When Did Marketing Leadership Became Operational?

On the marketing machine, the rise of AI, and why marketing leadership may finally be returning to its strategic roots.

One of the interesting side effects of the current AI conversation is that it’s forcing a closer look at what marketing leadership has actually been responsible for over the past couple of decades ( I wrote about that a bit more here).

In theory, senior marketing roles have always been positioned as strategic. Titles like VP of Marketing, Chief Marketing Officer, or Head of Growth suggest ownership of market direction, positioning, and long-term growth. In practice, many of those roles evolved into something far more operational.

Many marketing leaders became responsible for running the machinery of execution . Campaign calendars, demand generation programs, agency coordination, content production, event logistics, reporting dashboards, marketing technology stacks, and increasingly complex channel strategies.

All of it important, critical, work. But much of it focused on producing output, not necessarily shaping market direction. I’ve thought this for a long while (and certainly not universally) that somewhere along the way, strategy and execution quietly drifted apart.

How marketing leadership evolved

Part of this shift happened gradually as marketing became more specialized. As digital channels expanded, companies began hiring teams of specialists: SEO experts, paid acquisition managers, lifecycle marketers, content strategists, social media teams, marketing operations managers.

Each role owned a specific part of the growth engine.  The job of the marketing leader became coordinating all of those moving parts.

Managing budgets. Managing agencies. Managing campaign timelines. Managing reporting structures. In other words, managing complexity.

Over time, that complexity started to consume  so much of the role that often what got squeezed out was the deeper strategic work that marketing should arguably have been responsible for all along.

Questions like:

• What category are we really competing in?

• What problem does this product solve better than anyone else?

• What narrative should define the company in the market?

• Which customers actually matter most for the next stage of growth?

Those decisions frequently lived elsewhere - with founders, product teams,  strategy consultants even. For plenty of orgs I knew, Marketing  became responsible for amplifying the answer, rather than shaping it.

The strategy gap

This isn’t to say that strategic marketing leaders don’t exist. Many do, and many are exceptional. But structurally, the role has often been designed around execution oversight, not market architecture, which has meant that many fall into that bucket without even knowing it. Often, in fact, without many of the hirers knowing it, the got what to look for in a head of marketing wrong.

Which has meant that for some, when companies talk about “marketing strategy,” what they actually mean is something closer to campaign planning - Channel mix. Budget allocation. Quarterly demand targets.

All important decisions, but not the same as defining how a company should exist in the market in the first place.

True go-to-market strategy sits a layer above that. It’s about defining the problem space, shaping the narrative around a product or service, identifying the right customer segments, and making deliberate choices about where a company will — and won’t — compete.

That kind of work requires time, experience, true collaboration with other leadership functions, and a certain degree of distance from the day-to-day mechanics of execution. And, historically, many marketing leaders simply didn’t have that distance.

When did “GTM” stop meaning go-to-market?

Another interesting shift, that I will say has really grinded my gears, has been with the terminology of GTM. Over the past few years, almost everyone and their dog in sales and marketing has started describing themselves as working in “GTM.”

No so.

The term — shorthand for go-to-market — has become a catch-all label across the industry. Sales leaders, growth marketers, demand generation teams, even sales enablement roles now sit under the GTM umbrella.

But in so many cases the phrase has started to lose its original meaning. When I first heard the terms used 20 years ago as an agency junior,  “go-to-market” referred quite literally to the act of defining how a company would enter and compete in a market. 

It meant thinking carefully about the core problem being solved, the narrative that would resonate with the right audience, the channels where those people could actually be reached, and the partnerships or ecosystems that might accelerate adoption. Starting out, I was in awe of my directors who could see and build the big picture - as were our clients. Often we were taking successful Silicon Valley into the European market for the first time - it’s where I learned the true  - and literal - meaning of GTM. In other words, it was real, strategic work, that made an impact.

Today the label is too often applied to the execution layer  — campaign launches, channel tactics, or marketing operations. All important parts of GTM growth, but not quite the same thing as deciding how a company should go to market in the first place. And that distinction matters more now than ever.

Why the shift is becoming visible now

For years, the operational complexity of marketing masked this gap. There was always more execution to manage.

Entire teams exist to keep the machine running. Don’t get me wrong, I large organizations this is still a necessity. But AI is beginning to compress or even erode parts of that operational layer.

Tasks that once required multiple people can now be accelerated with the help of AI tools. Draft content can be produced faster. Research can be summarized quickly. Data sets can be segmented and outlined in minutes. Execution isn’t disappearing by any stretch of the imagination, but the effort required to produce it is shrinking at pace.

Now that doesn’t mean anyone can do it. It’s just the real constraint begins to show itself more clearly - not execution capacity but direction.

The question becomes: who is actually responsible for defining the market strategy that all this execution, albeit AI enabled, is meant to support?

What this means for marketing leaders

As the operational layer becomes easier to manage, marketing leaders have the chance to move closer to the strategic center of the business.

To spend more time on positioning, category narrative, market definition, and growth architecture. For me, these are the super exciting and interesting bits of the role! The kinds of decisions that determine whether a company is simply producing marketing activity or actually building momentum in the market.

But that shift also requires a different set of skills. Less emphasis on managing production pipelines and more  on market insight, and the ability to translate product capability into a compelling story the market understands.

It requires comfort with ambiguity, debate, and the kind of thinking that doesn’t always fit neatly into a quarterly plan.

The next chapter of marketing leadership

If the operational side of marketing continues to compress, the role of marketing leadership may begin to resemble something closer to market strategy leadership, for want of a better word.

Less about managing the machine. More about deciding where the machine should go and why.

That transition won’t happen overnight. Organizational structures take time to shift, and many companies are still built around the old model.

But the trajectory is becoming clearer.

When execution becomes easier, the scarce resource becomes  strategy.

And the leaders who can define that  — who can translate product capability into a clear market position and growth path — will become increasingly valuable. In the end, marketing leadership may finally return to the strategic role it was always supposed to play.