Editorial
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The New Publishing Standard in the AI Era and What It Replaces
The Gist
- Marketing has become the default landing spot for anything unowned. A jammed printer, a birthday slideshow, or a logo that needs to be bigger is not marketing's job, but all of it ends up there because marketing is the team that makes things look finished.
- The cost isn't one big miss. It's a hundred small yeses. New CEO and CMO research backs this up. Leaders who absorb every small request lose the room to do the strategic work they're measured on.
- One intake point and a clear conversation with the CEO can fix this. Marketing leaders need agreement on what belongs on the team's plate, then a process that enforces it.
A logo needed to be bigger, so that went to marketing. A jammed printer became a marketing problem. A birthday slideshow for an executive's assistant turned into a marketing deliverable.
Talk to enough marketing leaders and you'll hear a version of this same list.
Abbie Hill, a fractional CMO, put it more bluntly: "Marketing has become the organizational junk drawer. If no one knows who owns it, it somehow ends up on Marketing's desk."
These requests don't belong to marketing, but all of them end up there anyway, because marketing is the team that makes things look finished, and the team that finishes things becomes the team everyone hands their unfinished business to.
Why Does Marketing Get Requests Finance and Operations Don't?
Leadership sees marketing as the team that gets things done, not the team that decides what's worth doing. CEO scrutiny keeps rising while marketing's influence over revenue lags, so every stray task looks like a fair ask.
Why Does Marketing Get Every Task Nobody Else Owns?
CEOs aren't quiet about where they've landed on this. The CMO Survey found that even as marketing's influence keeps growing, the function still plays a limited role in revenue growth, product innovation and market selection. More visibility hasn't bought marketing more say in the numbers that CEOs track, and that gap is what's driving the pressure. Sixty-one percent of marketing leaders report greater scrutiny from CEOs than two years ago, up from 51%.
That shift explains more than it seems to. If leadership already sees marketing as the team that gets things done rather than the team that decides what's worth doing, every stray task looks like a fair ask. Finance and operations don't get the same requests because they aren't known as the department that finishes things. Marketing is.
How Small Off-Plan Requests Crowd Out Marketing Strategy
The deeper issue isn't that marketing says yes too often. It's that most marketing functions don't have a structure that makes saying no defensible. Gartner's research on CMO strategic dysfunction found that 61% of CMOs say their plans are driven primarily by operational needs, like prioritizing whatever work shows up next, and 94% say translating company strategy into an actual marketing plan is a major challenge.
When there's no filter for what belongs on marketing's plate, everything qualifies. A request that takes 15 minutes doesn't feel worth pushing back on. Ten of those in a week add up to a full day. A month of that, and the campaign that would have moved pipeline is the one that gets bumped to next quarter. There's no single bad call to point to, just a hundred reasonable ones that add up to a missed strategy.
Related Article: Stop Stressing About Marketing ROI and Start Owning It
How Do Small Marketing Requests Derail Strategy?
Without a filter for what belongs on marketing's plate, 15-minute favors add up to a lost day each week. Over a month, the pipeline campaign is what gets bumped.
What Is the Marketing Competence Tax?
I've shared my thoughts on this before, and the replies made the case better than I did. A few lines are worth repeating.
Devin Ewart, an enterprise systems architect, called it a competence tax: "The more problems you successfully solve, the more unrelated problems become yours." That tax comes due on the campaign that needed a full day of uninterrupted focus, worked instead in 40-minute gaps between favors.
Alexandra Wright, a strategic marketing and AI enablement leader, described a habit she picked up to catch this before it compounds: "Each individual yes is defensible. But six months later the team has a reputation for slide decks, and nobody can figure out why they're not seen as strategic. I've started asking 'what did we say no to this quarter' as a team check."
How to Build Marketing's Intake System From the Ground Up
Editor's note: The following table highlights the most important lessons, actions and strategic considerations emerging from marketing leaders' efforts to make "no" a normal answer to off-plan requests.
| Key Area | What Happened | Why It Matters | Recommended Action |
|---|---|---|---|
| Request Intake | Requests reach marketing through Slack, email, hallway conversations and shared drives | Volume stays invisible until it has already eaten the week | Route every ask through a single form or ticket with a named triage owner |
| Prioritization | Logo resizes and lead-nurture campaigns compete for the same afternoon | Work that moves marketing's measured numbers loses to whatever arrives first | Tie every incoming request to a pipeline, retention or brand metric before it gets a yes |
| Executive Escalation | Senior requests skip the queue without anyone naming the tradeoff | Marketing absorbs the cost of someone else's shortcut unnoticed | Make the CEO the tiebreaker and require the requester to own the tradeoff out loud |
| Workload Measurement | Teams report campaigns launched and content shipped, not hours lost to unplanned work | Without the data, the case for structure is only an argument | Log every off-plan request and the hours it takes for one month, then share the total with leadership |
What Process Keeps Off-Plan Work Off Marketing's Plate?
Route every request through one intake point and score it against pipeline, retention or brand metrics. Queue-jumpers should own the tradeoff out loud, and off-plan hours should be logged, not absorbed.
When Should Marketing Still Say Yes to Off-Plan Requests?
This doesn't mean marketing should turn into the department of no. A leadership request tied to a hard deadline or a genuine crisis still deserves a fast yes. The difference is whether that yes gets tracked and counted against the plan or absorbed as if it cost nothing. Teams that log the exception can show the CEO exactly what got traded away to make room for it. Teams that don't just look busy, then get graded on a strategy they didn’t have the time to build.
Talk to marketing leaders this quarter, and you'll hear the same request over and over. They want a way to see the tradeoff before it costs them a campaign. Pick one month, log every off-plan request that lands on your team, and bring the total to your next leadership meeting. You'll either walk out with the intake process you've been asking for, or a much clearer picture of what marketing got asked to carry.
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