The modern CMO has too much to do, too few people to do it, and an entire industry lining up to sell them another retainer.
Somewhere in America, a CMO is being asked to do more with less. Again.
The CEO wants growth. Sales wants leads. Product needs a launch campaign by Thursday. Finance wants to know why marketing costs so much. The board wants an AI strategy, preferably one that doubles revenue and eliminates the need for employees.
And someone in HR needs a heartwarming video about the company picnic.
Meanwhile, the marketing team is working nights, the agency wants to revisit its retainer, and the one person who actually knows how to update the website just quit to become a breathwork instructor in Sedona.
Welcome to modern marketing.
Where everything is urgent, everyone is a stakeholder, and every problem can apparently be solved by scheduling another meeting.
Something has to give.
And for once, perhaps it shouldn't be the CMO's sanity.
Congratulations. Your Marketing Department Is Now Responsible for Everything.
Remember when marketing departments did marketing?
Those were simpler times. There were campaigns to create, customers to understand, products to sell, and the occasional CEO who thought his nephew had a real gift for graphic design.
Today, marketing is responsible for practically everything that happens between a company and another human being.
Brand strategy. Demand generation. Content. Customer experience. Social media. Websites. Sales enablement. Analytics. Events. Public relations. Marketing automation. AI adoption. The CEO's LinkedIn presence.
Somewhere, a marketing manager is being asked to explain why the company doesn't have a TikTok strategy for industrial adhesives.
And the requests keep coming.
The website needs refreshing. The new product needs positioning. The sales team needs a presentation that doesn't induce a coma. The brand needs more personality. The campaign needs better results. The CEO has just returned from a conference with some exciting ideas about artificial intelligence.
Everyone wants something. Preferably yesterday.
What's interesting is that many of these marketing departments are filled with genuinely talented people. They know their customers. They understand the business. They're working hard.
They're simply being asked to operate as a creative agency, technology consultancy, production studio, research company, media operation, and strategic advisory firm.
Usually with a team of seven.
And a budget that Finance has begun treating like an unattended buffet.
It's a familiar theme in our Marketing Mischief & Mayhem conversations with CMOs and marketing leaders. The responsibilities keep multiplying, but the number of hours in a Tuesday stubbornly remains the same.
The Problem With Hiring More People Is That You Have to Hire More People.
Let's say your company needs a new campaign.
You could hire a creative director, a strategist, a copywriter, an art director, a designer, and a producer.
Six salaries. Six benefits packages. Six performance reviews. Six people who will eventually have to complete the same mandatory cybersecurity training featuring an actor pretending to be a hacker.
And what happens when the campaign is finished?
You still have six employees.
Of course, there's nothing wrong with building a great internal marketing organization. Companies absolutely should. Institutional knowledge is invaluable, and nobody understands the business quite like the people living inside it every day.
But internal teams have limitations. Not because they're inadequate, but because the demands of marketing change faster than any reasonable hiring plan can accommodate.
One quarter you need a brand strategist. The next, an integrated campaign. Then a product launch, a website overhaul, a new identity, or a creative idea strong enough to make people stop scrolling past your company like it's another inspirational quote from a software CEO.
Hiring a permanent employee for every occasional specialty makes about as much sense as buying a cement mixer because you need to fix the patio.
There are people who do this stuff for a living.
You can call them.
Agencies Have Become Remarkably Good at Making Simple Things Complicated.
The advertising industry has spent decades perfecting the art of the agency relationship.
There are discovery workshops, onboarding sessions, stakeholder interviews, chemistry meetings, strategic immersions, creative briefings, alignment meetings, and meetings to discuss what happened in the alignment meetings.
Eventually, if everyone remains sufficiently aligned, somebody makes an ad.
I say this with affection. I've spent most of my career in agencies. I've seen the extraordinary things they can accomplish, and I've seen the machinery required to produce a single landing page.
Sometimes the machinery is justified. A global brand transformation involving dozens of markets, multiple business units, and complicated customer relationships deserves serious resources.
But not every assignment is a global brand transformation.
Sometimes the client needs a better campaign.
Sometimes the website needs to stop sounding like it was written by a committee of enterprise software executives.
Sometimes the company has a genuinely interesting product and absolutely no idea how to explain it.
And sometimes the marketing team simply needs someone with fresh eyes and good judgment to walk into the room, look at the work, and say what everyone else has been politely avoiding for six months.
"This isn't very good."
An uncomfortable sentence, certainly.
Potentially worth a fortune.
We explored how the traditional agency model is evolving in You Don't Need Another Full Service Agency. You Just Need the Right People in the Room.
The interesting question is no longer how much work an agency can take over. It's how much better the work can become when the right people get involved.
Not Every Marketing Problem Requires a Marriage Proposal.
There's something peculiar about how agencies approach new business.
A prospective client calls with a problem. The agency responds by describing a relationship.
A long relationship.
One involving shared values, cultural compatibility, strategic alignment, and an annual commitment that makes the client's procurement department reach for the antacids.
By the time the agency has finished explaining its process, the client has forgotten what they called about.
Perhaps they just wanted a brochure.
A brilliant brochure, naturally. Something with enough intelligence and personality to make the competition's materials look like they were assembled during a hostage situation.
But still, a brochure.
Maybe it's a product launch. A new campaign. A brand refresh. A landing page. A sales presentation. An infographic that doesn't resemble the evacuation instructions on a commercial aircraft.
The assignment should determine the engagement.
That sounds so obvious it barely deserves to be written down, yet the agency business has made an impressive amount of money pretending otherwise.
For marketing leaders wondering whether they need an agency of record or project based creative support, the answer depends on the problem. Ongoing, complex programs may benefit from a dedicated relationship. Defined assignments can often be handled more efficiently by a focused team of experienced specialists.
There's no universal answer, despite what the agency pitching for your business may tell you.
A good agency should be comfortable with either.
And if the assignment is small, it shouldn't be handed to the interns while the senior people disappear to chase something more glamorous.
Small projects can be extraordinarily important. A single landing page might determine whether a product launch succeeds. A sharper presentation could help close a multimillion dollar account. One great campaign idea might change how an entire category sees a company.
The size of the invoice and the importance of the assignment are not always related.
Your Marketing Team Has Plenty of Hands. What It Needs Is Another Brain.
Actually, make that a few really good brains.
There's no shortage of people willing to help produce marketing materials.
Freelancers. Consultants. Production companies. AI platforms. Offshore design teams. And approximately 900,000 people on LinkedIn describing themselves as fractional growth ninjas.
Production capacity is becoming easier to find.
Judgment is another matter.
Someone has to recognize when the positioning is wrong, when the creative is forgettable, when the message is too complicated, or when the marketing team has fallen so deeply in love with its own terminology that customers need a decoder ring to understand the homepage.
Someone needs to know which problem is worth solving first.
Experienced outside partners can be particularly valuable here because they aren't carrying around years of internal assumptions.
They weren't in the meeting where the CEO fell in love with the tagline.
They don't have to pretend the product name is brilliant because the founder's daughter suggested it.
They can ask the question nobody inside the company wants to ask.
"Why would anyone care?"
It's an impolite question in certain conference rooms.
It's also the beginning of a lot of great marketing.
This is the uncomfortable territory we explored in CMO, Clear the Room!, where we looked at how perfectly good ideas are slowly murdered by well meaning committees.
It's also a subject that came up in our Marketing Mischief & Mayhem conversation with Robyn Parks of Verizon about why great marketing ideas die in conference rooms.
The best outside agency partners bring perspective, experience, and the willingness to challenge the thinking before anyone spends a fortune executing it.
Preferably without being insufferable about it.
A Little Outside Help Can Prevent a Lot of Inside Suffering.
Consider what actually lands on a CMO's desk.
The product launch that suddenly became everyone's emergency.
Engineering has spent two years building something remarkable. Product has created 84 slides explaining how it works. Sales wants to know what to say about it.
Marketing has six weeks to make the world care.
This is exactly where an experienced creative and strategy team can help. Clarify the positioning, find the story, develop the campaign, and give the internal team something worth taking to market.
It's particularly important in B2B technology, where companies often assume that customers will recognize the brilliance of the product if someone simply explains enough features.
They won't.
In our podcast conversation From Chaos to Clarity with Jason Liu, we discussed the challenge of making complex technology understandable, relevant, and human.
Because if it takes 47 minutes and a solutions engineer to explain why your product matters, you may have a positioning problem.
The website that looks expensive but explains absolutely nothing.
It's beautiful. The photography is tasteful. The animations are smooth. There's a headline about transforming possibilities and a paragraph about empowering tomorrow.
After five minutes, visitors still have no idea what the company sells.
Perhaps the site doesn't need another complete redesign. It may need a compelling story, clearer messaging, better information architecture, and a creative idea that gives people a reason to keep reading.
We examined this broader problem in The Courage Gap: Why Most B2B Tech Positioning Fails.
Sometimes companies are so determined to sound credible that they forget to sound interesting.
And if the website isn't helping convert interest into business, there's another useful discussion in Why Your Pipeline Looks Healthy But Isn't Converting.
The campaign that works perfectly, except for the working part.
The targeting is sophisticated. The media plan is optimized. The dashboard has so many charts it resembles the cockpit of a Boeing 787.
Unfortunately, the creative is completely forgettable.
The company has invested heavily in reaching exactly the right people with something those people couldn't care less about.
We wrote about this in Why Performance Marketing Can Make Your Brand Invisible.
Better distribution doesn't compensate for a message that gives people no reason to pay attention.
And now AI has made it possible to produce an astonishing amount of perfectly ordinary marketing in record time.
We covered that particular achievement in Why AI Is Making Marketing Sound the Same.
In our conversation with Chris Kent, CMO of Coder, we explored why creativity and courage still matter when everyone has access to the same technology and increasingly similar marketing playbooks.
Because being able to make 400 mediocre ads before lunch isn't necessarily progress.
It may just mean you've industrialized mediocrity.
The company that grew up while its brand was looking the other way.
The business has evolved. The products have improved. The customers have changed. The competitors are different.
But the brand is still telling the same story it told when the founders were working out of a rented office above a nail salon.
That doesn't automatically mean the company needs a complete rebrand. Sometimes a sharper positioning, refreshed identity, or new creative platform is enough to make the business look and sound like the company it has become.
Our article Rebrand vs. Refresh: How to Decide What Your Brand Actually Needs explores how marketing leaders can make that decision without throwing away years of brand equity.
The marketing team that's simply had enough.
This one may be the most common.
The people are talented. The priorities are legitimate. The workload is absurd.
A little experienced outside support can make an enormous difference, particularly when that support arrives ready to do the work instead of introducing another management layer.
Nobody needs another person asking for a status update.
They need someone who can make the status change.
There's a related lesson in our conversation with Margaret Dawson about internal brand alignment.
Even excellent marketing teams struggle when the organization isn't aligned around what matters.
Adding more activity to that environment usually makes things worse.
The Best Agency Relationship Might Start With One Project.
There's another advantage to starting with a specific assignment.
You discover what an agency is actually like.
Not what it's like during the pitch, when everyone is charming, the strategists are insightful, the creative directors are dazzling, and someone has brought pastries from a bakery that charges $11 for a croissant.
The pitch is advertising.
The project is reality.
Can the agency understand your business quickly? Does it ask intelligent questions? Can it tell the difference between a genuinely important strategic issue and something that simply sounds impressive in a presentation?
Does it make the work better?
And perhaps most importantly, are the people doing the work the same people who convinced you to hire them?
That last question has surprised a few clients over the years.
A focused initial project gives both sides an opportunity to find out whether the relationship works. The agency demonstrates its thinking, the client experiences the process, and everyone gets to see what happens when deadlines and opinions become real.
If it works, there may be a much bigger relationship ahead.
If it doesn't, at least nobody needs to involve the lawyers.
Small Budgets Can Produce Big Ideas. Large Budgets Can Produce Very Expensive Wallpaper.
The marketing industry has developed an unfortunate habit of confusing spending with ambition.
Big budgets can accomplish wonderful things. They buy reach, frequency, sophisticated production, extensive testing, and occasionally a celebrity who appears to have no idea why they're holding your product.
But money doesn't automatically produce an interesting idea.
We've all seen enormously expensive campaigns that manage to say absolutely nothing.
And we've seen relatively modest efforts become memorable because someone found a compelling human truth and expressed it in a way nobody expected.
At TheorySF, we've had the privilege of working on both ends of the spectrum.
Our experience includes major global initiatives such as the launch of Xbox Kinect and the U.S. introduction of Alibaba, along with focused assignments for emerging brands, technology companies, and businesses looking to find their place in a crowded market.
For Avast, our work helped drive U.S. brand awareness from virtually zero to approximately 40% in a matter of months.
For Visit Mendocino, a distinctive destination marketing program helped increase aided awareness from zero to approximately 40%, while website traffic grew dramatically.
For Airbase, sharper positioning and integrated marketing contributed to improved conversion and approximately 20% sales growth over the following two quarters.
You can see more of this work in our TheorySF case studies.
These weren't identical assignments. They didn't have identical budgets or business challenges.
What they shared was a need to find the right problem, develop the right idea, and execute it in a way that made a difference.
A smaller assignment doesn't deserve a smaller imagination.
And a large assignment doesn't become brilliant simply because the production budget includes a helicopter.
So When Should a CMO Hire an Outside Creative Agency?
When there's a meaningful gap between what the business needs and what the internal marketing team has the time, expertise, or perspective to deliver.
Sometimes that gap is strategic. The company needs positioning, brand architecture, messaging, or a clearer story.
Sometimes it's creative. The strategy is sound, but the campaign lacks the originality to make anyone notice.
Sometimes it's execution. The team knows exactly what needs to happen but doesn't have the capacity to produce it.
And sometimes the company has been looking at the same problem for so long that everyone has forgotten there's another way to approach it.
An outside agency can be particularly useful for product launches, brand refreshes, integrated campaigns, website messaging, creative development, sales enablement, and other defined marketing projects.
The key is finding people who can move comfortably between strategy and execution.
Because a brilliant strategy that never gets made is a very expensive document.
A beautiful campaign that communicates the wrong thing is a beautifully produced mistake.
And a website that wins design awards but doesn't help the business is basically an expensive screensaver.
Marketing leaders don't need more deliverables to admire.
They need work that accomplishes something.
It's a point reinforced by the marketing leaders we've interviewed for Marketing Mischief & Mayhem.
In Brand Awareness Is BS, with Eightfold AI CMO Navneet Singh, we explored why awareness alone isn't enough and why positioning needs to connect to pipeline and sales.
And in our article 10 Things CMOs Learned About Modern Marketing, we pulled together lessons from conversations with marketing leaders navigating many of these same challenges.
The common thread is that better marketing begins with better decisions.
Preferably made before the budget is gone.
We Built TheorySF Around the Work. Not the Retainer.
At TheorySF, we've always been more interested in solving interesting problems than building elaborate agency relationships around them.
We're a San Francisco brand strategy and creative agency that works with ambitious companies, from emerging challengers to global brands.
We help businesses figure out what makes them different, why anyone should care, and how to turn that understanding into creative work that gets noticed.
Sometimes we're helping leadership teams rethink the brand.
Sometimes we're building a campaign, developing a website, launching a product, or finding a more compelling way to tell a complicated story.
And sometimes a marketing leader calls because something needs to get done, the internal team is overwhelmed, and the work needs to be a hell of a lot better than what's currently on the table.
We like those calls.
We bring experienced strategic and creative people to the problem, assemble the right resources for the assignment, and get to work.
We've worked on global brands with enormous budgets. We've also worked with ambitious companies that needed to make every dollar count.
Both can be interesting. Both deserve great thinking.
We've never understood the notion that a small assignment should receive less imagination than a large one.
The audience doesn't know how much you paid for the idea.
They only know whether it's any good.
If you'd like to understand more about the thinking behind our approach, explore our services and our perspective on the modern flexible agency model.
Your Marketing Team Doesn't Need Rescuing. It Needs Reinforcements.
The modern CMO doesn't need another lecture about the future of marketing.
They need to get through Thursday.
They need the product launch to happen. The campaign to perform. The website to make sense. The sales team to stop complaining. And the CEO to understand that adding a QR code to something doesn't automatically make it a digital strategy.
They need people who can step in, understand the problem, contribute real expertise, and make the work better.
Sometimes that means a long relationship with a dedicated agency. Sometimes it means bringing in a few very talented people for a very specific assignment.
Either way, the objective should be the same.
Get something extraordinary done.
Without turning the process into another full time job for the people who hired you.
So before you add another six people to the payroll, launch a six month agency review, or sign a retainer that requires couples counseling to terminate, consider something simpler.
Find people who are really good at solving the problem in front of you.
Give them the problem.
See what happens.
And maybe cancel a few meetings while you're at it.
Your team would probably appreciate that more than the company picnic.
Got a Marketing Problem? We Collect Those.
A campaign that needs a better idea? A brand that's lost its personality? A product launch that's coming in hot? A website that looks terrific but couldn't sell water in the desert?
Maybe you need a global brand transformation.
Maybe you just need a great infographic.
We don't believe the size of the assignment should determine the quality of the thinking.
At TheorySF, we work with marketing leaders on projects big and small, bringing senior strategy, creative thinking, and the experience to turn a good opportunity into something special.
Bring us the problem that's been sitting on your desk.
We'll see what we can do.
Let's talk about your next project.
No elaborate courtship. No agency theater. No massive presentation.
Unless you specifically request one.
In which case, we're going to have some questions.
Russell Quinan is Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of TheorySF, a San Francisco brand strategy and creative agency helping ambitious companies find their difference and turn it into work people actually give a damn about. He also hosts Marketing Mischief & Mayhem, featuring conversations with CMOs and marketing leaders about brands, creativity, growth, and the occasional spectacularly bad marketing decision.
