The Quiet Reason Good Marketers Get Cut First
The work that gets a marketer called “useless” is often good work. It just had no number attached to it.
That gap is worth understanding right now.
When budgets tighten and AI starts absorbing the production side of the job, the first people cut are the ones whose work no one above them can price.
This is a career problem first, a craft issue second.
And you can fix it on purpose.
3 things to know
“Useless” often means “unaccounted for”
When leadership cannot trace your work to revenue, pipeline, retention, or cost saved, they fill the gap with a guess, and the guess runs low.
You can do excellent work for two years and still read as overhead, because unmeasured spend looks like overhead from the top.
The label is a verdict on the accounting, not the talent.
AI is sorting the people who owned activity from the people who owned outcomes
The parts of marketing easiest to automate are the parts easiest to see: the posts, the briefs, the campaign builds, the reporting.
For years that visible activity passed as a decent proxy for value.
Now a tool produces it in minutes, and anyone whose worth lived in the doing has lost their cover.
The judgment that decides what to do and why was always the scarcer thing, and most marketers never made it clear to a single person above them.
The market has started treating marketing as a generic skill
More leaders now believe they can hire a sharp generalist, hand them a few tools, and get most of the way there.
They are wrong about the ceiling and right about the floor.
The floor of marketing is cheap and fast now.
If your work lives near that floor, the person paying for it can do the math, and increasingly they do.
2 moves to make
Pick one number you can credibly move, and claim it in writing this quarter
Look one level up from your own work at the outcomes the business actually tracks, pipeline contribution, activation, retention, payback, and find the one your work most directly touches.
Then tell your manager, in writing: this is the number I am driving, here is the baseline, here is where I expect it to go.
Naming it changes how your work gets read for the rest of the year, before anyone else decides what to call it.
Run the “what breaks if I vanish” test on your own role
Write the honest answer to one question: if you disappeared tomorrow, what specifically stops working, and how long until someone notices.
If the answer is “the posts stop” or “the reports are late,” you are sitting near the automatable floor.
If the answer is “we lose the judgment that decides where the budget goes,” you have something a tool cannot copy.
Wherever the answer comes out thin, that is your work for the next two quarters: move your weight from the doing to the deciding.
1 question to sit with
What number would your CEO use to defend your role in a budget meeting you were not in?
If you are trying to figure out which number to claim and how to make the case for it, that is the kind of thing I help with one on one. Reply to this email and tell me where you are stuck.
Hakan | Founder, Marketers Remote