The marketing department autopsy report

I was in a planning meeting recently that took three hours. Three hours to agree not more than a headline. By the time we'd finished, a competitor had already shipped something similar and moved on to the next thing.

This is what we built. We built marketing like a civil service. Layered. Titled. Ritualised. The strategist thinks. The creative director adds vision. The copywriter adds words. The designer adds polish. The social team schedules it. The compliance team deletes half of it.

Three weeks later, something stumbles out the door. It's late. It's beige. It cost a fortune. Meanwhile, a 23-year-old with Claude and Midjourney shipped three campaigns before we agreed if the headline should say "empowering" or "enabling".

We didn't just build a slow system. We built one optimised for a world that no longer exists. Like a loyalty card for a DVD rental shop.

Let's not call this a disruption. Let's call it what it is. Small teams with tools are now moving faster than big teams with process. While some are still rewriting the brief, others have already tested five ideas and moved on. The specialist stack wasn't streamlined. It was sidelined.

We used to pay for execution. Design. Craft. Copy. Now most of that is cheaper, faster and often, if I'm being honest, often better when done by machine. If your value is tied to what you produce, you've probably already been replaced. You just haven't been told yet.

We were trained to be hedgehogs. Pick a lane. Stay there. Climb the ladder. But the foxes, the curious, cross-trained, judgment-led ones, are moving faster, breaking rules, and skipping the whole approval chain.

AI makes average execution free. So the value has moved. You're not paid for your polish anymore. You're paid for your taste. Not whether you can write the ad, but whether you can tell the difference between an ad that works and one that just fills space.

Your job now is to spot the tension before the brief. To choose the 10x idea over the 10th revision. To move fast without losing the plot.

So how do we fix this? That six-person social pod? It's now two generalists with taste, AI tools, and the permission to act. The old model was "I do my bit, then pass it along." The new model is "I can make the call, do the work, and hit publish before lunch." This isn't about finding unicorns. It's about removing the need for unicorns.

Our seven-layer approval chain isn't quality control. It's momentum loss. Sharp teams set boundaries, act fast, and review while it still matters. Not "Is this perfect?" but "Did it work?" As my dad, a doctor, used to say: "Don't wait for the autopsy to fix something you could've caught in triage."

Nobody cares how many banners we shipped. Start tracking how fast you move from insight to action. That's the real metric now. Every handoff slows you down. Every sync meeting is a tax. Every job title that starts with "liaison" should come with a warning label.

Smart teams won't make coordination more efficient. They'll make it unnecessary.