Here’s a question worth sitting with. When you hired your last head of marketing, what were you actually hiring for?
If the answer involves a long list of channel expertise, someone who knows paid media and SEO and marketing automation and CRM and content and analytics and brand, you may have been hiring for the wrong thing. Experience in all those things matter, but expecting one person to be the deepest expert in all of them, while also setting strategy, managing a team, and staying commercially aligned, is how you end up with a very busy, very stretched marketing leader who isn’t doing any of it particularly well.
The modern marketing leader isn’t the most technically capable person in the room. They’re the person who knows what questions to ask, which calls to make, and when to bring in someone who knows more than they do.
What marketing leaders should own
There are things that only a senior marketing leader can do, and they’re worth protecting.
- Strategy and prioritisation: Deciding what the business is trying to achieve through marketing, and which bets are worth making with the time and budget available.
- Commercial alignment: Keeping marketing connected to revenue, pipeline, and the priorities that actually move the business forward. Not just campaign metrics.
- Customer understanding: Owning the organisation’s view of who their customer is, what they need, and how that’s shifting.
- Team direction and decision-making: Giving people clarity on what they’re working towards, removing blockers, and making the calls that need seniority behind them.
- Cross-functional credibility: Being the person who can walk into a conversation with sales, product, finance or the CEO and hold their own. Not because they know everything, but because they understand the whole picture.
These are leadership responsibilities. They require judgement, context, and accountability. They can’t be delegated.
What they shouldn’t be expected to personally execute
The list of specialist disciplines inside modern marketing has grown considerably. Paid media optimisation. Marketing automation logic. Data analytics and attribution modelling. CRM architecture. Performance creative. SEO technical audits. The tools alone, Salesforce, Meta Ads Manager, Google Analytics 4, each have their own depth.
A senior marketing leader should understand these areas well enough to make good decisions about them. They should know what good looks like, ask sharp questions, and spot when something’s off. But being the person who actually does the work is a different job.
When marketing leaders get pulled into execution, when they’re the ones building the automation sequence, pulling the report, briefing the creative from scratch, two things happen. The execution takes longer because it’s not their core skill. And the strategic work suffers because their headspace is full.
How AI made this problem worse before it made it better
There’s a version of the AI story that goes like this: technology now handles the repetitive work, freeing marketers to focus on strategy. That version is true in theory. In practice, it’s played out rather differently for most marketing leaders.
What AI actually did, in the short term, was lower the perceived cost of a request. If a tool can generate a first draft in seconds, the assumption follows that producing the final version shouldn’t take long either. Sales needs a new deck by Friday, can you throw something together? The event is next week and we need a one-pager. The CEO wants a LinkedIn post about the announcement. It won’t take long.
It does take long. Because the brief is incomplete. Because the first draft needs reworking to sound like the brand. Because the marketing leader is the only person in the organisation with enough context to make it right. And because ten of these requests arrive in the same week.
The result is a marketing function that’s extremely busy producing things, and not particularly effective at doing the work that would actually build the business. Collateral gets made. Campaigns don’t get planned. Channels get fed. The customer journey doesn’t get designed.
A persistent underestimation of what marketing expertise actually is. The skills that make a marketer genuinely valuable, such as audience insight, narrative development, message architecture, and an understanding of how people make decisions, aren’t visible in the way that writing a social post is visible. They look like thinking. And thinking, in an environment wired for output, tends to get interrupted.
Marketers who’ve tried to push back on this have often found it’s a losing battle without a clear operating model to point to. The requests feel reasonable in isolation. It’s only in aggregate that they become a strategic problem.
The model that actually works
The marketing leaders making the biggest impact right now tend to operate with a clear mental model. They own direction and outcomes, and they build or access the specialist capability needed to deliver against them.
That might mean a small in-house team with external specialists brought in for specific disciplines. It might mean a retained partner who provides senior capability across multiple areas without the overhead of full-time hires. It might mean using AI to genuinely close execution gaps rather than create new ones.
What it doesn’t mean is one person absorbing every request from every stakeholder and trying to make it all work.
The other thing that matters is clarity about what marketing is actually for. When the broader business understands that marketing’s value lies in audience understanding, positioning, and the design of how customers are acquired and retained, not just in producing assets, the requests change. Or at least, the conversation about them does.
The practical implication
If you’re a marketing leader, it’s worth being honest about where your time is going. How much of your week is spent on things that only you can do? How much is spent filling gaps, turning around last-minute requests, and producing things that feel urgent but aren’t strategic?
If you’re a business leader, it’s worth asking a harder question. Does your organisation actually understand what it’s paying a senior marketer to do? Because if the answer in practice is “produce whatever we need, when we need it”, you’re not getting marketing leadership. You’re getting an expensive production resource, and probably burning them out in the process.
Marketing leadership has changed. The environment it operates in has changed too. The organisations that figure out the right model for both will have a meaningful advantage over the ones still treating their marketing leader as a one-person agency.
If this resonates, it’s worth thinking about where your own marketing function sits right now. Are the right things getting the right attention? If your team needs a moment to reset, let’s talk.
