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Marketing’s accumulation of unowned work has a measurable cost that most functions never surface. The CMO Survey finds 61% of marketing leaders now face greater CEO scrutiny than two years ago, while Gartner reports 61% of CMOs say their plans are driven by whatever work arrives next rather than strategy. Fractional CMO Abbie Hill frames it cleanly: marketing became the organizational junk drawer because it’s the team that finishes things, and finishing things invites everyone else’s unfinished business.
What this means for your business
The organizations most exposed here are the ones where marketing’s competence is high and its boundaries are undefined. A team that reliably delivers becomes the default handler for anything that needs to look polished, from a logo resize to an executive’s birthday slideshow. That reputation isn’t a compliment; it’s a tax. Ten 15-minute favors a week is a full day gone, and a month of that is a pipeline campaign that never launched. The CMOs who recognize themselves in this pattern are already paying it; the ones who don’t are paying it invisibly.
The structural fix the piece proposes, a single intake form, triage ownership, and logging every off-plan hour for one month, is straightforward enough that its absence is the more interesting fact. Most marketing functions don’t track unplanned work as a category at all. They measure campaigns shipped and content published, which means the hours absorbed by off-plan requests never appear in any dashboard the CEO sees. The case for protecting marketing’s capacity is lost before it gets made, not because leadership doesn’t care, but because the data doesn’t exist to force the conversation.
The leadership dynamic underneath this is worth naming directly. If the CEO already perceives marketing as execution capacity rather than strategic input, every structural reform the CMO proposes reads as defensiveness rather than discipline. The only move that changes that perception is producing the month of logged off-plan hours and bringing it to a leadership meeting as evidence, not complaint. Marketing leaders who skip that step and ask for process change anyway are arguing from authority they haven’t yet established with this particular CEO. I’d revise that read if the CMO Survey’s next wave shows marketing gaining measurable revenue ownership, but the current direction runs the other way.
Based on reporting from Why Marketing Became the Junk Drawer and How to Fix It, originally published 2026-09-24 15:15:00.
