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My marketing career started in a small windowless office in Building 121 of Microsoft’s Redmond campus. At the ripe age of 21, I was assigned a $3M budget and asked to deliver 10:1 ROI against that spend.

This was well before the days of multi-touch attribution (MTA) or marketing mix modeling (MMM). I bought up billboards, placed ads in magazines, and worked the press at partner events. My right arm was Brad, the Sales Manager assigned to the same portfolio. Together, we’d monitor the pipeline, compare it against marketing spend, and rely on two guiding factors to inform our future strategy – revenue and intuition.

I stand by it. 

These were the best days to grow up as a marketer.

Back then, great marketers were trusted to do what they did best – leverage intuition to build strong brands, develop omnichannel distribution strategies to reach the right audience, and make strategic bets, even without sophisticated attribution data.

Today, the role of marketers has fundamentally changed. And a lot of it has to do with the expectations of leadership. With the emergence of AI, 79% of CEOs believe that AI can improve their marketing programs, putting a lot of pressure on CMOs to move quickly. Meanwhile, the demand for precise measurement continues to grow, even as privacy restrictions make tracking more difficult. The result? Bloated, underutilized MarTech stacks that add complexity without always delivering better insights. 

Add shifting expectations of investors to the mix and there’s no doubt about it. We’re playing a different game, and 2025 marks the beginning of another transition for marketers.

I’m here for it, but there’s one giant hurdle in the way. 
And no, it’s not technology, budgets, or even AI. It's the outdated notion that marketing exists solely to serve sales and other functions rather than drive strategic growth. Let’s take a look at recent Gartner CMO surveys for some anecdotes: 

• 47% of CMO respondents stated that their marketing organization is perceived as a cost center within their company. That’s about half of us. 
• Just 14% of CEOs and CFOs view their CMO as highly effective at market shaping and fulfilling customer needs. This doesn’t look good. 
• CMOs plan to spend 27.9% of their budget on paid media while decreasing investment in labor, technology, and agencies. Money follows attribution.

Gartner calls it “radical reprioritization of the resource mix.” Sure, but it’s also evidence of how the function and expectations of marketing have fundamentally changed since I first sat in my tiny little Microsoft office. Where marketing leaders were once trusted (and even celebrated) keepers of brand, they now sit in a seat that’s scrutinized based on outcomes that show up in daily dashboards.

So, how did we get here anyway? 

2000’s: Storytelling Era

Marketing leaders were hired to build strong brands and worked closely with media partners to execute distribution strategies. Strategic value was measured by the strength of the overall plan, and marketers had far more autonomy in how dollars were spent. In many organizations, marketing, and sales operate as true partners, not competitors. 

While “The Cloud” was emerging, digital investments remained largely experimental, with traditional media still dominating budgets. This era hosts some of the most iconic ad campaigns including Dove’s “Real Beauty,” Google’s “Year in Search,” and Apple's “Get a Mac” campaign. Marketers were producing great work, in a much less polluted media environment, but without sound measurement, the function was often considered a cost center. 

2010’s: Digital Era
What a time for marketers. Kicked off by the Facebook and Google duopoly, digital marketing exploded. As long-term brand budgets were reallocated to short-term paid channels, marketers identified new ways to nurture, giving rise to marketing automation, hyper-segmentation, and the oh-so-controversial MQL. 

To top it off, capital was easily accessible and many VCs were urging leaders to favor rapid top-line growth over efficiency. Owning the top of the funnel, many marketing leaders were encouraged to “double down” causing a lot of the bloat that we’ve been working to recover from in more recent years.  

2020’s [So far]: Efficiency Era
The growth-at-all-costs era comes to an end, and suddenly, all CMOs feel like they have a direct reporting line into the CFO. It’s a tough time to be a marketer. Brand-building efforts come to a halt, and long-term results are traded for metrics that can be measured in the weekly sales dashboard. 

As capital dried up post-2020, marketing budgets got a hard look, and leadership teams prioritized efficiency over experimentation. Enter, attribution wars. Even with sophisticated tools emerging, most organizations still lack sophisticated, cross-functional data architecture. This makes it harder for marketing teams to quantify their impact compared to last-touch sales and product-led growth (PLG) partners, who benefit from direct, in-app attribution.

And, we’ve arrived.
2025.

I’m calling it the beginning of “The Correction Era.”

For the last twenty years, growing up as a marketer has felt a little bit like whiplash. Many of us entered our careers with the idea that we would be the next big brand builder, only to be tasked with building a strong digital playbook from scratch with less money, fewer people, and arguably too much data. Our work has changed, and when we learn that only 14% of CEOs / CFOs view their CMO as highly effective, I think it’s fair to say that many of us have struggled to adapt.

That can feel heavy, especially facing another transformation as AI requires all of us to be more disciplined, increasingly agile, and to deliver value in new ways. If you’re like me, mid-career and having weathered every transition since 2006, you can look at this and feel one of two things: 1) completely exhausted or 2) energized. I’m choosing the latter. Why? Having grown up on the marketing rollercoaster, I believe that those of us sitting in leadership seats today are in a prime position to own the trajectory for the marketing teams and leaders that will follow in our footsteps.

The Correction Era will be led by data-driven storytellers. 

Correction Marketers understand that there’s a balance between brand and performance. They know how to supplement their dashboards with intuition. They are marketers who can deliver strategic value to the C-suite by satisfying the near-term expectations of the board while setting the stage for long-term growth.

This is exactly what the last twenty years have been priming us for.
Balance. 

While this feels like a natural place to arrive, it doesn’t mean that it’s easy. Marketing teams continue to recover from years of bloat, and the associated perceptions. In the face of AI, some marketing functions are questioning how to adapt and prove the value of their work. CFOs are beginning to loosen the reins but still expect measurable performance.

Accountability is essential. As a leader, you have to own that. For yourself, your team, and the future of marketing. If we’re going to “correct” this notion that marketing exists to support, we need to start showing up differently and encouraging our ICs to do the same. But how? 

Here’s the playbook, The Correction Framework, that I’ve followed to transform marketing teams from order-takers to strategic partners at companies spanning from $1M to $100M ARR.

The Correction Framework

Step One: Leadership Alignment
The best way for marketing to earn respect within an organization is to look at the business through the same lens. Marketers often fall into the trap of prioritizing the top of the funnel versus optimizing for later-stage activation or retention metrics. 

• Ask: Assume nothing. Whether you’re new to the team or have been there for a long time, ask key stakeholders where they expect marketing to show up and which data sources they are using to measure impact. Expect some surprises. 

• Compare: Once you have a good idea of where your C-Suite expects you to deliver, take a look at other strategic documentation. How is marketing represented in OKRs, board-approved plans, and growth targets? Flag any inconsistencies. 

• Align: Marketing should be oriented to the same North Star KPIs as the C-Suite. If the organization lacks a North Star, use it as an opportunity to open the conversation further reinforcing the value of marketing. 

Step Two: Measurement Philosophy

Accountability doesn’t mean that marketing has to live and die by the sales dashboard. It means that marketing leadership has defined what success looks like and ensures that teams have meaningful ways to measure their work. This might mean having to leverage vanity metrics for signals – and that’s okay. 

• Metrics: Start with the North Star KPI for marketing (which should map to that of the company) and waterfall it down so that every team has a metric that aligns with their day-to-day work. For example, if we want to measure the impact of our Brand team, but don’t have a dedicated tool to do so, we could assign Impressions to that team as a top-of-funnel signal. 

• Sources: For each assigned metric, make sure that there is a dedicated, trusted source for marketers to measure their progress with some frequency. Going back to alignment, try to choose sources that are reputable within the cross-functional leadership team. 

• Targets: Cascade your targets a marketing leader down to ensure that sub-teams have clear monthly goals. Ideally, these are presented annually, but quarterly targets can allow for greater agility in early-stage start-ups. 

Step Three: Own Rigorous Prioritization
99% of marketing teams that I’ve worked with feel like they have too much on their plate and they are taking orders from other functions. This doesn’t mean you need more headcount – it means you need prioritization. And as the leader, this is on you. 

• Listen: Sit with the team and listen closely. Notice what frustrations and bottlenecks keep coming up.

• Document: Gather your leadership team to document all existing marketing activities and brainstorm new “big ideas” to help you achieve identified KPIs – it will be a long and overwhelming list.

• Audit: Narrow down your exhaustive list by grouping like activities and mapping them back to the agreed-upon marketing KPIs. If an activity doesn’t align with any metric, it’s a good signal that it may not deserve resources. 

• Prioritize: Leveraging ICE or your favorite prioritization framework, determine which initiatives have the most potential to help your team achieve their goals. These are your Big Bets. As work is distributed, limit the number of initiatives to improve outcomes. 

Step Four: Nail Your Story
You spend all day refining your customer-facing narratives. Your internal storytelling capabilities are just as important. Give your team visibility into the strategic priorities of the business and share your vision for ensuring that marketing has a seat at the table. 

• Vision: Even if you’re not getting it from your leaders/peers, you own vision for your team. I call it the power of micro-environments. Share the metrics you're accountable to and outline how you’ll get there – as a team. 

• Consistency: Good stories have a logic to them. The more plot twists and tangents you present, the harder it will be to capture your audience. Your team is no different. Even if the tactics change, try to be consistent in your vision and the way you show up. 

• Transparency: The Glassdoor Employee Confidence Index fell to a record low of 44.4% in February 2025. Employees are under a lot of stress and it’s omnipresent. I’ve found that anonymous AMAs are a great way to build trust and also give ICs greater business context. 

Step Five: Build a Culture of Accountability
An accountable marketing team owns its metrics, tracks progress, and operates with transparency. Every individual should feel like they have a seat at the table, from leadership down to ICs. Remember, this is about driving business outcomes. 

• Metrics: Metrics are relatively meaningless unless they have an owner. Tap the marketing leadership team to assume accountability for the entire funnel. For example, a Product Marketing leader may own Conversion while the Performance Marketing leader is accountable for (Quality) Leads. 

• Big Bets: Every single Big Bet on the marketing roadmap should have a dedicated owner. Look beyond the marketing leadership team to give ICs more exposure. Marketers want to learn from their peers and also see meaningful growth opportunities for themselves.

• Sub-teams: Surround KPI and Big Bet owners with the support they’ll need to execute. In some cases, this might mean looking beyond hard reporting lines and following a more agile model. Ideally, each sub-team has no more than three Big Bets to deliver against at a time. 

• Discipline: Host a Monthly Marketing All-Hands with the entire marketing team to review data and report on results – both good and bad. The more voices the better. Own kick-off, then hand it over to ICs to showcase their work. 

‍Marketing teams can be productive – and happy.

During my last in-house role at Booksy, with Prasid Pathak alongside me, we refined this playbook to lead a team of 50+ marketing through transformation, delivering 20% topline revenue growth with 30% less marketing budget. The best part? Marketers who are given autonomy and visibility to produce outcomes are also happier. For 11 months, these strategies grew the eNPS of Booksy’s global marketing team from 0 to 32.

It can work for small teams too. Over the last year, I’ve served as an advisor to five organizations, across industries, with marketing teams of 0 to 10 people and I’ve applied The Correction Framework every time. Marketers and growth teams crave impact and when given guided autonomy, the right team can take off. 

At one Series A company, the in-house marketing team was ready to walk because they were so overwhelmed by inconsistent prioritization across regions, leaders, and teams. Rather than chasing last-minute deadlines, I told them to stop. For one day. We audited our programs, assessed their value, and looked to the organization's first-over, company-wide OKRs for prioritization. We also adjusted their KPIs to prioritize leads from specific segments. This improved conversion rates by 3x and delivered greater focus for marketers who responded by saying things like, “This took my panic away”. 

Conclusion 

The entire reason that I landed in that small Microsoft office was because I had dropped out of college. For roughly two days. I left the University of Michigan, which one of my peers told me would be “the greatest mistake of my life”, and returned to my hometown to figure it out. There I found myself in a dark lecture hall, listening to a marketing professor who looked 4x my age. The student body didn’t think much of him. “He expects too much”, they said.

He was pacing, holding the photocopy of an old ad in his hand. The advertiser was a grandfather clock retailer seeking to combat declining sales with two specific marketing tactics. The first, a bundle – offering a free rifle with any clock purchase. The second, a strong narrative, which spoke to the dynamics of the model 1950s household. A woman (end-user) who wanted a fancy clock, and a husband (decision-maker) who was more concerned about fulfilling primal instincts.

How peculiar, and fascinating, I thought.

Then I immediately dis-enrolled from my pre-dental program.

It’s been decades since that turning point in my life. But in a lot of ways, the themes remain the same. Leaders are going to expect too much. The demands of the market will change. Content will remain central, but distribution will evolve. 

The great marketers of tomorrow will know which levers they need to pull to drive growth while also possessing the intuition to tell great stories. 

The Correction Era is here.
Let’s own it. 

About the Author

Allison Cherrette is a seasoned tech marketer with 20 years of experience spanning startups and global organizations like Microsoft, Nuance, and Booksy. She’s led marketing organizations of 50+ people, managed $500M in marketing investments, and executed global GTM strategies across 80+ countries. Her expertise lies in customer-centric positioning, building revenue-aligned marketing teams, and blending strategy with execution. As Founder of Forever Paisley, today, she helps early-stage startups scale marketing as a revenue-driving function.

About RevelOne
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