The new challenge for marketers: orchestrating expertise

I've started to notice something in almost every conversation I have with marketing leaders.

The first question is usually:

"Can you recommend an agency?"

It's a perfectly reasonable question, but increasingly I think it's the wrong one.

Not because agencies aren't valuable, they absolutely are. In fact, the best agencies have never been more important. But marketing has changed so fundamentally that the real challenge is no longer finding a partner. It's understanding what expertise you need in the first place.

Twenty years ago, most marketing departments looked for a creative agency, a media agency and perhaps a PR partner. Today, the picture is dramatically different.

AI, CRM, customer experience, ecommerce, retail, media, data science, marketing automation, influencer marketing, content strategy, SEO, GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation), community management and performance marketing have all evolved into specialist disciplines in their own right.

The agency landscape has evolved accordingly. The UK alone is home to more than 25,000 marketing, communications and creative agencies, ranging from independent specialists to global networks. For a CMO, choice is no longer the problem. Clarity is.

Marketing leaders aren't simply choosing agencies anymore.

They're navigating an increasingly complex ecosystem of expertise.

Marketing has become exponentially more specialised

Marketing has always evolved, but the pace of change over the last five years has been extraordinary.

Artificial intelligence is reshaping content creation, search and customer service. Privacy regulation has transformed data and measurement. Customer journeys now span dozens of touchpoints across owned, earned, paid and increasingly AI-driven channels. At the same time, marketing teams are expected to deliver more with tighter budgets and leaner internal resources.

According to Gartner, marketing budgets have fallen to around 7.7% of company revenue, down significantly from pre-pandemic levels, while expectations around growth, personalisation and measurable ROI continue to rise.

The result is that marketing leaders are being asked to master an ever-expanding number of disciplines without proportionate increases in resources.

Few organisations can justify employing world-class specialists across every discipline.

Equally, very few agencies can genuinely claim to excel at everything.

This isn't a criticism of agencies.

It's simply a reflection of how specialised marketing has become.

Start with the challenge, not the solution

One of the most common conversations I have begins with a solution.

"We need a creative agency."

"We're looking for an AI partner."

"It's time to review our digital agency."

Yet as the conversation develops, the challenge often turns out to be something quite different. A perceived brand problem may actually be a customer experience issue. An underperforming campaign might stem from poor audience insight rather than weak creative. Flat ecommerce sales may be caused by friction in the customer journey rather than ineffective media buying. Poor lead generation might reflect an unclear proposition rather than a demand generation problem.

What initially appears to be a communications challenge frequently turns out to be a commercial, operational or customer experience issue. The brief evolves because understanding deepens.

What starts as a search for a new agency often becomes a conversation about proposition, customer insight, organisational capability or data maturity.

The best agencies recognise this. Rather than rushing to sell a service, they spend time diagnosing the problem.

Because solving the wrong problem brilliantly still produces the wrong outcome.

Expertise should follow the challenge

Long term agency relationships remain incredibly valuable, particularly where deep brand understanding and integrated delivery matter.

What's changing is how brands complement those relationships with specialist expertise.

I recently worked with a brand that already had trusted agency partners. They weren't looking for another agency, they wanted an independent perspective to help shape a new positioning across customer experience, communications and international markets.

Once the challenge was clearly defined, identifying the right specialist expertise became much easier.

It's not always about replacing agency partners. It's about bringing in the right expertise at the right time, ensuring everyone is aligned around the same commercial objective.

Increasingly, the role of the CMO is becoming less about managing suppliers and more about orchestrating expertise.

Knowing when to lean on trusted partners.

Knowing when to introduce specialist capability.

And perhaps most importantly, ensuring everyone is aligned around the same commercial objective.

The best marketers are becoming conductors

The best CMOs I meet today remind me less of traditional marketing directors and more of orchestra conductors.

They aren't expected to play every instrument.

They're expected to know which instrument is needed, when it should come in and how everything works together to create the desired outcome.

That's a very different skill.

It requires curiosity, diagnosis and a willingness to challenge assumptions before commissioning work.

Five questions worth asking

Before writing a brief or beginning an agency search, it's worth asking:

1. What business problem are we actually trying to solve?

2. What commercial outcome are we hoping to achieve?

3. What's preventing us from getting there today?

4. What expertise is genuinely missing?

5. How will we know we've succeeded?

They're deceptively simple questions.

But in my experience, they often lead to a very different brief from the one you started with.

The most successful marketing partnerships rarely begin with a pitch.

They begin with curiosity.

Because in today's marketing landscape, the challenge isn't finding an agency.

It's finding the right expertise. And then bringing the right experts together around the problem that really matters.