10 things senior marketers are thinking about right now

Ten lessons from my Clarity Calls with senior marketing leaders on AI, team design, marketing effectiveness, client connection and where the role of marketing is heading next.

Over the past few months, I’ve been having a series of Clarity Calls with senior marketing leaders working across global B2B, financial services, professional services, data, events, technology and the built environment.

The premise was deliberately simple: bring me something that’s on your mind and we’ll spend an hour pulling it apart.

There was no prescribed agenda. We talked about whatever was keeping that particular person busy: the changing role of the CMO, AI in marketing, team design, proving marketing’s commercial impact, getting closer to clients, thought leadership, product positioning and how to use AI without producing marketing that sounds like everyone else’s AI-produced marketing.

These calls were separate to my Future CMO research, where I’m speaking to and surveying senior marketing leaders about how the CMO role, marketing organisations and the skills we need are changing. You can take part in The Future CMO survey here. If you'd like a copy of the research when it's published, get in touch.

I’ve kept everything here anonymous, but a huge thank you to the clients and marketing leaders who gave me their time and, more importantly, talked candidly about what’s really happening inside their organisations.

Here are the themes that came up in various conversations:

1. AI is quickly becoming an organisational design question

Some clients are using multiple AI platforms for defined marketing use cases. One is exploring how to pilot and scale AI across hundreds of marketers. Another wanted to replace cumbersome marketing processes with AI-enabled workflows.

Almost every conversation touched AI, but surprisingly few were really about the technology.

They were about questions like:

What should our marketers still do themselves? Where should AI take over? What skills do we need now? How should we structure the team? Who owns AI? What should people do with the time AI saves?

It was interesting to explore how best to design a marketing organisation when AI can do a meaningful chunk of the work it was previously designed around.

It’s a huge conversation, and one I’m increasingly solving with clients through my marketing effectiveness and organisational design work.

2. Everyone talks about AI saving time. Hardly anyone says what to do with it.

If a 30-person marketing team collectively gets 150 hours a week back, is the ambition simply to produce 150 hours’ worth of more stuff?

Use AI to research faster, create first drafts, synthesise information, repurpose content or structure a brief. Then deliberately reinvest some of that time in things like talking to customers, understanding the business, developing stronger propositions, creative thinking, relationship building and strategic planning.

Productivity without a plan for the productivity gain isn't much of a strategy. So, I’ve been helping clients get much more explicit about this.

3. Prompts are starting to replace templates

This came up in a number of guises.

Global marketing functions have spent years building templates: campaign briefs, communications requests, messaging frameworks, content plans, event briefs.

The intention is good. The reality can be an awful lot of forms.

I've recently worked with a global organisation to rethink this. Instead of giving marketers more templates to complete, we created prompts that guide them through the thinking and help generate the required output.

It changes the role of the framework.

·         A template standardises what marketers fill in

·         A well-designed prompt can help standardise how marketers deliver

I think prompt libraries are going to become increasingly valuable marketing assets, particularly for global organisations trying to raise the quality and consistency of work across teams with very different capabilities.

4. Marketing teams are being organised around capabilities, not channels

One conversation started with a deceptively simple question: should a particular activation channel sit centrally within a new central team?

The channel was commercially important to this particular organisation. But if you were designing the marketing organisation from scratch today, would you really build an x-activation team, or would you build a customer activation capability?

Segmentation, automation, journey design, testing, personalisation and optimisation aren't channel specific. They're capabilities that stretch across CRM, paid media, email, websites, events and increasingly AI-enabled customer experiences.

That distinction matters when you're designing a marketing function that still needs to make sense three years from now.

5. The best central marketing teams won't do all the marketing

Another theme was the changing role of central marketing teams.

The most interesting model wasn't a giant central function that owns everything. It was a team whose job is to make everyone else's marketing better.

That might mean creating frameworks, piloting technology, establishing governance, sharing successful approaches, building capability, developing prompts and playbooks, running communities of practice and improving measurement.

If something works in one market, the central team helps all markets benefit from it.

6. Marketing has plenty of data. It still struggles to prove its value.

One senior marketer described conversations becoming dominated by LinkedIn lists, paid LinkedIn, analytics and the numbers immediately available in the platforms.

Those numbers aren't useless but they're not necessarily the same thing as impact.

In a complex B2B organisation, the thing that matters might be a client saying they heard one of your experts speak and it changed their view. A campaign might give an account director a reason to reopen a conversation. An event might introduce the right technical specialist to a client and ultimately contribute to a major piece of work.

Good luck finding that in your LinkedIn impressions.

I've been developing Impact Dashboards with clients to address exactly this problem. They sit above the detailed marketing reporting and act as a translation layer between marketing activity and the outcomes the business actually cares about.

You still measure the clicks. You just don't confuse the clicks with the point.

7. Getting closer to clients may be one of marketing's best uses of its newly available time

This connected several conversations for me.

One senior marketer had recently moved from being very close to the business into a larger global marketing structure and was worried that he now needed to become more “marketing”. My advice was almost the opposite, his connection to the business was his advantage.

He could be the person in the marketing room saying: this is what clients are actually talking about; this is how the business makes money; this is the language clients use; this is the work we're valued most for.

There are simple ways to build more of this into marketing: join selected client meetings as a listener, interview account leaders, run regular client-listening sessions, invite technical experts into marketing meetings and capture the questions clients repeatedly ask.

If AI gives marketers five hours back, spending one of them with a client sounds like a pretty good investment.

It's also why my brand and growth strategy work starts with people, customers and commercial priorities rather than a marketing channel plan.

8. The more content AI creates, the more valuable original thinking becomes

One conversation was with a marketing leader who was experiencing a creative block around a content platform. She'd tried AI and it kept giving her ideas she'd already had.

That's quite revealing. AI is exceptionally good at finding patterns in what already exists. That's also why it can be spectacularly average at giving an experienced marketer an idea they've never encountered before.

We started talking instead about tensions. What does everyone in the industry believe? Where might the consensus be wrong? What are smart people disagreeing about? These tensions can lead to much richer ideas for research, events, debates and content.

As the volume of perfectly competent AI-generated content explodes, curiosity, judgement and a genuinely interesting point of view become more valuable. That's why platforms, such as LinkedIn, are now prioritising original human content over generic AI (see article here).

9. AI should scale your value proposition, not invent one

One marketer was developing the positioning for a complex new product and wanted to use AI to speed things up without ending up with something that screamed ChatGPT.

My approach - and this marketer's gut feeling - was fairly simple: do the thinking first.

Get the right people in a room. Understand the customer problem. Talk about the competitive landscape. Agree the commercial opportunity. Capture customer language. Work out why you're genuinely different. Decide what you want the audience to understand. Then bring in AI.

At that point it can be brilliant for testing alternatives, adapting messages for different buyer personas, developing first drafts, stress-testing claims, repurposing content and maintaining consistency.

You can even turn the thinking into a proprietary prompt library that supports future product launches, positioning and messaging.

An hour spent with your colleagues, ahead of bringing in AI, can save several hours going back and forth later on.

10. Execution is getting cheaper. Judgement is getting more valuable.

This is probably the thread that connects all the calls.

AI is making research, first drafts, analysis, content production and administration faster. And at the same time, the questions landing on senior marketers' desks aren't getting simpler. What should we prioritise? What should we stop? How should the team be structured? Which clients matter most? What's our point of view? Is this campaign actually worth doing? Which numbers matter? Where should AI be used - and where shouldn't it?

Those are judgement calls, and that changes what I think strong marketing teams will increasingly optimise for.

• Less time moving things through processes. More time understanding customers.

• Less time filling in templates. More time asking better questions.

• Less obsession with producing more content. More attention to whether we have anything interesting to say.

• Less marketing for marketing's sake. More understanding of how the organisation grows and where marketing can genuinely help.

So, what is the modern marketing function for?

That is perhaps the biggest question I've taken from the Clarity Calls.

Across conversations about AI, marketing effectiveness, product launches, organisational design and thought leadership, I kept coming back to the same idea:

Use technology and better operating models to create more space for the things humans are particularly good at: understanding clients, exercising judgement, making connections, developing original ideas and deciding what matters.

That's also increasingly the work I'm doing with clients - sometimes as a fractional CMO or interim marketing leader, sometimes through a focused strategy engagement, and increasingly through projects around marketing effectiveness, AI, team design and operating models. Pink Mingo's model has always been flexible: the right level of senior marketing support for the problem in front of you.

A big thank you again to everyone who joined me for a Clarity Call and was generous enough to share what they're wrestling with. You've given me plenty to think about.

If one of the challenges above sounds suspiciously like what's happening in your marketing team, you can request a Clarity Call. Sometimes an hour pulling the problem apart is a very good place to start.

I'm continuing this work through The Future CMO, my research into how senior marketing leadership is changing and what the next generation of marketing organisations will need. Complete The Future CMO survey here. And if you're a CMO or senior marketing leader and would like a copy of the findings when they're ready, get in touch.