Jul 02, 2026

Why Marketing Teams Spend More Time Co-ordinating Than Creating

Marketing teams are rarely short of capability. The talent is there, the processes are sensible, the budgets are reasonable. What is in shorter supply is room. Room to think, room to move from one piece of work to the next without dragging a long tail of co-ordination behind it.

That shortage rarely shows up in a single moment. It shows up in the volume of status updates needed to keep a piece of work moving. In the number of people who need to be briefed, looped in, reassured, or reminded before something straightforward can be approved. In the realisation on a Friday afternoon that a significant share of the week was spent co-ordinating work rather than improving it.

The Hidden Work Nobody Talks About

This is the part of the production conversation that does not get enough attention.

There is a generation of marketing and creative talent that joined the industry to make things, shape ideas, and produce work they could point to with pride. Increasingly, the job they actually do is something different. It is the job of moving work between people.

That work is valuable. The people who are good at it are often the people organisations rely on most. Yet it remains largely invisible. It does not appear in a portfolio and rarely translates neatly into a performance review. And it is not why most people entered the industry in the first place. Over time, that gap between the job people expected and the job they actually do becomes its own form of attrition.

AI Will Speed Up Production but Will it Reduce Friction?

This is where the current AI conversation becomes interesting. AI is being introduced in many organisations with the promise of relieving pressure. In some areas, it genuinely will. Production capabilities are advancing rapidly and, for the right tasks, the gains are real.

But faster production does not automatically reduce the co-ordination burden surrounding the work. The making becomes quicker while the deciding, aligning, reviewing, and handing over remains just as heavy as before. The bottleneck simply moves further upstream and becomes easier to see.

Back to the Work That Matters

The changes that ease this pressure are rarely dramatic. Fewer hands on each piece of work, with clearer authority for the people who remain. Production capability organised so it does not need to be rebuilt every time. Decisions made earlier, when course correction is still inexpensive. A willingness to recognise that when co-ordination dominates a role, it is often a sign that the system surrounding that role needs attention.

When those shifts happen, the volume of work does not necessarily change. What changes is what the work is made of. People spend more time creating, solving, improving and less time chasing, translating, and reconnecting threads that should never have become disconnected in the first place.

The Question Worth Asking

That, increasingly, is the conversation worth having. Not how to produce more. Not how to produce faster. But how to organise production so the people responsible for it can sustain the pace being asked of them and still recognise their own job inside it. Because the volume is not going to decrease. Expectations are not going to soften. And technology, however capable, is not going to absorb the operational weight on its own.

Marketing has spent the last decade asking how to produce more. The harder question for the next decade is whether the people inside the system would still choose this job if they were applying for it today.