Why The Best Years For Marketers Haven't Happened Yet
A friend of mine who’s been in marketing for close to fifteen years told me something recently that stuck with me. She said this is the first time in her whole career that she’s genuinely excited about where the job is headed, rather than just anxious about keeping up. That surprised me a little, because most of what you hear right now is the opposite, endless headlines about AI replacing marketers, entire departments getting automated out of existence, junior roles disappearing. But the more I looked into it, the more I understood what she meant. I don’t think we’re watching marketing die. I think we’re watching the boring parts of it finally get stripped away, and what’s left underneath is a much better version of the job
We spent decades doing work that was never really the point
Think about what an actual marketing job has looked like for most of the last twenty years. A huge share of the day went to things that had nothing to do with actual strategy. Formatting the same asset for five different platforms. Manually building a report every month that mostly just restated numbers a dashboard already showed. Writing endless slightly different versions of the same headline because testing required brute force rather than insight. None of that was ever the interesting part of the job. It was the tax you paid to get to the interesting part. And for a long time, that tax ate so much of the week that plenty of marketers barely got to the actual strategic thinking at all. That’s the layer getting stripped away right now, and it’s honestly overdue
The people getting nervous are often doing the wrong kind of work
Something worth being honest about here. The marketers who are genuinely worried right now tend to be the ones whose whole job was that repetitive layer. If your value was mostly producing standard content quickly, yes, that specific version of the job is shrinking, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. But that was never really a marketing skill on its own, it was a production skill that happened to live inside a marketing department. The actual marketing skill, understanding a specific audience, knowing what will make them care, building a brand people trust instead of scroll past, that skill is becoming more valuable precisely because it’s now the scarce part of the equation instead of the abundant one.