Let’s take an agency CEO to be specific.
Decades of experience, mega relationships and a real story behind the business.
So, naturally, you Google them to find some more answers.
Almost nothing, so it made me think.
They probably spend significant money every year making sure people know about their agency and multiply that a hundredfold for their clients (figuratively speaking of course).
Advertising. PR. Social media. Events. Sponsorships. Content. Corporate communications.
Yet the person entrusted with its direction, reputation and future is almost completely absent from the public conversation.
Does that make sense?
I don’t think it does anymore, and even more in advertising.
We spend millions making brands speak, that’s essentially what advertising does.
We give companies personalities, find their tone of voice, create stories around them, put faces in their campaigns, build communities, pay creators to talk about them and buy media to make sure those stories reach enough people.
Then sometimes you search for the CEO running the whole thing and find a photograph from a conference in 2019 and a LinkedIn profile that hasn’t been touched since.
Strange!
Nowadays, advertising is increasingly moving from brands speaking at people to people speaking with people, and the ones who get it are the content creators, and entrepreneurs definitely relate to this.
Some founders have built enormous audiences around themselves and transferred that attention directly to their companies; my favorite reference here is Toufic Kreideih, the founder of Brand For Less! Genius move from Toufic… A case study itself.
But many traditional CEOs still operate under an older assumption: the company should speak and I should stay behind it.
I personally like to challenge this, your CEO is already part of your brand, whether they participate or not.
For example, before a senior executive accepts a job, they look at who they’ll be working for; or if a journalist calls, a potential partner responds or sometimes even a customer makes a decision, they want to understand the people behind the organization.
And when they search, they either find a story or a vacuum.
I get it, silence used to feel safe, but come on, we are in 2026, speak UP.
Because even if you can control your privacy, you cannot completely control your reputation.
CEO visibility isn’t about posting every day, photographing yourself walking into meetings or turning every ordinary business observation into seven leadership lessons.
It should be about authority and not activity.
Like: What do you actually know, or what have you learned, maybe some industry news! Or even your perspective on things… Its OK to disagree or have an opinion; that’s what will make you unique.
What are you afraid of?
That’s where the interesting content is.
A CEO doesn’t need to manufacture thought leadership; they need to extract the thinking they already have.
This is where I think advertising and personal branding are starting to collide.
And increasingly, people themselves are becoming media.
A CEO’s LinkedIn presence, podcast appearances, keynote speeches, articles, and even conversations with employees are media.
I’m not suggesting moving the advertising budget into the CEO’s account, but stop treating leadership communication as something completely separate from the company’s communication strategy.
The corporate brand says something.
The advertising says something.
The employees say something.
The customers say something.
And the CEO says… nothing?
That gap will become harder to justify.
And now, AI makes the argument even stronger; now is the time to speak or forever hold your peace.
Remember, everyone can produce more, but what becomes valuable is Identity. Experience. Opinion. A recognizable voice.
There is knowledge sitting inside CEOs that advertising can’t invent, with twenty or thirty years of experience that is extraordinary intellectual capital.
Yet sometimes we’ll spend three weeks in an agency brainstorming a thought-leadership campaign while the person with the most interesting thoughts in the organization isn’t even in the content strategy.
That makes zero sense to me.
So should every CEO have a digital presence?
Well, every CEO should have an intentional presence.
That’s different.
Perhaps we need to update the way we think about the media mix.
We have paid media.
We have owned media.
We have earned media.
Maybe there is another layer becoming increasingly important: authority media.
So the next time we’re sitting around a table discussing an advertising strategy, perhaps there is another question worth asking:
Where is the CEO in this story?
Makes Sense?
(The author is the founder of Eleveight)
