In an age of austerity and AI, a long-simmering trend is accelerating
During my days as a consultant at Deloitte, I collaborated on a study about an unexpected trend. Between 2008 and 2010 – in just two years – the average tenure for a CMO jumped from 28 months to 42 months.
This was surprising. The conventional wisdom was that the life of a CMO was “nasty, brutish, and short.” Corporate marketing was seen as more art than science, and did not directly contribute to revenue in any measurable way. We found a reasonable explanation for this sudden change of heart. Around that time, many more CMOs – many of them women – were coming out of business school, more fluent in the language of the CEO and CFO. The new CMO appeared to be more business-minded than her predecessors. She earned a better seat at the table.
In our published report – “From Mad Man to Superwoman” – we told the story of this transformation by tracking the evolution of the CMO, from the golden age of creatives to the time when CMOs were expected to know it all. Fast forward to the present, and many are expected to do it all.
Enter The Solo Marketer
In recent months, I have witnessed the rise of the solo marketer, that is, one-person marketing operations inside companies, many at the startup or “pre-growth stage.” Having been in the industry for a couple of decades, I can say that this is not entirely new. What is new is how the concept has been so heavily embraced, to the point where it is now being named, defined, and defended. It goes by several names, depending on who you speak with: the one-person marketing team, the T-shaped marketer (older), the full-stack marketer (newer).
The latter is my favorite because it so obviously reveals the bias that employers today have toward technology. The term “full stack” originated in the world of software, to describe the engineer who can do it all. It’s odd to think of marketers as full stack, as if they were mere composites of software.
But the technology bias seems to make business sense. When times are tough, and technology provides a way to reduce the costs of human labor, technology generally wins. (Remember how the PC revolution, the biggest business technology disruption before AI, wiped out an entire profession: secretaries. Many executives learned to adapt and do their own adminstrative work.) For several years, marketing budgets have been shrinking, partly in response to economic uncertainty and social disruption. A recent Gartner report revealed that marketing budgets declined about 15% in the post-pandemic years of 2023 and 2024. It also found that only 24% of CMOs said they had “sufficient budget to execute their 2024 strategy.”
But the rise of the solo marketer parallels a more extreme trend in cost-cutting: the rise of the solopreneur, the one-person business team. With the assistance of advanced tech, entrepreneurs can decide to save on startup costs by doing it all by themselves. This trend radically demonstrates the bias toward tech for solving the challenge of doing more with less.
Costs versus benefits
But solo marketing is not just about reducing costs. It’s about giving the marketer more power, and a sense of agency. Prepping for this article, I chatted online with more than a dozen solo marketers in different industries and different countries. Most regularly use AI, to varying degrees of sophistication, and love the the clout they’ve earned by becoming the sole resource of all things marketing.
“I have a direct line to the company’s leaders, so I can craft a narrative that reinforces what they want the company to be,” said Jeannie Assimos, Head of Content and Communications at Mainlove, a sustainable single-use plastic container company. “I also have the unique vantage point of understanding the brand on a deep level, and I understand what we are trying to accomplish in terms of our mission of highlighting Maine’s natural resources sustainably.”
“As a one-person marketing team, I’m responsible for everything from strategy and brand voice to SEO, content, paid ads, and outbound campaigns,” said Brooke Colglazier at Spacebase, a SF-based SaaS company in the commercial real estate market. “There are real advantages; speed, cohesion, creative control.”
That said, many solo marketers complained about the long hours and burnout, though one confessed to the neurochemical rewards that fuel busy marketers.
“The pros? Agility, ownership, and constant dopamine hits when everything aligns, and strategy, execution, and outcomes lock in, and you can finally stand back and see the fruits of your labor,” said Med Yakoub, Director of Marketing at Tradesk Securities, a New Jersey-based startup brokerage, who uses AI scale the creation of content that is compliant to financial regulations. “The cons? Burnout is real. You’re the strategist, the tactician, the executor — and there’s no one to catch what you drop. Every delay, misfire, or gap ultimately rolls up to you.”
A more serious challenge, at some businesses, is an occupational hazard: lonesomeness. If solo marketers fail to bond with others inside and outside the business, it could adversely affect both the marketer and the business. Beyond the emotional impact on the marketer, “there’s an invisible cost in creative isolation,” said Pakistan-based Babar Khan Javed, a serial solo marketer. “Without peers to challenge your ideas, it’s easy to get stuck in your own echo chamber.”
It reminded me of the echo chambers that AI is creating for people who rely on it too much (a topic for a future article). In the meantime, there may be even a more serious challenge for solo marketers: the nature of their jobs forces them to prioritize short-term results over long-term strategy. “CEOs are obsessed with immediate clicks but forget that if your brand doesn’t mean anything, you won’t scale anything,” said Linda Orr, a veteran marketing strategist who has frequently served in the solo role of fractional CMO. “I spend as much time coaching CEOs out of ‘tactic addiction’ as I do building marketing systems.”
And herein lies the greatest challenge. Can CEOs even expect solo marketers to advise them on things like positioning and brand strategy? Do they even know what to look for in a solo marketer, or should they wait until the need becomes more pressing? The reality is that it’s hard if not impossible to find people who possess all marketing skills, and it’s unlikely one will find them unless they recruit thoughtfully.
“My word of warning is this: when you only have one marketer, an intense amount of effort needs to be put in up front, both vetting them in the hiring process and supporting and onboarding them to prepare them for success,” said Trevor J. English, VP of Marketing at Atlanta-based Ledgible, who has played the solo role at several other startups.
Back to the table
And so the table turns. The scarcity of true full-stack marketers – those who come with a strong human layer – puts pressure on employers.
A former colleague of mine recently landed a solo marketing job at a well-funded martech/adtech firm. Originally, the hiring team was looking for someone less seasoned. An advisor intervened and recommended they take a closer look at senior talent – and pay a bit more money for it – and hire my friend. That of course put some pressure on her, but she found an opportunity to prove herself on the first day of the job.
“In an Uber to O’Hare, I joined a Zoom meeting with our PR team and the lead of commerce media. I have a deep retail background so it was just so natural to jump in and contribute to the discussion.” The depth of her experience enabled her to immediately establish her strategic bona fides. And her command of AI, which she uses for creating customer personae and data analysis, completed her profile as a full-stack marketer.
Weighing the rewards and risks, what should marketers and their employers be thinking about?
First, the expanding role of AI in the marketing workplace is inevitable. There’s no sense fighting it, and it’s an opinion shared by creatives and technologists alike. Nancy Duarte, the renowned visual storytelling consultant, recently shared her thoughts with me . “Using AI in marketing roles is like adding a jet pack to your work. Some will take it to new heights and some fail to navigate it well and crash. It’s all about the user.”
Second, not all solo marketers are created equal. So-called “soft skills” will continue to differentiate the best and the brightest, and employers will need to compete for them, as they always have.
But finally, marketers today is in a position where it may need to reposition itself. Behind the corporate drive to do more with less, of course, is the relentless corporate mandate to cut costs. Over the past few months, I’ve heard from several prominent leaders that aspects of their work have been devalued, so much so that they had to redefine what they do to show a measurable impact on revenue, an insight corroborated by the Gartner report, which urged marketers to take steps to “change the perception of marketing from a cost center to a profit driver.”
It’s 2010 all over again. Marketers will need to earn a better seat at the table. But this time they’ll come in jet packs.
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