Marketing has a middle management problem. Too many mid-level managers built their careers on channel specialism rather than customer-first strategic thinking, and the spread of generative AI is now exposing that structural weakness with uncomfortable clarity.

That is the argument laid out in a recent Marketing Week opinion piece, which draws on a first-hand account of an agile content operating model test to illustrate how deep the problem runs.

During the experiment, marketers briefed content producers directly, bypassing long agency briefings, set-piece creative reviews and bureaucratic process. The test was designed to check whether the team could operate without that process overhead — and whether it had sufficient strategic and creative thinking to do so.

A junior marketer, using AI to "make me a brief", produced a document that looked the part but contained no identifiable customer segment, no customer insight, no sense of the brand's distinctive role, and no evidence of judgement or curiosity. According to the author, it was "a competent rectangle of emptiness".

The revealing moment came when her senior manager reviewed the work. Rather than addressing the vacuous brief, the manager focused on surface-level execution: a headline tweak, an image swap, a formatting suggestion, a reminder about "how we usually do it for digital or social content". Nothing on who the customer is, the barrier to overcome, or why only the brand in question could solve the problem.

The author's conclusion: the fault lay not with the junior marketer, whose inexperience is expected, but with the middle management layer. This cohort, the author argues, was not simply under-developed but "structurally mis-developed" — shaped by years of channel-first marketing, rewarded for tactical fluency over framing, optimisation over discernment.

AI exposes a pre-existing hollow

The piece rejects the common framing that AI is collapsing junior roles. "AI isn't collapsing junior roles. It is exposing a truth we've been avoiding for too long: for many practitioners, marketing stopped being strategic long before AI arrived," the author writes.

Because execution competence was the only thing these managers were ever rewarded for, judgement — the ability to frame, choose and discern at a strategic level — was never taught, let alone valued. The result is managers who micromanage juniors' work because they don't know how to coach, and who in some cases don't recognise the need to evolve even as AI automates the very activities their careers were built on.

The author is explicit that these are not bad marketers but mis-developed ones, produced by a system that confused narrow channel specialism with strategic capability, rewarded output over commercial outcome, and let process replace judgement.

The learning ladder rotted long ago

The traditional route to marketing judgement relied on time: sitting beside someone who knew what good looked like, watching them frame a problem, seeing what they chose to leave out, absorbing judgement through proximity and practice rather than theory. Those opportunities have largely disappeared.

AI is now removing the low-stakes tasks where critical thinking, curiosity and imagination used to develop. It can accelerate competence, the author notes, but not wisdom. It is already making clear who has been building marketing judgement as a core capability and who has been building only channel expertise.

A new mandate for the CMO

The answer, the piece argues, sits with the CMO — not as a functional department head but as a steward of marketing judgement. Judgement cannot be outsourced, delegated or automated; it can only be grown, deliberately and repeatedly.

Concrete measures the author proposes include:

• Reinstating live brief reviews that teach people to sharpen the problem, not just polish the asset
• Making managers accountable for coaching strategic choices, not simply approving outputs
• Creating standards for what constitutes a good brief, a good insight and a good creative argument
• Protecting time for learning and practice
• Refusing to let channel fluency pass for marketing capability

The modern CMO's job, the author writes, is "to rebuild a craft": developing marketers who can frame strategic arguments and enable breakthrough creativity to solve business problems, not just assemble decks or execute campaigns.

The piece closes on a blunt assessment: "AI didn't hollow out the middle. It simply revealed that we had. The ladder is broken, but the craft is not." The future, it argues, belongs to marketing leaders willing to rebuild judgement itself — in their teams, their agencies and themselves.

Source: Marketing Week (https://www.marketingweek.com/marketing-solve-middle-management-problem/)