Why the institutions developing marketing leaders are producing the wrong capability for the moment that matters The belief this piece is challenging The assumption most organisations operate on, implicitly if not explicitly, is that the marketing leadership gap is a resourcing problem. That if organisations invested more in training, if universities built stronger industry relationships, […]
Monthly Archives: May 2026
May
28
Marketing Leadership minus the hype 5: The resilience dividend
posted by Mike O'Brien
The brands that will perform through disruption are not those with the most sophisticated crisis response infrastructure. They are those whose leaders understood, early enough to act on it, that resilience is not built in the moment of crisis. It is accumulated quietly, over time, through investment in human capability, direct customer relationships, and the kind of genuine authority that travels independently of platform favour. This piece closes the series by making the case that people first is not a soft position. It is the highest-returning long-term investment available to marketing leadership.
May
28
Marketing Leadership Minus the hype 4: the platform trap
posted by Mike O'Brien
Every investment made in optimising for a platform’s current requirements is an investment in a relationship whose terms are controlled entirely by the other party. Search fragmentation is not a discoverability problem. It is a sovereignty problem. Here is what marketing leaders should build instead.
May
27
Marketing Leadership minus the hype 3: Stop performing authenticity
posted by Mike O'Brien
The case for treating brand behaviour as an investment rather than a communications strategy There is a version of authenticity that most marketing organisations are very good at. It involves carefully articulated value statements, brand purpose frameworks that run to thirty slides, social media presences calibrated to sound human and occasionally self-deprecating, and campaign work […]
May
26
Marketing Leadership minus the hype 2: The measurement trap
posted by Mike O'Brien
Why the attribution crisis is a leadership problem disguised as a data problem The marketing industry’s response to the erosion of third-party cookie tracking has been, in its broad shape, technically impressive and strategically insufficient. First-party data infrastructure has been rebuilt at considerable expense. Data clean rooms have been deployed to enable privacy-compliant measurement across […]
May
26
Marketing leadership minus the hype 1: Judgment over speed
posted by Mike O'Brien
Time to value human judgement rather than simply accelerate activity There is a contradiction at the heart of modern marketing that most leaders feel but few have named, certainly not in the volume of content currently competing to name it for them. Marketing has never had more capability. More data, more channels, more automation, more […]
May
12
Consolidation and the capability crisis
posted by Mike O'Brien
What the holding company model did to marketing capability Something happened to marketing capability over the last three decades and the industry has been reluctant to say it plainly. It wasn’t a skills shortage in the conventional sense. The talent was there. Brilliant people kept entering the profession, and many of them were genuinely exceptional. […]
May
11
Marketing minus the hype: Shared fictions
posted by Mike O'Brien
Listen to the Jam Read the Jam Welcome to our Marketing minus the hype Jam.This episode: the shared fictions that built marketing, brands, and maybe civilisation itself. There’s an uncomfortable truth sitting underneath almost every successful brand in the world. People do not buy products alone.They buy meaning. A logo is ink.A luxury watch tells […]
May
11
Marketing, minus the hype: Why marketing gets you in a spin.
posted by Mike O'Brien
Watch the Jam Read the transcript Welcome to Marketing, minus the hype. This episode: Why marketing gets you in a spin. There is a feeling many marketers recognise. The work never really stops. Campaigns roll into campaigns.Reports follow reports.Ideas are replaced before they are tested. It feels like movement.It looks like progress.But it often creates […]
May
06
Marketing, minus the hype: Burnout is not a capacity problem
posted by Mike O'Brien
Listen to the jam Read the transcript Welcome to Marketing, minus the hype. This episode: Why burnout is not a capacity problem. There is a pattern in modern marketing. More tools.More content.More reporting. It looks like progress.It feels like effort.But for many teams, it leads somewhere else. Burnout. And the data is difficult to ignore. […]
May
06
Marketing Minus the hype: strategy is not a document
posted by Mike O'Brien
Listen to the Jam Read the transcript Welcome to Marketing, minus the hype. This episode: Why strategy is not a document. There is a common output in marketing:the strategy deck. Slides.Frameworks.Plans. It feels complete.It looks structured.It signals progress. But it can be misleading. Because strategy is not what is written. It is what is decided. […]
