Dear CMO: What If You Had a Blank Page?
Recently, we heard a CMO say that “times of economic pressure are when we see the greatest creativity and solutions.” You know what they say: “Pressure makes diamonds.”
But what if we could set ourselves up for creative breakthroughs without pressure? What if we could draw inspiration not from outside forces, but by thoughtful design?
Picture this: Tomorrow morning, you walk into the office and suddenly there are:
No inherited processes: that approval bottleneck that meant campaigns took weeks to get off the ground is gone.
No legacy investments: suddenly those media dollars no longer locked into channels that stopped working two years ago.
No "that's how we've always done it" weighing down your every decision; no incredible talent leaving the team because they couldn’t actually do their jobs.
✨A dream ✨
This does not have to seem like a distant pipe dream but rather a reality that is within reach.
Our Challenge: Start with a blank page and imagine your perfect work world.
What would your team look like?
Where would you be spending your time and money?
How would you be getting things done?
Here’s some inspiration to help you sketch out the future.
Your Team
Without decades old departmental silos, you'd likely create fluid, cross-functional teams. Your best strategist would sit directly with your top creative and your media expert, not three floors apart in different buildings (or different states). You'd hire for curiosity and adaptability over tenure and specialized degrees.
You’d be reimagining entire functions assuming AI from the start (don’t worry, you’ve already let AI execute the more rote and routine tasks for months). You’d know where you plan to deploy the available talent as humans shift from prompters to orchestrators.
Your Go To Market
You'd start with where your customers actually are, not where your budgets used to live. That might mean 60% TikTok and podcasts instead of 60% traditional display.
You'd measure incrementality from day one, building attribution that actually works instead of retrofitting broken measurement onto legacy channels.
Your media mix would be dynamic, shifting budget weekly based on performance data rather than locked-in annual commitments to vendors who've had your business for years.
Your Ways of Working
Gone would be the twelve-layer approval process that turns breakthrough ideas into good-enough compromises.
Instead, you'd build rapid prototyping and agility into everything – testing concepts with real customers before the boardroom. Your creative would be accountable to performance, not internal politics.
Your calendar would drive impact with intentional working time and purposeful meetings - not ones stood up 18 months ago.
The truth is you can't burn it all down tomorrow, but you can start building the future state today.
Here are some of our go-to practices for teams and people looking to shrink the gap between where they are today and where they want to be.
- Take a look at your teams and ensure they are Real Marketing Teams designed for action, ownership and quick decisions. Rechart them to include AI as a key team member for certain things, allowing everyone to do more, drive more, create more.
- Run a calendar audit today to find intention and focus in your days and free yourself of meetings no longer serving you.
- Kickoff a KPI reset to find the metrics that matter based on your latest priorities and targets.
- Introduce recurring team-wide retrospectives to build the muscle of transparency and forward focused collaboration.
On our team, we champion the mantra, ‘Start by starting,’ so get that blank piece of paper out, and your favorite pen. Pick one campaign, one team, one process,and design it as if you were starting fresh. Challenge every assumption about what marketing should look like, and make it what it needs to be for your team and your work.
Before you know it, your blank page will start to take shape. It might lead to "innovation zones" within your organization where new (or no!) rules apply — to testing revenue-sharing models with agencies (spicy!) — or even experimenting with AI-first creative development (scary!)
And it might just lead you down the very path you’ve been dreaming about all along.
