There were a lot of good things about starting my marketing career at a huge multinational company. With over 20 people on the team across campaign management, data science and Marketing Ops, the camaraderie was intense. At that stage of our lives, having a large team of colleagues in our mid-20s to early 30s meant happy hours, house parties and the occasional weekend outing together. We were coworkers, and we were also friends.
In those days, entire functions were built around the biggest marketing channels. It was possible to rise to the level of VP – and I know a couple of people who did – purely through achieving great depth in a highly scalable channel such as SEM. And very deservedly so, because those were the people who truly pioneered AI in marketing by leading the deployment and testing of in-house predictive models that could make or break the profitability of 8-digit PPC budgets.
(Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash)
In-House Teams Are Getting Smaller. Ideally, They Should Also Get Nimbler.
Paid media teams of the 2020s are getting smaller – and flatter – than those of the 2010s.
Increasingly, the definition of growth and acquisition marketing has broadened. It used to be closely intertwined with paid media, based on the assumption that before a brand could gain traction and loyalty, paid traffic was the conduit to quick awareness and revenue.
Now, product and marketing are intertwined all the way up to the top – Chief Marketing Officers are becoming Chief Marketing and Product Officers or Chief Growth Officers. Go-to-Market and Product Marketing roles are far outnumbering pure digital marketing vacancies on the job market.
What does that mean? Instead of going deeper, now we all need to get broader. Paid digital advertising is increasingly being seen as an enabler rather than a standalone discipline. In this hybrid marketing – product world, the people who decide what gets spent on paid marketing – and where – may not necessarily be the ones driving the hands-on optimization of the channels.
If this flattening of organizations works right, it would mean that everybody gets nimbler. Generative AI is shaping the way we phrase our keyword searches and where our links and content can show up. Strategies for marketing a product may shape-shift faster than we ever thought possible with AI powering unprecedented volume growth in creator content, as well as providing opportunities for links to appear in AI answers even if the user didn’t specifically ask for references (here’s looking at you, Claude!). The assumptions we once made about which channels have the greatest potential to drive scalable growth are changing faster than our team structures can.
By Scaling Expertise Across Use Cases, Agencies Are Poised To Lead The Change
(Illustration by YuguDesign on Unsplash)
Most – if not all – the content that’s resonated strongly with my operational reality were written by niche practitioners. Here are two examples that I found particularly relatable: Wil Reynolds’ piece about how SEO-ranking content tends to be repetitive and Artlist’s blog article about how a less detailed VEO3 prompt generated a more emotionally impactful scene than their first, more technical attempt.
What does this show? We would all love to be boots-on-ground experimenting with the latest tools, but innovating and operationalizing can scale much better with a wide variety of use cases to test and learn on.
The profile of a “full stack marketer” is changing from someone with deep channel and technical expertise to an individual having broad cross-channel literacy. And agencies are the accelerants to your learning that will get you from being a specialist to becoming a strategist and generalist by Year 3 instead of Year 5 or Year 7 because there’s no better way to learn a channel quickly than to be in a crucible where you apply it to multiple businesses from day one.
If I could have a do-over of my career, would I have gone the agency rather than the enterprise route? Truthfully, it’s hard to say because the paradigms then were different – and the resources to invest in Martech infrastructure and in-house data science capabilities were critical to dominating the paid media marketplace until very recently. Platform-based smart bidding algorithms have existed for nearly a decade, but they’ve catapulted from “niche tool we might test, but we don’t trust this as much as our in-house algos” to “if you’re not doing this, you’re behind” in the last two or three years, drastically levelling the playing field between large and small businesses.
Last week and this week, I’ve shared my thoughts about how the changes in paid platform marketing are redefining career paths for both experienced and early-career professionals. Next week, I’ll move on to what this means from an employer’s perspective. Will future leaders come from Marketing? My take on this will come in Part 3.