Marketing has been around for as long as humans have had something to sell. As a business practice, though, marketing is a relatively new discipline.

Moreover, during the past 60 years of marketing practice, most every aspect of our profession has changed—including just about every marketing tactic and delivery channel imaginable.

Marketing professor Mark Ritson points out it's hard for marketers to be sure of anything these days: "It has never been a more exhilarating or exhausting time to work in this discipline. Never before has so much happened in marketing with so little consensus around what is and isn't working. We do our business on what appears to be a continually moving and undulating platform of knowledge that constantly contradicts and reverses itself as we cling on for grim life."

Consider these challenging realities for marketers

Short tenures: Executive search firm Spencer Stuart has found that the average CMO tenure among consumer brands was 44 months in 2017, with more than 20% of those CMOs appointed in the previous year and more than half of them first-timers.

Invisible on boards: Of the roughly 9,800 board seats held within Fortune 1000 companies, marketers occupy a scant 68.

First to be blamed: CMOs are themost likely among the C-suite to get axed when growth targets are missed.

Undervalued: In survey after survey, marketing is listed as one of the least valuable professions to humanity, scraping the bottom alongside politicians and civil servants.

No professional code: Marketing operates largely under voluntary and self-regulating principles that go (slightly) beyond a company's legal obligations. Our profession has no unifying code of conduct (other than slow-to-react and open-to-interpretation Federal Trade Commission rulings). Nor do we have a professional designation, certification, or recertification process, unlike doctors, accountants, and lawyers.

Lack of standard reporting: Nearly every business function—Sales, Legal, Operations, Finance—has a generally accepted or legally mandated standard for reporting results. Marketing does not, hurting our ability to justify and compete on an equal footing for continued investment.

Tension between CEO and CMO: 80% of CEOs don't trust or are unimpressed with their CMOs (ouch!). In comparison, just 10% of the same CEOs say they feel that way about their CFOs and CIOs.

Tension among practitioners: Marketers are not a particularly cohesive lot. There's little consensus among us on what constitutes marketing best-practices, accompanied by a continual jousting over resources and budgets. You'll find plenty of advocates and detractor for inbound versus outbound marketing, brand building versus demand generation, paid versus earned versus owned media, and traditional versus digital channels.

Despite the odds, business degrees (including marketing, business, and management) continue to be a popular career choice: One in five US college grads receives a bachelor's degree in this field each year. That is in addition to the 10.6 million professionals worldwide who list marketing or marketer in their LinkedIn job title. (Which just goes to show that we marketers are not easily deterred!)

No one would call marketing a staid profession

The adventure and excitement of our field has long attracted the most imaginative, innovative, pioneering, and boundary-pushing talent. Everchanging consumer needs, wants, motivations, and behaviors demand everchanging marketing strategies and tactics. Indeed, that is what draws many of us into the marketing profession. It seems every day we wake up to a new surprise or a new crisis that demands our time and energy.