There was a time, not so very long ago, when ascending to the top of a marketing organization meant you could finally stop making things. The corner office came with strategic responsibilities, budgetary authority and — perhaps most cherished of all — the privilege of never again having to build a landing page.
That era, according to one senior financial services marketer, may be ending.
Jonathan Harrop, vice president of marketing and communications for wholesale lending at Citigroup, argues that artificial intelligence tools are compressing what once required entire teams into tasks a single person can accomplish before lunch. The result, he said in a recent interview, is that chief marketing officers who have not personally executed campaign work in a decade or two may soon find themselves doing exactly that.
"A lot of CMOs are probably going to have to take on a little more IC work and be a little more in the weeds than they have been traditionally," Mr. Harrop said, using the corporate shorthand for "individual contributor." (One imagines some corner offices growing suddenly quieter.)
The efficiency gains are real, he noted. "Setting up a landing page for a campaign now takes five minutes," Mr. Harrop said. "I remember spending hours doing landing pages for campaigns."
But efficiency, as it tends to do, arrives with complications. Mr. Harrop acknowledged that marketing organizations will face "tough decisions about junior employees and middle-level employees" as the tools improve. The question of how many managers a department actually requires, he suggested, is about to be asked more frequently.
Mr. Harrop, who has been serving as a juror for industry awards, observed that artificial intelligence appeared in nearly every submission he reviewed — somewhere in the analysis, the planning or the optimization. He even suggested that search marketing categories may require reconceptualization as answer engines replace traditional search results.
Yet he pushed back against predictions that machine-generated creative work would quickly supplant the human variety. "Every ad I've seen that is pure AI, if you look at the comments, they are massively negative," he said. "Consumers have really latched on to the tells."
The future Mr. Harrop describes is one in which the marketing profession becomes, in his words, "fundamentally multidisciplinary" — less a collection of specialists and more a gathering of people who can do several things reasonably well. His advice to new graduates: "Don't go down one side."
For senior marketers who spent years earning the right to delegate, the message is somewhat different. The tools they championed may now require them to use them.
Original story published in The Drum: "Inside the Jury Room: Citi’s Jonathan Harrop on why AI is dragging CMOs back into the weeds | The Drum"