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Congratulations. We played ourselves.
Mar 7, 2024
A mentor of mine, John, sent me an article titled “Fortune 500 Companies Are Eliminating Chief Marketing Officer Roles as the Position Loses C-suite Clout” (Wow, dude, shots fired!). The premise is that companies are distributing CMO responsibilities to other executives. From my honestly biased perspective – meaning yes, I am biased, but justifiably, legitimately so – this is absurd. In the clown court spiral of profitability to growth, marketing is now the Ann Boleyn of the executive team: the first to get their heads chopped off.
Inexplicably, they are doing this when marketing expertise should be becoming more valuable, and more in demand. Both B2B and B2C customers want more authentic interactions. This means well-executed branding, messaging, and content. However, instead of speaking to their customers authentically, marketers stack content with keywords for SEO or create content with no real outcome in mind other than to hope it hits SERP bingo. Most digital agencies are happy to oblige with crappy AI-assisted, junior writer-edited content, sharing vanity metrics that don’t speak to the customer experience at all. Then, they’re trying to institute flat fee retainers across the board – to pre-empt itchy questions about how much of their work is AI-driven from value-seeking clients who want 80% discounts on their hourly rates.
In a lot of ways, it’s marketing’s own damn fault. We’ve played into vanity metrics like impressions to show value and played along with the honchos’ needs for such validation. We double downed on the MQL/SQL funnel metrics which rotated us to lead generation vs revenue growth, causing all kinds of frustration and disconnect with the sales teams. Instead of admitting that this shit is hard to measure and that there are intangibles when customers change how they get their information (dark social, internet research, etc.), we’ve also been slow to admit the diminishing returns in media and social platforms because, without the tried and true, we can’t answer “what’s next” for the higher-ups. So we became more insular and disconnected from the larger business strategy instead of doing what we should have been doing, which is working with the rest of the team and driving overall strategy and not just playing to bullshit metrics we should have challenged the legitimacy of in the first place. To quote DJ Khaled, “Congratulations, you played yourself.”
Well-executed marketing, at least within an organization, requires the ability to sell the truth that marketing serves the overarching long-term goals of the company, and not merely chases vanity metrics to justify short-term decision-making. We didn’t have, or know how to have, the hard conversations with execs or other teams that maybe the old models weren’t working. A lot of us didn’t consider, or want to consider, that always positioning marketing as the alpha dog on the Iditarod sled team of growth disconnects it from the rest of the pack who all have contributions to make. It’s all mush, now.
John said, “it does feel like the changes in what tactics are available or work have exacerbated the intrinsically poor value that B2B CEOs and boards place on marketing to begin with.” We are only justifying a preconceived notion already held.
This is absolutely true. Most CEOs and boards don't value marketing because they look at the short-term growth, not the long-term value that well-done marketing can bring -- and marketers have always struggled to communicate their value in the first place. The math isn’t clean. CEOs and boards assume that they can throw more salespeople at a problem because that math is easy: one salesperson = this much revenue = this much growth. What they fail to take into account is that without a well-executed brand narrative or marketing air cover, they are throwing the sales folks out of a plane with no parachute. With no adequate enablement, the salesperson can't speak to what they are selling. And with no awareness of the product, sales cycles drag on longer than they should. Without a clear understanding of the ICP with a brand or messaging strategy that speaks to their needs, growth will stagnate.
So what is the answer? Marketing needs to go back to basics and focus on creating strong brands with positioning that speaks to their target audience. AI, if harnessed correctly, can build efficiencies. However, it isn’t the messiah to save all marketers from their ills. Content has always needed to originate from a place of authenticity: speaking to people, not algorithms (the current wave of moving to zero-party data confirms this). Marketing needs to align with the business’ intended outcomes and to speak to how it’s driving towards those goals – not vanity metrics that make us feel better but cause everyone else to ask if we are actually living in the same universe as the rest of the organization.
We got ourselves into this mess and it’s up to us to get ourselves out of it.
A mentor of mine, John, sent me an article titled “Fortune 500 Companies Are Eliminating Chief Marketing Officer Roles as the Position Loses C-suite Clout” (Wow, dude, shots fired!). The premise is that companies are distributing CMO responsibilities to other executives. From my honestly biased perspective – meaning yes, I am biased, but justifiably, legitimately so – this is absurd. In the clown court spiral of profitability to growth, marketing is now the Ann Boleyn of the executive team: the first to get their heads chopped off.
Inexplicably, they are doing this when marketing expertise should be becoming more valuable, and more in demand. Both B2B and B2C customers want more authentic interactions. This means well-executed branding, messaging, and content. However, instead of speaking to their customers authentically, marketers stack content with keywords for SEO or create content with no real outcome in mind other than to hope it hits SERP bingo. Most digital agencies are happy to oblige with crappy AI-assisted, junior writer-edited content, sharing vanity metrics that don’t speak to the customer experience at all. Then, they’re trying to institute flat fee retainers across the board – to pre-empt itchy questions about how much of their work is AI-driven from value-seeking clients who want 80% discounts on their hourly rates.
In a lot of ways, it’s marketing’s own damn fault. We’ve played into vanity metrics like impressions to show value and played along with the honchos’ needs for such validation. We double downed on the MQL/SQL funnel metrics which rotated us to lead generation vs revenue growth, causing all kinds of frustration and disconnect with the sales teams. Instead of admitting that this shit is hard to measure and that there are intangibles when customers change how they get their information (dark social, internet research, etc.), we’ve also been slow to admit the diminishing returns in media and social platforms because, without the tried and true, we can’t answer “what’s next” for the higher-ups. So we became more insular and disconnected from the larger business strategy instead of doing what we should have been doing, which is working with the rest of the team and driving overall strategy and not just playing to bullshit metrics we should have challenged the legitimacy of in the first place. To quote DJ Khaled, “Congratulations, you played yourself.”
Well-executed marketing, at least within an organization, requires the ability to sell the truth that marketing serves the overarching long-term goals of the company, and not merely chases vanity metrics to justify short-term decision-making. We didn’t have, or know how to have, the hard conversations with execs or other teams that maybe the old models weren’t working. A lot of us didn’t consider, or want to consider, that always positioning marketing as the alpha dog on the Iditarod sled team of growth disconnects it from the rest of the pack who all have contributions to make. It’s all mush, now.
John said, “it does feel like the changes in what tactics are available or work have exacerbated the intrinsically poor value that B2B CEOs and boards place on marketing to begin with.” We are only justifying a preconceived notion already held.
This is absolutely true. Most CEOs and boards don't value marketing because they look at the short-term growth, not the long-term value that well-done marketing can bring -- and marketers have always struggled to communicate their value in the first place. The math isn’t clean. CEOs and boards assume that they can throw more salespeople at a problem because that math is easy: one salesperson = this much revenue = this much growth. What they fail to take into account is that without a well-executed brand narrative or marketing air cover, they are throwing the sales folks out of a plane with no parachute. With no adequate enablement, the salesperson can't speak to what they are selling. And with no awareness of the product, sales cycles drag on longer than they should. Without a clear understanding of the ICP with a brand or messaging strategy that speaks to their needs, growth will stagnate.
So what is the answer? Marketing needs to go back to basics and focus on creating strong brands with positioning that speaks to their target audience. AI, if harnessed correctly, can build efficiencies. However, it isn’t the messiah to save all marketers from their ills. Content has always needed to originate from a place of authenticity: speaking to people, not algorithms (the current wave of moving to zero-party data confirms this). Marketing needs to align with the business’ intended outcomes and to speak to how it’s driving towards those goals – not vanity metrics that make us feel better but cause everyone else to ask if we are actually living in the same universe as the rest of the organization.
We got ourselves into this mess and it’s up to us to get ourselves out of it.
A mentor of mine, John, sent me an article titled “Fortune 500 Companies Are Eliminating Chief Marketing Officer Roles as the Position Loses C-suite Clout” (Wow, dude, shots fired!). The premise is that companies are distributing CMO responsibilities to other executives. From my honestly biased perspective – meaning yes, I am biased, but justifiably, legitimately so – this is absurd. In the clown court spiral of profitability to growth, marketing is now the Ann Boleyn of the executive team: the first to get their heads chopped off.
Inexplicably, they are doing this when marketing expertise should be becoming more valuable, and more in demand. Both B2B and B2C customers want more authentic interactions. This means well-executed branding, messaging, and content. However, instead of speaking to their customers authentically, marketers stack content with keywords for SEO or create content with no real outcome in mind other than to hope it hits SERP bingo. Most digital agencies are happy to oblige with crappy AI-assisted, junior writer-edited content, sharing vanity metrics that don’t speak to the customer experience at all. Then, they’re trying to institute flat fee retainers across the board – to pre-empt itchy questions about how much of their work is AI-driven from value-seeking clients who want 80% discounts on their hourly rates.
In a lot of ways, it’s marketing’s own damn fault. We’ve played into vanity metrics like impressions to show value and played along with the honchos’ needs for such validation. We double downed on the MQL/SQL funnel metrics which rotated us to lead generation vs revenue growth, causing all kinds of frustration and disconnect with the sales teams. Instead of admitting that this shit is hard to measure and that there are intangibles when customers change how they get their information (dark social, internet research, etc.), we’ve also been slow to admit the diminishing returns in media and social platforms because, without the tried and true, we can’t answer “what’s next” for the higher-ups. So we became more insular and disconnected from the larger business strategy instead of doing what we should have been doing, which is working with the rest of the team and driving overall strategy and not just playing to bullshit metrics we should have challenged the legitimacy of in the first place. To quote DJ Khaled, “Congratulations, you played yourself.”
Well-executed marketing, at least within an organization, requires the ability to sell the truth that marketing serves the overarching long-term goals of the company, and not merely chases vanity metrics to justify short-term decision-making. We didn’t have, or know how to have, the hard conversations with execs or other teams that maybe the old models weren’t working. A lot of us didn’t consider, or want to consider, that always positioning marketing as the alpha dog on the Iditarod sled team of growth disconnects it from the rest of the pack who all have contributions to make. It’s all mush, now.
John said, “it does feel like the changes in what tactics are available or work have exacerbated the intrinsically poor value that B2B CEOs and boards place on marketing to begin with.” We are only justifying a preconceived notion already held.
This is absolutely true. Most CEOs and boards don't value marketing because they look at the short-term growth, not the long-term value that well-done marketing can bring -- and marketers have always struggled to communicate their value in the first place. The math isn’t clean. CEOs and boards assume that they can throw more salespeople at a problem because that math is easy: one salesperson = this much revenue = this much growth. What they fail to take into account is that without a well-executed brand narrative or marketing air cover, they are throwing the sales folks out of a plane with no parachute. With no adequate enablement, the salesperson can't speak to what they are selling. And with no awareness of the product, sales cycles drag on longer than they should. Without a clear understanding of the ICP with a brand or messaging strategy that speaks to their needs, growth will stagnate.
So what is the answer? Marketing needs to go back to basics and focus on creating strong brands with positioning that speaks to their target audience. AI, if harnessed correctly, can build efficiencies. However, it isn’t the messiah to save all marketers from their ills. Content has always needed to originate from a place of authenticity: speaking to people, not algorithms (the current wave of moving to zero-party data confirms this). Marketing needs to align with the business’ intended outcomes and to speak to how it’s driving towards those goals – not vanity metrics that make us feel better but cause everyone else to ask if we are actually living in the same universe as the rest of the organization.
We got ourselves into this mess and it’s up to us to get ourselves out of it.
A mentor of mine, John, sent me an article titled “Fortune 500 Companies Are Eliminating Chief Marketing Officer Roles as the Position Loses C-suite Clout” (Wow, dude, shots fired!). The premise is that companies are distributing CMO responsibilities to other executives. From my honestly biased perspective – meaning yes, I am biased, but justifiably, legitimately so – this is absurd. In the clown court spiral of profitability to growth, marketing is now the Ann Boleyn of the executive team: the first to get their heads chopped off.
Inexplicably, they are doing this when marketing expertise should be becoming more valuable, and more in demand. Both B2B and B2C customers want more authentic interactions. This means well-executed branding, messaging, and content. However, instead of speaking to their customers authentically, marketers stack content with keywords for SEO or create content with no real outcome in mind other than to hope it hits SERP bingo. Most digital agencies are happy to oblige with crappy AI-assisted, junior writer-edited content, sharing vanity metrics that don’t speak to the customer experience at all. Then, they’re trying to institute flat fee retainers across the board – to pre-empt itchy questions about how much of their work is AI-driven from value-seeking clients who want 80% discounts on their hourly rates.
In a lot of ways, it’s marketing’s own damn fault. We’ve played into vanity metrics like impressions to show value and played along with the honchos’ needs for such validation. We double downed on the MQL/SQL funnel metrics which rotated us to lead generation vs revenue growth, causing all kinds of frustration and disconnect with the sales teams. Instead of admitting that this shit is hard to measure and that there are intangibles when customers change how they get their information (dark social, internet research, etc.), we’ve also been slow to admit the diminishing returns in media and social platforms because, without the tried and true, we can’t answer “what’s next” for the higher-ups. So we became more insular and disconnected from the larger business strategy instead of doing what we should have been doing, which is working with the rest of the team and driving overall strategy and not just playing to bullshit metrics we should have challenged the legitimacy of in the first place. To quote DJ Khaled, “Congratulations, you played yourself.”
Well-executed marketing, at least within an organization, requires the ability to sell the truth that marketing serves the overarching long-term goals of the company, and not merely chases vanity metrics to justify short-term decision-making. We didn’t have, or know how to have, the hard conversations with execs or other teams that maybe the old models weren’t working. A lot of us didn’t consider, or want to consider, that always positioning marketing as the alpha dog on the Iditarod sled team of growth disconnects it from the rest of the pack who all have contributions to make. It’s all mush, now.
John said, “it does feel like the changes in what tactics are available or work have exacerbated the intrinsically poor value that B2B CEOs and boards place on marketing to begin with.” We are only justifying a preconceived notion already held.
This is absolutely true. Most CEOs and boards don't value marketing because they look at the short-term growth, not the long-term value that well-done marketing can bring -- and marketers have always struggled to communicate their value in the first place. The math isn’t clean. CEOs and boards assume that they can throw more salespeople at a problem because that math is easy: one salesperson = this much revenue = this much growth. What they fail to take into account is that without a well-executed brand narrative or marketing air cover, they are throwing the sales folks out of a plane with no parachute. With no adequate enablement, the salesperson can't speak to what they are selling. And with no awareness of the product, sales cycles drag on longer than they should. Without a clear understanding of the ICP with a brand or messaging strategy that speaks to their needs, growth will stagnate.
So what is the answer? Marketing needs to go back to basics and focus on creating strong brands with positioning that speaks to their target audience. AI, if harnessed correctly, can build efficiencies. However, it isn’t the messiah to save all marketers from their ills. Content has always needed to originate from a place of authenticity: speaking to people, not algorithms (the current wave of moving to zero-party data confirms this). Marketing needs to align with the business’ intended outcomes and to speak to how it’s driving towards those goals – not vanity metrics that make us feel better but cause everyone else to ask if we are actually living in the same universe as the rest of the organization.
We got ourselves into this mess and it’s up to us to get ourselves out of it.
