Last week, I had the pleasure of presenting at a local event in Cincinnati called Cool People Saying Smart Things, hosted by UFO Performance Marketing. Here’s what I presented, in article form:

In today’s corporate ecosystem, marketing, as a discipline, does not have a seat at the adult table.

Finance, operations, legal, and IT are all on one side with the CEO, actually running the business. And then you’ve got marketing on the other side, on its tippytoes, trying to get a look. The adults see marketing and respond with, “Oh hey! Hey, marketing. We were just over here, running the business, and then we were going to tell you what we decided. But we need a couple more minutes. Where's your iPad? Can you go find your iPad? Maybe, do some coloring?”

[pause for laughter]

This isn’t just anecdotal. There’s real data to back all of this up. According to a 2025 article in the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science:

A Gartner report finds that, “Just 34% of CEOs and CFOs see eye-to-eye with CMOs on marketing’s role in supporting growth.”

A Deloitte / Harvard Business Review report found, “Only 17 percent of C-suite execs report having collaborated with CMOs over the past 12 months.”

A McKinsey report discovered, “When we asked CEOs and CMOs of the same companies what their top three marketing metrics were, they only agreed half the time.”

[pause for gasps]

I think there are a lot of reasons for this disconnect. One is that marketing has never done a good job at marketing itself, which is not news to anybody who's been in marketing. We've been saying this for years.

Another is that while everyone gets marketed to, most people only ever see the final creative output — the TV spot, the newsletter, the social media post. So to them, that’s what marketing is; it’s the creative asset.

However, I do think there’s a bigger reason for the disconnect and misalignment. Marketing isn’t taken seriously because marketers don’t take it seriously. We prioritize awards. We overindex on accolades. We focus on being disruptive. We want to be creative just for the sake of being creative.

This is all good and fine when business is good. Every company wants to do those fun, disruptive things. But when business isn't good, the adults inevitably get together and say, “Well, we’re going to get rid of the fun department. It's been nice having them around. But we can’t afford fun right now. We can’t afford a glorified arts and crafts department.”

The explosion of generative A.I. only exacerbates all of this. If the company only sees marketing as the final creative output, generative A.I. can absolutely do marketing’s job. Anthropic, the company behind Claude, released a report in March estimating that 65% of tasks done by “Market research analysts and marketing specialists” are “exposed” (i.e. can potentially be handled by A.I.). And the reality is that, when it comes to creative assets, for most companies most of the time, generative A.I. can absolutely do it well enough.

So putting all this together — the perception that marketing is just creative output, people don't understand what marketing is, and all of that can be replaced by generative A.I. — marketers should feel some sense of urgency. It’s up to us to shift perception and focus, and to demonstrate value.

Marketing needs to better define, and then defend, what marketing is and isn’t.

PR is not marketing. Internal Comms is not marketing. Product development is not marketing. Just because something is an event doesn't make it marketing.

Marketing’s role is to build brand awareness among a target audience, generate demand, and drive qualified leads. A lot of marketers are really good at that. And we have all these really great tools in the marketing toolbox to do all that.

But what happens is, for instance, HR wants to update the new employee welcome packet, and since the writers and designers are part of the marketing department, HR is going to reach out to marketing for help — which is fine if HR has a clear strategy, clear direction, and a clear brief.

But that’s not what happens. HR says they want to update their new employee welcome packet, and goes to marketing and says, “Can you come up with something? Oh, and make it fun.”

Then, all of a sudden, it’s marketing’s job to build a welcome packet for new employees — which doesn’t build brand awareness among the target audience, generate demand, or drive qualified leads.

But marketers are so desperate to be loved that we say, “Yes, of course, we’ll do it.”

We need to stand up for ourselves. When finance says you have to do these 7 things in order to get reimbursed for travel, you have to do those 7 things. If HR says you have to do these mandatory trainings, you have to do the trainings. If marketing says, “Can you please just answer these three super simple questions as part of the briefing process? It’ll take two minutes.” the response we get is, “You’re not really going to make me do that are you?”

Yes. We’re really going to make you do that. We’re a serious discipline with real structure and process.

Marketers need to stop collaborating.

I've never had someone from finance come to me and say, “Hey, Scott, you're in charge of marketing. Can you take a look at this accounting spreadsheet? Just let me know your thoughts. Any edits or direction would be great.”

Because of course not. That would be ridiculous. Yet, for whatever reason, the default for marketing is by committee. Marketing is always a group project. I do think some of this has to do with what I mentioned before — that everyone has been marketed to, so they have an opinion on what they like, and they probably genuinely want to support the work.

But that would be like me going into the finance department and saying, “Hey everyone, I use money, so I maybe I could poke around and see if there’s anything I can improve.”

Steve Jobs, after he was kicked out of Apple in the mid 80s, started a new company called NeXT, Inc. He was establishing a new brand, which he knew would require a new visual identity, and he reached out to a guy named Paul Rand who was a well-known designer of the time. The way Steve Jobs tells the story: “I asked him if he would come up with a few options, and he said, 'No, I will solve your problem for you and you will pay me. And you don't have to use the solution. If you want options go talk to other people.'”

None of us is Paul Rand, or Steve Jobs for that matter, but marketers need a lot less deferential. If you're in a meeting and you're the only marketer in the room, you are the marketing expert. You are the smartest person in that room when it comes to marketing. Solve problems accordingly.

I know it’s controversial to say, but marketing is not responsible for revenue.

[pause for pearl clutching]

Marketing is responsible for building brand awareness among an established target audience, driving demand, and generating qualified leads.

Here’s a story that I’m going to say is “based on actual events”:

Executives at a company are putting together quarterly revenue projections, and it looks like revenue is going to be down. So they go to marketing and say revenue is looking soft next quarter, so you need to up your game.

Then marketing says that actually, month over month, quarter over quarter, marketing’s numbers are up. We’re driving more brand awareness, building demand, and generating more qualified leads.

So one of two things is happening. We may need to revisit what we mean by a qualified lead. That’s a perfectly worthwhile exercise to do — and it should involve marketing and sales, and probably finance and operations as well, to ensure we’re all aligned on what a qualified lead is.

That's one possibility. The other, more likely, possibility is that leads aren’t converting into revenue because sales is bad at their jobs. Because of course they are. With their fancy suits and their charisma.

We convince ourselves that marketing needs to be a revenue source in order to show our value. But legal isn’t a revenue source. HR isn’t a revenue source. Operations isn’t a revenue source.

Regardless, we say we’ll fix the revenue problem, and then we pull all the marketing levers we have access to which, because they’re marketing levers, don’t fix revenue. And then it looks like we’re bad at our jobs when, in reality, we’re bad at other people’s jobs.

We have unique value we can provide to a company to support the overall commercial engine, and we need to be explicit about that value.

So what do marketers do about this?

We need to establish two or three KPIs reflecting how marketing is performing as a discipline within our organizations.

In addition to the regular performance indicators for campaigns and for the website and for social, marketers need to have two or three performance indicators we can report quarterly or monthly to say, “Marketing is doing its job, and it's providing value. We are building brand awareness among our target audience, we are generating demand, and we are delivering qualified leads.”

Start there, and that will get the ball rolling on discussing the remit of marketing, the scope of what marketing should and shouldn't be doing, building a strict marketing process, and how marketing fits into the corporate structure. We bring value. We’re clear about what it is. And we're going to stand up for ourselves.

And by doing that — by being a little bolder, by being a little more clear about the value we bring to a company — not only can we can successfully navigate the tremendous amount of change that's coming to marketing and finally get a seat at the adult table, but it will actually free us up to do the creative, disruptive, award-winning stuff that so many marketers want to focus on.

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