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But to stride in jauntily they will have to change the way they work. Gartner, a consultancy, has predicted that by 2017 they will spend more on technology than their companies’ chief information officers. Already 70% of big American firms employ a “chief marketing technologist”, says Gartner. With the shift in emphasis from set-piece campaigns to rapid responses, CMOs need more people working directly for them. This is putting into reverse a 20-year trend of favouring “working spend” (what consumers see) over “non-working spend” (overheads), says Dominic Field of the Boston Consulting Group.

Still, a gap yawns between what CMOs could do and what they actually do. The left-brained bent that the job now demands “is not part of where their experience has been”, says McKinsey’s Mr Edelman. But CMOs are learning. Mindshare installed an “adaptive lab” in its London headquarters to educate them. DigitasLBi teaches its clients that not every utterance about a brand needs to be vetted by lawyers.

But spare a thought for the poor admen. Their industry is going through a particularly difficult time. Not only are they confronting a proliferation of new “channels” through which to pump their messages; they are also having to puzzle out how to craft them in an age of mass scepticism. Consumers are bombarded with brands wherever they look—the average Westerner sees a logo (sometimes the same one repeatedly) perhaps 3,000 times each day—and thus are becoming jaded. They are also increasingly familiar with the tricks of the marketing trade and determined to cut through the clutter to get a bargain. Scepticism and sophistication are especially pronounced among those born since the early 1980s.

A study by the Boston Consulting Group found that 46% of American “millennials” use their smartphones to check prices and online comments when they visit a shop.

Many companies want to go further and bypass conventional ad campaigns altogether. It has long been known that “earned media”—word-of-mouth recommendations from friends, family and news articles—are highly trusted. Nielsen’s studies show that strangers’ comments on social media and online forums are also now seen as credible sources, rivalling traditional “paid media”.

These companies excel because they don't spend time and energy building formal business cases in order to justify every dollar spent on customer-centric initiatives

American Express overhauled its customer care employee training program and now spends 70% of the time focused on skills such as actively listening, assessing customers' moods, and helping customers understand the value of their relationship with the company. All that time and effort has paid off as customer spending increased, attrition decreased, and customers who learn about their card benefits and features from customer care employees show an average increase of more than 10% in advocacy.