The golden age of marketing is not behind us. It is right now.

I've been incredibly lucky to work at some of those brands. I tried to structure my career working with interesting companies doing disruptive things, challenging the status quo wherever it lived. Most of my career has been in B2B. The line I always use: nobody comes out of university wanting to be a B2B marketer. Nobody, when they grow up, says what I really want to be is a marketer thinking about a complex buying unit that may take 12 to 18 months to buy something. But that's enterprise B2B software, and I made the jump from technical sales into marketing relatively early because I wanted to be involved in the medium-to-long-term side of a business rather than the short-term revenue side. It was a leap of faith, and it turned out well.

When I started in B2B technology marketing, you had a handful of channels. PR, to get into the press. Direct mail, using rented lists. Events, where people phoned up to register or sent in prepaid reply cards. It sounds quaint and ancient now. If you were lucky, you got to do some advertising. Data was hard to come by. It either took too long to get or you simply didn't have it.

Now we have probably too much data. We have all the data that informs us about what's working, what isn't, and what our customers love and hate. Access to it is low-cost. Google Analytics on your website is free. You don't need to spend months implementing a high-end CRM with a consultant. That's the first reason this is the golden age.

The second is that the gap between B2B and B2C marketing has narrowed considerably. The way we communicate with customers is much the same as a consumer brand. We have a less spontaneous, more considered purchase, but we reach buyers through the same channels. All the things we use in our personal lives, the social platforms, the meme economy, all of that, we can bring into work.

The third is that we're on the precipice of accelerated creativity with AI. A great deal of cumbersome work can now be actioned faster. Good marketing is understanding the customer and where they are. Great marketing is using data and creativity to stand out. We have to work as hard now to stand out in a digital feed as a 1950s consumer marketer did making a box of soap powder jump off a supermarket shelf.

There are some things that haven't changed in the thirty years I've been doing this. Understand your customer. Tell your story in a compelling way in the customer's language. Use data and creativity to drive a better connection with your customers. The channels and tactics are different now. The fundamentals haven't moved.

I had an epiphany at a start-up I worked at, a 150-person company marketing a B2B platform globally. Our ability to punch far above our weight using technology, with a small marketing team reaching a global customer base, was striking. I was Marketo's first international customer. Technology lets you extend reach globally. You still have to turn up consistently in each country, and personalisation and relevance technology helps you do that, but the playing field has been levelled in a way that lets smaller brands compete at enterprise scale on reach.

I sometimes push back on the term growth marketing. I don't know many companies that want to shrink. The real discipline is understanding the customer's longer relationship with you, particularly in software-as-a-service. To sustain growth you have to deliver value, because if customers don't get value they don't renew. Growth marketing is as much about working with the customer to make sure they get value from what they have as it is about acquiring new customers.

Inside that, there are two pillars. The classic marketing channels that bring customers in. And product-led growth, which is the nut to crack in SaaS. Once customers are inside the product, the product should be the showcase and your main marketing channel. At Adobe, we treated the product as the marketing. The product is your advertising. The hints, tips, training, and in-product nudges show value better than any external billboard or digital programme.

The right structure varies by company. Sometimes product marketing sits under the CMO. Sometimes it sits in a business unit under a CRO, COO, or CDO. The classic cliché answer is: it depends. What matters is that product, marketing, and sales work in the same group structure, especially on the small and medium customer segments where product-led growth motion is strongest. On the enterprise side it's typically a one-to-one sales motion with custom pricing and configuration, where marketing supports rather than leads. The leadership question is what brings the functions together.

Marketing doesn't have a great track record of implementing technology to its maximum. We've had amazing targeting tools, automation, behavioural marketing, and personalisation, and most brands still don't deliver a truly personalised, relevant experience. You still get spam from brands you love and from brands you don't. You don't get a personalised web experience. You still show up differently across channels and call centres. There is enormous headroom in automation, in behavioural marketing, in using data to drive personalisation.

The advice to CMOs: don't buy more. I worked for several martech companies and I'm telling you the technology will not solve your problems. Strategy first, technology in service of it. There's a great deal we already have that we could make work much better.

The generative side is a great co-pilot for marketers, an assistant sitting on the side. Not the fully automated thing. Where it's most useful is taking the mundane work out of marketers' day, so they can spend more time understanding the customer and the business and focusing on the creative. If you have a creative who has to do twenty different formats of an ad, AI can do that work instantaneously. That gives marketers their time back.

I've come down to three qualities I hire for: change, curiosity, risk. Change: every interview, I'm looking at what people have done to change things wherever they've been. Anything. What did they do to drive a change? It's a competitive, intense environment, and people who can move at that pace are what teams need. Curiosity: I'm amazed how many people in marketing aren't curious about marketing. I want people bringing experiences in. I work in technology, and the obvious platforms are LinkedIn, a bit of X, a bit of Instagram, but maybe TikTok is the thing we should be doing. Why not try it? It doesn't cost much. Risk: years ago, risk was heavily loaded. You bet your budget on a campaign and waited six months to find out if it worked. Now you can take a risk with five thousand, two thousand, even ten thousand. Run digital tests. See results in a couple of days. Reinvest.

A general marketer who can join the dots. I'm not chasing teams full of specialists who don't understand how the pieces come together. You might need deep technical skills sometimes, but more often the integrated marketer who understands the full mix and may have a specialism in events or social will win. The skills change. Five years ago we had Clubhouse experts. We had Second Life experts fifteen years ago. Last year it was the metaverse. Now it's AI. The person who can roll with the punches without chasing the shiny thing is the person you want.

You can't put people in a room and tell them to innovate, in the same way you can't turn up to an offsite at nine in the morning and announce now we will have fun. So I set aside a percentage of my budget for people to try things out, with one rule: it has to be measured. If it doesn't work, don't do it again, learn, and move on. The culture has to be data-driven, the team has to have latitude with some of the budget, and I've used mechanisms like innovation challenges. At VMware, with a team of one hundred across functions, we ran a competition with a meaningful budget for the winner to make their idea real. The winner produced a racing game tied to our key brand attributes that we then ran at conferences and exhibitions. People who didn't win also acted on their ideas. One team branded a van and went out visiting customers with free coffee. Encouragement plus structured permission plus a culture that says failure is fine, just don't repeat it.

We can measure whatever we want, so the discipline is surfacing the things the business cares about. If the business understands and values what you're doing, the conversations about budget and team get easier. I focus on what moves the needle for the business and measure everything else for our own learning.

The classic example is the lead. A marketing team runs an event with five hundred attendees. How many leads? Ask one marketer and they'll say five hundred, everyone in the room is a lead. Ask another and they'll say fifty, because only ten percent were in the enterprise target. What the business wants to know is how much pipeline came out of it, and how much of that pipeline closed to a booked deal. So I focus on pipeline and bookings rather than the upstream activity.

Three broad areas. Top of funnel: are people aware of us? A leading indicator is whether they search for us and arrive at the website. Middle of funnel: marketable universe, contacts in our target accounts, pipeline. Bottom of funnel: bookings and renewal rate. Marketing is leaning more into renewal and retention than it used to. There isn't time to fully cover marketing attribution. Sourced, influenced, the endless debate. But the simplest version of the answer the business cares about is website visitors, pipeline, bookings, and renewal rate.

Right now I advise smaller businesses, so the stack is very simple: Meta and Google ad centres with light automation. That can take a small business a long way. For a serious operation: an automation platform (HubSpot, Marketo), a data platform, website personalisation linked to a CMS, and the embedded AI inside each of those tools. That's enough to get on with. The big jigsaw stacks I've worked inside become a mess. I want to do marketing, not systems integration.

Remember when marketing was the voice of the customer? In B2B we somehow stopped talking about that, and it got deferred to product or sales or the customer experience team. That is the opportunity. Understanding the customer is fundamental to great marketing. If you want to move into marketing from another function, show that you understand the customer. We can teach the rest. The tools are not that hard to pick up. Even an idiot like me can pick up the tools and do something with them. Have a learn-it-all mentality rather than a know-it-all mentality, and you'll do well.