Straight answers
A fractional CMO is a senior marketing executive who works inside your company part-time — typically a set number of days a week — and owns your marketing strategy and function the way a full-time CMO would, without the full-time executive seat. At Extra Medium the practice is senior-only and founder-led: diagnosis first, one strategy everyone argues from, then running the calendar, the team and the vendors against it.
Monday starts with the numbers: where revenue came from, what each channel produced, what gets stopped. The middle of the week is the calendar — launches, campaigns, the agencies and freelancers briefed and held to outcomes. Leadership meetings get a translator: what marketing can do this quarter, what it can’t, and what the evidence says to fund. Underneath all of it is one written strategy that every decision gets tested against, including the decision to kill good ideas that don’t fit.
Companies whose marketing has outgrown improvisation but not the budget for a full-time executive: founders still acting as their own CMO at midnight, teams of juniors with no one setting direction, and businesses spending real money on agencies with nobody senior on their side of the table. It also fits companies between CMOs, where the seat can’t sit empty for two quarters.
The Lead practice at Extra Medium pairs the fractional seat with the studio underneath it, so strategy and execution live under one roof: the person who writes the plan is in the room when the plan meets reality. Engagements are shaped as fractional leadership — a set cadence, a named senior, and the studio’s Launch, Reinvent and Grow teams available behind it.
A consultant advises and leaves; the advice then has to survive contact with your calendar without them. A fractional CMO is embedded and accountable: they own the strategy, run the function on their days, and answer for outcomes in the leadership meeting.
It depends on the size of the function being run. Most engagements are one to three days a week equivalent, weighted toward launches and planning cycles. The shape is set in the first conversation, against what actually needs leading.
Not necessarily. An agency executes a brief; a fractional CMO writes the brief and judges the work. At Extra Medium the two sit in one company, which removes the hand-off where most strategy gets lost.
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