced by credible third parties and industry voices—signals that both customers and algorithms trust.
• Shared enables real-time listening and engagement, so you can respond within seconds when a need emerges.
• Owned serves as your algorithm-ready content library, structured for AI discoverability—this is visibility engineering in action. Every asset is designed so generative engines can easily identify, cite, and surface your expertise.
• Paid amplifies your highest-performing content or offers precisely in the windows of peak attention, ensuring you’re present in those fleeting moments of intent.

This shift from journey mapping to moment mastery isn’t theoretical—it’s survival. In healthcare, it may mean showing up in an AI-curated patient education answer before a physician appointment. In retail, it may mean being the first recommendation when a consumer asks their voice assistant for a product category.

With PESO as the operating system, visibility engineering stops being an experiment and becomes a built-in function—making sure your brand is findable, credible, and actionable in the exact instant it matters most.

The PESO Model Is Your Engine

IBM’s study makes it clear that with third-party cookies disappearing and privacy regulations tightening, the growth playbook now revolves around three imperatives:

1. Optimize existing data with AI;
2. Strengthen direct customer relationships; and 
3. Build first-party and zero-party data strategies.

PESO is purpose-built to operationalize all three.

Optimize existing data with AI

The PESO Model’s integrated measurement framework consolidates insights from paid, earned, shared, and owned into a single, enterprise-wide dataset. 

Instead of siloed analytics, you get a full-funnel view of what drives engagement, conversion, and retention. 

Feed this dataset into AI models, and you can forecast demand, personalize at scale, and allocate resources dynamically—turning raw data into predictive power.

Strengthen direct customer relationships

PESO hardwires trust-building into your marketing system, where owned channels become the hub for exclusive, high-value content and experiences. 

Shared facilitates ongoing two-way dialogue in the spaces your audience frequents. 

Earned reinforces credibility by appearing in respected publications, industry rankings, or peer recommendations. 

And paid helps re-engage and nurture those who’ve already interacted with you, deepening the relationship over time.

Build first-party and zero-party data strategies

PESO’s owned layer isn’t just for publishing—it’s a data engine. 

Interactive tools, gated content, and personalized experiences collect first-party and even zero-party data (information customers willingly provide in exchange for value). 

Earned and shared channels act as acquisition engines, driving qualified audiences to these owned experiences.

And paid reaches new audiences precisely targeted and primed for your content. 

The result is a closed-loop system: The PESO Model captures rich, permission-based data, strengthens relationships through ongoing engagement, and feeds AI models that continually refine targeting and messaging. 

It’s how you build data advantage without breaching trust—and in a privacy-first world, that’s a competitive moat.

From Campaigns to Perpetual Growth

IBM’s study is blunt: the old CMO chased campaigns; the new CMO architects outcomes. In practice, that means building systems that can run continuously, adapt automatically, and deliver measurable business growth without stopping to reset between initiatives.

That’s exactly what PESO was designed to do.

When PESO shifts from being a project framework to being your operating system, it stops producing one-off spikes in attention and starts generating sustained visibility, trust, and conversion. 

Each media type has an always-on role in the growth engine:

• Owned remains the discoverable knowledge hub—continuously updated and structured for human readers and machine learning systems.
• Earned feeds authority signals to AI answer engines, SEO, and industry influencers 24/7.
• Shared keeps conversations and community engagement alive in real time.
• Paid accelerates the assets and messages already proving their worth, ensuring they scale quickly and profitably.

AI accelerates PESO’s natural feedback loop: data flows from all channels into a single measurement system, AI interprets patterns and opportunities, and resources are reallocated dynamically to where they’ll have the most effect.

This is the shift from “launch and leave” to “learn and leverage.”

Instead of ramping up for six weeks, hitting a peak, and fading into the background, PESO organizations are constantly building momentum. That’s how you evolve from running marketing programs to running a marketing engine.

Answering IBM’s CMO Action Questions

IBM’s CMO Study closes with a set of action questions—the kind a CEO or board chair might ask in a performance review. Here’s how PESO answers each one with clarity and speed.

1. Are we winning the moments that matter? PESO ensures you’re visible, credible, and actionable in those microseconds of intent. Owned delivers structured, high-value content that algorithms can surface. Earned provides authoritative signals that put you in AI answer engines. Shared lets you engage instantly when a trigger event occurs. And paid amplifies winning content exactly when it’s most relevant.
2. Where is infrastructure latency costing us customer engagement? PESO runs on a shared measurement and content infrastructure. When one team updates messaging or data, it propagates across channels—no waiting for siloed approvals or asset rebuilds.
3. How much of our CX pain is really EX pain? PESO’s integrated planning forces marketing, comms, sales, and ops to work from a single playbook. Cross-functional ownership of the customer journey (or, more accurately, customer moments) reduces handoff friction that customers feel as delays or inconsistency. 
4. Do we have AI + EQ in balance? PESO operationalizes both. AI predicts, personalizes, and allocates resources dynamically. Human creativity ensures messaging has originality, empathy, and emotional resonance.
5. Are we building an adaptive growth system? PESO’s cyclical structure—plan, execute, measure, optimize—creates a perpetual growth loop. Every insight feeds the next action, and AI shortens the time between learning and doing.

With PESO, these aren’t hypothetical questions—they become performance metrics you can monitor, optimize, and report to the board.

Building Resilience with AI + EQ

The most successful CMOs of the next decade won’t just integrate AI into their workflows—they’ll hardwire adaptability into their organizations. 

IBM’s study warns that without the right operating model, AI risks creating more complexity, not less.

PESO is that operating model. 

It balances AI’s precision and scalability with EQ’s emotional depth and originality, ensuring the brand stays human even as it becomes more machine-optimized.

Resilience in PESO comes from three core strengths: channel diversity, consistent measurement loops, and built-in adaptability.

By activating paid, earned, shared, and owned in an integrated way, PESO reduces dependence on any single channel, algorithm, or platform. If one falters—say, a social algorithm change—your growth engine keeps running.

It also helps you create consistent measurement loops because it acts as an early warning system. Shifts in engagement, search visibility, or sentiment are spotted sooner, enabling faster pivots before problems escalate.

And it has built-in adaptability because all four media types are planned and executed together, changes in one area trigger coordinated adjustments across the rest. That agility is critical when markets, regulations, or technologies shift overnight.

In practice, AI identifies high-value opportunities, predicts customer needs, and optimizes delivery at speed and scale. EQ ensures every touchpoint feels authentic, empathetic, and brand-consistent—whether it’s a CEO interview in the Wall Street Journal or a chatbot interaction at 2 a.m.

When AI and EQ operate inside the PESO framework, CMOs can adapt faster, protect brand trust, and sustain growth no matter how the external landscape changes.

The Roadmap for the CMO of the Future 

IBM’s CMO study doesn’t sugarcoat it: the old marketing operating models are dead. Journeys have been replaced by moments. Trust is as important as relevance. Data is harder to get, harder to use, and more valuable than ever. AI is rewriting the rules in real time.

In this environment, operational courage isn’t optional—it’s the entry fee.

The CMOs who thrive in the next decade will architect outcomes, not campaigns, build platforms, not tool collections, hire for heart and train for AI, and integrate, measure, and adapt at machine speed without losing human connection.

That’s exactly what the PESO Model delivers when it’s run as your marketing operating system. 

It connects channels, aligns functions, bakes AI into the core, and turns activity into measurable business results. 

It operationalizes precision, prediction, and protection—and it does it in a way that scales across brands, geographies, and teams.

The choice in front of every CMO is simple:

• Keep optimizing inside an outdated structure and risk being left behind; or
• Lead the revolution with a system designed for an AI-powered, privacy-first, moment-driven market.

PESO isn’t just a framework. It’s the engine that makes operational courage pay off.

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