Your Marketing Framework Is Also a Career Strategy
I started the Experimental Marketer Framework for companies. Turned inward, it becomes a career audit you can run this week.
This is another article on the process of developing my framework and my book.
Here we are covering the last E of the Experimental Marketer Framework: Evolve. This E was the last one to be added, when I realized the framework could work not only for the marketer's company but also for a marketer's own career.
Then, in truly Experimental fashion, I had nine collaborators in this chapter to discuss some possibilities for the future of marketing work.
Interested in reviewing an early copy of my book? Reply to this email and let me know!
Hope you enjoy, Ana
I built the Experimental Marketer Framework to (primarily) make marketing organizations stronger. Eight capabilities, the eight Es, each one a way to make the function around you work better. Explore the ecosystem. Engage the stakeholders. Exchange the process. Experiment, Embrace the change, connect Everything to the business, Explain the value. Then Evolve.
While I was building (and living) it, I was thinking about the company. The team. The stack. The quarter. The Experimental Marketer Framework started with seven Es. Evolve was not included at first.
But when I started working on the Framework, refining it and explaining it to other marketers, I realized it could also be used to help the marketer’s own career. To help them become more flexible, agile and experimental when it comes to the future of marketing work. At least, it has worked for me, it took being able to name it.
After working with marketing and technology for over 15 years, throughout different industries and including four FORTUNE 500 companies, in all stages of marketing transformation, I can assure: I Explored many ecosystems, Engaged with an array of stakeholders, Exchanged processes, Experimented (and learned from it) and Embraced changes, good and not-so-good, all the while trying to connect Everything back to the business goals and Explaining its value. Then, at the end of all this, I realized I had Evolved professionally: I was able to hold more (and better) conversations with all the different teams involved and was also able to lead projects and own customer data related outcomes that have had no previous owner inside these complex companies.
You are reading The Experimental Marketer Newsletter.
What you get: every week, one martech or AI concept broken down
with real examples, step-by-step walkthroughs, and the career case for why it matters.
Created by a Marketer, for Marketers.
Every time I moved sectors, financial services to hospitality, media to consumer goods, consumer goods to industrial, there was this common thread, even before I was able to recognize (let alone name) it. It is about jumping without starting over every time. I never had clean language for this until I started tinkering with the Framework. The skills that carried across were never the platform certifications or the channel playbooks (these actually have expiration date: what if you join a company that does not work with the stack you have experience with?). What transferred was the ability to walk into an unfamiliar organization and explore how its data actually flowed, engage people who had no reason yet to trust the new person, build exchange where marketing had never collaborated before, and explain results in terms a Finance team stakeholder would act on.
Those capabilities not only do not expire when a tool changes, they actually compound. And somewhere in the last chapter it became obvious that the eight Es were never only an operating system for a marketing function. They were an operating system for a marketing career. The same instrument, turned inward.
This piece is about that turn, and about a decision I made in building the chapter and how it can benefit all types of marketers.
The career question is real, and the data is blunt about it
Start with why the chapter needed to exist at all.
The chapter opens on a marketer who did everything right. Twelve years of strong reviews. Fluent in attribution, automation, segmentation. Then over about eighteen months an AI content tool collapsed her team’s production cycle, an analytics platform automated the reporting she used to own, and a reorg folded her channel expertise into a vaguer “growth” function. She was not fired. She was not demoted. She just sat in meetings no longer sure what she was for.
This is an example I created to illustrate how even the best marketers can miss chances to evolve in their own careers.
Mayfield surveyed more than fifty CMOs this year on how AI is reshaping the marketing org. Seventy-two percent are reallocating budget away from legacy vendors toward AI. Only nine percent describe their AI as agentic, acting proactively, while roughly half are still using it as point solutions. The barriers they name are not budget. They are: trust in the outputs and integration. The work is being rebuilt, unevenly, in real time, and the people inside it can feel the floor moving before the org chart admits it.
The role at the top is also being redrawn in public. In a piece built on sixteen citations, brand.ai and the strategist Eugene Healey trace how the standalone CMO is being filtered out and replaced by something more operational and cross-functional. They quote Gartner’s 2025 CMO survey, which found that 65% of CMOs say advances in AI will dramatically change the CMO role within the next two years, yet only 32% believe significant changes are needed to the CMO profile and skill set, while separate Gartner research indicates just 15% of CEOs view their marketing leader as strongly AI‑savvy today. The gap between those numbers is the career risk, named.
And underneath the executive layer, a new role is being born. Justin Taylor, writing in The Landing Pad, names it the Marketing Engineer, a marketer who builds with AI and sits inside the marketing team. His constraint is the one that matters: marketer first. Not an engineer who learned marketing on the side. Although I disagree we need to add the Marketing Engineer label to get these results (all marketers should then become engineer marketers as this type of work belongs to marketers as they exist now, this is my point of view), I agree that knowing what to build is harder than knowing how to build it. The how can be learned in months now. The what takes years and cannot be googled.
So the career question is not abstract. The operational layer of marketing is compressing into platforms and agents. The question the chapter takes is: When the tasks that have defined your value as a marketer get automated or redistributed, what value do you (human) can actually bring to the table?
Why I answered it with nine voices instead of one
Here is the decision I want to explain, because it is the part of the chapter that is most an argument in itself.
I could have written the careers chapter as a solo thesis. I have a framework, I have the cross-sector proof, I could have run the eight Es down the page in my own voice and called it done. But, alas, I did not. In true Experimental Marketer fashion, I preferred collaboration and built it as a chorus. Nine practitioners, researchers, and leaders, each answering a different part of the question, each in tension with the others.
That structure is the argument. Stay with me here!
The reason I survived through different industries was not that I was the smartest person in any of those rooms. It was that I knew how I could assemble the right people around a problem and synthesize what they brought into something the business could use. A career built on knowing whose judgment to pull in, and how to balance competing expert views into a position you can defend, can become a more durable one. The chapter is built in the only way a resilient career can be built: on purpose.
So the contributors are the chapter’s argument enacted and not just validators to my point of view. Here is the cast, lightly, because the interviews belong to the book and I am not giving them away here (here I am giving you a taste).
Two voices map where career value is actually shifting. Mats Georgson, who carries three decades of brand strategy across academia and practice, holds the line that the timeless fundamentals are in short supply at the senior level. Austin Hay, the technical marketer extraordinaire behind the Growth Stack Mafia newsletter, holds another view, that technical specialization alone is losing its value as a differentiator now that anyone can execute through AI. This is a positive type of “disagreement”, and the reader gets a real map instead of a pep talk.
Two voices cover how you position yourself professionally. Ashley Faus, of Atlassian and the author of a Kogan Page book on human-centered marketing, on building visibility as contribution rather than purely self-promotion through her Content Playground. Scott Brinker, who has shaped how the industry thinks about martech for over a decade, on context as the scarce layer, which is where my own agent-of-context work lives.
Three voices cover how you keep growing. Victoria Ferrier, on the internal game, why retuning beats accumulating certifications. Jacqueline Freedman, on the strategic game, seeing your career as a system rather than a ladder. Avinash Kaushik, on the practical game, using AI as a thinking partner and applying ruthless prioritization to your own development the way he applies it to analytics.
And two voices cover what you owe. Mark Stouse, on the business accountability marketers increasingly carry, traced through expanding fiduciary obligations. Nicole Alexander, author of a Kogan Page book on ethical AI in marketing, on the ethical accountability, through her PACT framework.
Nine people. Four questions. One framework holding them together. That is the chapter, and it is also a working model of the marketing career it describes.
The turn, in one move
The reader takeaway here is not “read these nine interviews when the book is out.” It is something you can do this week, before the book exists. This is my book gift to you, reader.
Take the eight Es and score yourself, honestly, on each one as a career capability rather than a company one. Not what you can do. What you are positioned to do. Score each from 1 (this is a real gap for me right now) to 5 (this is a genuine strength that sets me apart). Sit with the questions before you answer.
Explore. Do I understand the landscape I am standing in? Can I map where value is actually shifting in my industry, not where the headlines say it is, and do I have an honest read on which of my own skills are appreciating, holding, or quietly depreciating?
Engage. Do the people who matter know what I think? Have I made my thinking visible to the people who hire, refer, and promote, through real contribution rather than self-promotion, or am I a well-kept secret?
Exchange. Am I the person others come to when the pieces need connecting? Do I bring context across functions, markets, and channels that nobody else in the room can assemble, or am I mostly consuming what others produce?
Experiment. Am I testing and learning with my own career, not only my campaigns? Have I run one deliberate experiment on my own development in the last six months, or am I waiting for someone to hand me a training plan?
Embrace. Can I adapt without losing my center? When the ground shifts, do I retune, or do I retreat to the tools and tactics that already feel safe?
Everything. Am I accountable for the full picture? Can I trace the causal reasoning behind my own decisions, not just my campaign results, and do I understand the governance and accountability landscape closing in on marketing leaders?
Explain. Am I a steward, not only a communicator? Can I make marketing’s value land with Finance and the board, and am I willing to say out loud what marketing should not do, not only what it can?
Evolve. Am I building the capacity to keep doing all of the above after the next shift? Or am I optimizing for the version of marketing that already exists?
Then find your lowest score. That score marks the point where your career system is most exposed to disruption, the link the chain breaks at first. And find your highest. That is the capability you build the others from. A marketer strong in Engage but weak in Everything does not abandon visibility to cram analytics. She uses the relationships she already has to find the people who will teach her the analytics. The system reinforces itself when you let it.
Where I have landed
I named the chapter Evolve, not Arrive, not Master. The marketers who will be fine are not the ones who find the right answer and execute it perfectly. They are the ones who keep the capacity to ask the next question after the environment moves again.
I built a framework to make companies stronger and discovered I had been using it to keep my own career alive the whole time. I would have started building it deliberately, and earlier, if I had known that is what it was.
So I will ask you what I ended up asking myself while I wrote the chapter. Run the eight Es on your own career, not your company’s. Where is your lowest score, and is it the thing you have been avoiding because it is uncomfortable rather than because it is unimportant?
What did you find when you looked?
End Notes
Chaddha, N (2026) Follow the money: The CMO’s AI mandate, Mayfield, May, www.mayfield.com/the-cmos-ai-mandate
brand.ai and Healey, E (2026) Your CMO’s days are numbered, brand.ai, May, brand.ai/blog/post/your-cmo-s-days-are-numbered. The Gartner figures (65% / 32% / 15%) are cited within this piece and originate with Gartner; confirm whether to attribute directly to the Gartner 2025/2026 CMO research in final copy.
Taylor, J (2026) Introducing the marketing engineer: The new role in marketing, born from AI [blog] The Landing Pad, 11 May, thelandingpad.substack.com/p/introducing-the-marketing-engineer
Thanks, @Mack Collier!