The marketing department, rebuilt

The first time I built a marketing department, nobody handed me an organisation chart. They handed me a budget line, a list of expectations and a launch date. No team, no agencies, no brand guidelines worth the name. A blank page and a deadline.

The temptation in that moment is always the same. You pick up a pen and start drawing boxes. A head of digital here, a communications manager there, an events lead, a designer, an agency for this and another one for that. It feels like progress. It even looks like a department.

It is not. It is a guess with job titles.

I spent more than a decade building marketing functions from nothing and running others from the inside before Forward Media existed. What follows is what that taught me, and what I would design differently with the tools on the table today.

Most departments were never designed

Look closely at the marketing department in most organisations in our region and you will find something that grew rather than something that was designed. A communications team here, a digital unit there, an agency roster that expanded with every new priority. For years that worked well enough, because the job was mostly the same every year: plan the calendar, brief the agencies, launch the campaigns, report the activity.

That job has changed underneath them. Gartner's 2025 CMO Spend Survey, mostly of large companies in North America and Europe, found marketing budgets flat at 7.7% of company revenue, with 59% of CMOs saying they do not have enough budget to execute their strategy. In the same survey, 39% said they plan to cut back on agency budgets, and 22% said generative AI has already reduced their reliance on external agencies for creativity and strategy. Meanwhile The CMO Survey put generative AI at 15.1% of marketing activities in spring 2025, more than double the 7.0% of a year earlier.

So the budget is flat, AI's share of marketing work more than doubled in twelve months, and the agency model most departments were built around is being cut back. And the structure? In most places it is the same one somebody drew ten years ago.

Plenty of activity, very little memory

The typical department is organised around outputs: campaigns, content, events, media. Each has its own team, its own suppliers and its own way of measuring success. What it rarely has is a place where the important decisions get made, and a way to learn from one quarter to the next.

Try a simple test. Ask what your department learned last year that changes what it does this year. In most organisations the honest answer is a long pause. Not because the people are not good. Because nothing was designed to remember. The learning left with the agency, the consultant or the manager who moved on.

And managers do move on. Spencer Stuart puts the average tenure of a chief marketing officer at an S&P 500 company at 4.1 years. Four years is not enough time to rebuild a department by accident. It has to be done on purpose.

The question is no longer how to make more. It is how to decide better, and how to keep what you learn.

Structure follows decisions

Here is the lesson the blank page teaches, and it is simpler than it sounds. Structure follows decisions.

Before you hire anyone, write down the decisions the department has to own. Not tasks. Decisions. Which audiences matter most this year. Which ideas go ahead and which ones are stopped. Where the money moves when something is not working. What the brand will never say. Who signs off, and on what evidence.

The list is always shorter than people expect. Ten decisions, perhaps a dozen, carry most of the weight. Everything else is execution. Once you know them, the structure almost draws itself: who makes each decision, what they need to see before they make it, and which teams, partners and tools serve it.

Do it the other way round, boxes first, and the organisation chart quietly becomes the strategy. You end up with a department shaped like its suppliers.

What I would design differently today

If I were building those same functions now, three things would change.

1. Judgement at the centre

When production is cheap, the scarce skill is knowing what is worth producing. Gartner's respondents already report generative AI paying back in time (49%) and cost (40%). The volume problem is being solved. The judgement problem is not.

So I would put the most senior thinking where the briefs are written, not where the approvals pile up. And I would be explicit about AI, with three short lists everyone can see: what AI does, what AI drafts and a person decides, and what AI never touches. Anything that speaks for the brand in a moment of risk, anything that needs you to know the room, anything that decides who the brand is, stays with people.

2. A system, not a calendar

A calendar tells you what is next. A system tells you what worked. I would connect data, content and channels so that every campaign leaves the department smarter than it found it: one brief format, one place where results live, one weekly review where the team decides what to stop, what to scale and what to test next.

This is not an argument against agencies. The ANA found that 82% of its members had an in-house agency by 2023, up from 42% in 2008, and yet 92% of respondents still work with external agencies. The best departments are not choosing between inside and outside. They are deciding what must be owned and what can be borrowed. Memory, data and judgement must be owned. Depth can be borrowed, from partners who are genuinely better at one thing.

3. Proof from day one

Before the work starts, I would agree what success means in the language leadership already speaks: revenue, reputation, behaviour. Then I would build the measurement before the campaign, not after it. Activity would still be counted. It would no longer be the answer.

A department that can show what it changed does not spend every budget season defending itself. It gets asked for next year's plan.

What it looks like on a Monday

Strip away the theory and a rebuilt department is recognisable by its habits.

• The week starts with decisions, not a status meeting.
• Every brief names the decision it serves and the evidence that will judge it.
• The rules for AI are written down, and everyone knows them.
• Results go to one place, and the team reads them together.
• Agencies are briefed on outcomes and kept for depth, not volume.

None of this needs a new building or a new headcount plan. It needs someone willing to start with the decisions.

Where to start

• Write down the ten decisions your department makes that matter most, and who makes each one.
• Map where your data, content and learning live today, and where they get lost.
• Pick one outcome leadership cares about and build the measurement around it first.

Bottom line

The department you need is not bigger. It is better designed. Budgets will stay tight, the tools will keep getting faster, and the people at the top will keep changing. The only thing that compounds is what the department decides to keep.

So, when did your department last decide what it is for?

Sources 4

1. Gartner, 2025 CMO Spend Survey, press release, 12 May 2025. Fieldwork February to March 2025, 402 CMOs and marketing leaders.
2. The CMO Survey, Spring 2025, Duke University Fuqua School of Business, 281 marketing leaders.
3. Spencer Stuart, CMO Tenure 2026 (data as of June 2025), as reported by Marketing Dive, 26 January 2026.
4. ANA, In-House Agency Report, 2023.