Something has been showing up in our client work for larger enterprises lately. We're being asked to engage sooner in the process than an agency would typically be brought onto a project. Can you come lead this session? Can you facilitate the team through this? Can you run the workshop before we start building?
It's strategic infrastructure work that we love to do and we're very happy to have it, so no complaints. But these shifts don't exist in a vacuum and we've been wondering whether it means something beyond our own situation.
Is the market telling us something about where enterprise marketing is right now?
There are a number of trends we regularly discuss here that could offer some perspective on the shift. First, the content machine inside large marketing organizations has never moved faster. AI has made sure of that. More output, more channels, more markets, more velocity. At the same time as more resources are required, staffing budgets are, thanks to the expectations bestowed upon us all by AI hype, either frozen or falling.
Secondly, the strategic layer that is supposed to sit above all of that, the place where the story gets built before the brief goes out, that layer is not keeping pace. It's not being cut, but it's not being adequately addressed either. Frequently we're seeing shallow briefs clearly written with an LLM with little human editing.
And the reality is that there is no time to spend doing things properly. The team is too deep in delivery. Enterprise seems to be firmly in their entrepreneur era. Wearing too many hats and a to do list you can barely put a dent in.
Another long tail effect may finally be surfacing as well. We've noticed that in-house creative teams have become much more competent and attracted much better talent over the past decade, especially in tech. That improvement in execution may have come at the expense of strategy, revealing a fundamental trade off between the two.
Is this a blip or an emerging realignment? Time will tell.
—Jay & Adam at FamousFolks
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📸 SNAPSHOT:
If you're short on time, here's what matters in this issue:
The machine is running, strategy isn't: Enterprise marketing teams are producing more than ever. The strategic layer directing that output is not keeping pace.
Not an isolated feeling: More than half of CMOs report they lack the budget to execute the strategy they already have.
AI made it worse: Content velocity has accelerated, but that speed got absorbed by volume, not thinking time.
The agency model is being rewritten from the client side: Agencies are being trusted to step in where the internal team has run out of bandwidth to think.
Get the details below.
Looking to bring this type of thinking into your mid-market or enterprise brand?
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💥 MARKET MOVES:
Turns out evidence of a gap in marketing team strategy is not hard to find
Gartner's 2025 CMO Spend Survey found that 59% of CMOs report they do not have sufficient budget to execute their strategy. That number gets cited a lot as a budget story, which it is, but we think it’s also telling us something else.
CMOs set the vision. That work gets done. What does not get done is the layer of strategic thinking that translates that vision into specific campaigns, specific stories, specific creative directions. That's not technically execution as we tend to think of it. It's thinking work. It just happens at the project level rather than the planning level. And it is the first thing that disappears when the team is buried in delivery.
Pepper needs a new set of creative briefs (IYKYK).
So when more than half of CMOs say they cannot execute their strategy, we suspect what they are really describing is a gap between the vision and the work. A missing layer. The brief gets written fast, often with an assist from an LLM and not much else. The translation step is effectively skipped. Production starts. And the campaign runs but never quite does what it was supposed to do.
The data elsewhere points in the same direction. The Spring 2025 CMO Survey found that AI now powers 17.2% of marketing efforts, double what it was in 2022, with leaders projecting it will reach 44% within three years. More output. More channels. And again more velocity. And 64% of marketing leaders say demonstrating the impact of marketing actions on financial outcomes is their top challenge, with pressure from CEOs, CFOs and boards climbing sharply year over year. That's downward pressure exacerbating the problem.
More to produce. More to justify. The thinking layer catches what is left.
📊 DATA & INSIGHTS:
Outsourcing logic is moving upstream
The 59% figure from Gartner deserves more than a mention. It's one of the stickier data points in terms of impact in recent marketing research because it names a gap most organizations are still trying to manage around rather than address directly.
More than half of CMOs cannot execute their vision, because the bandwidth to drive it through the organization, align the team around it, and protect the process that translates it into coherent work does not exist in sufficient supply.
Time to start channeling your inner Larry David.
What is notable is how teams have begun solving for it. The Spring 2025 CMO Survey also found that full-time employees now represent 77.9% of expected marketing hires, down from 82.5% in 2019. The share of full-time contractors has risen from 5.4% to 7.8% in the same period. Enterprise marketing teams are already reaching outside for capacity. They have been doing it at the executional level for years.
The next movement is the same logic applied one layer up
If you can bring in outside capacity to produce content, design campaigns, and manage channels, you can bring in outside capacity to run the strategic process those things are supposed to be rooted in.
The difference is that the second version requires a different kind of trust. You are not handing someone a brief. You are asking them to be in the room where the brief gets built.
🔥 FAMOUS TAKE:
The brief is where strategy either shows up or doesn't.
Enterprise marketing has a translation problem. And translation requires someone with the time to actually think.
—Jay
Thanks for reading. You could be spending your time anywhere. We’re glad you’re here. 💥
—Jay & Adam
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