Marketing is entering a golden age. But only if it speaks the board's language. And stops treating brand as a cost.

Edwards started in a post room after university, made herself known as the post girl, and landed a marketing assistant job at a publishing company. She climbed the usual ranks, moved into a tech company, then co-founded an agency despite never having worked agency side. As an in-house marketing director she felt she wasn't getting joined-up support: marketing consultants on one side, a creative agency on the other. The idea was to fuse the two into something more strategic. That agency, built as an account-based marketing specialist, she and her partners sold to Selby Anderson. She has now landed at Ammunition, a US-based B2B full-service agency, launching the UK and Europe arm for businesses with complex buyer journeys.

Marketing has always been the same for Edwards. Her first proper marketing manager gave her a well-worn book about the customer, about being the voice of the customer, 20 years ago, when marketing was still seen as the colouring-in department and glorified event organisers. That's when the penny dropped: her job as a leader is to champion the customer, hold that information and push it out to the business. What once was true all those years ago is still very much true now.

Getting the structure right comes first. With the engine already running, Edwards is wearing her CMO hat again: get known quickly, leverage what the US business has, take it transatlantic and build the brand here. It means repositioning too, because what lands in the States can appear tone deaf elsewhere. With all global marketing you hold a consistent proposition at the top while keeping it meaningful and localised.

Here buyers are fragmented and go niche, whereas in the States it's a one throat to choke sort of approach, leveraging a full-service agency that gets deep enough to do everything and move fast. UK and European buyers can be sceptical of that, and Edwards sees making it land as her job.

A study found about 75% of client side felt they nailed their brief, but only 5% of agencies say the briefs are any good. That disconnect starts at the outset, when expectations aren't joined up, and that's usually where the relationship crumbles later.

When marketing isn't aligned to business outcomes, the agency gets stuck doing output rather than outcomes. Edwards wants to properly move the dial and tie results back to business growth, so the agency isn't flipped out but becomes sticky as a true partner. She also mourns the loss of embedding implants inside client offices, which COVID and hybrid working eroded, because being in the room lets you pick up everything around you.

Brand often sat in the States with regional spinoff budgets for demand, which felt disconnected, and marketers overcomplicated the structure with SEO, PPC and ABM teams doing different things. Using a bowling analogy, too many just roll the ball and hope, without the brand pins in place, because brand is deemed expensive. Edwards finds it sad that so few boards have a CMO, but calls this a golden age as marketers become commercially savvy. The fix is language: talking clicks and impressions falls on deaf ears, because they don't care about that.

People start with brand, get scared when nothing comes in, and pull it too quickly, which costs them money. She heard of an ABM program that eventually landed a massive win but was turned off after the pilot 'didn't work'. Joining Ammunition, Edwards built a go hard or go home program rather than diluting budget on small incremental spends. She remembers unspent budget getting clawed back near year end, because marketing is still seen as a cost centre rather than a profit centre.

The best CMOs do internal PR, making sure everyone knows they're driving the business, not just taking orders. Edwards favours smaller milestones alongside the big ones and softer metrics, the three Rs of reputation, revenue and relationship, so people can see progress. Relationships are built on trust and loyalty, and that's people becoming their own brands, which makes thought leadership more important than company pages.

She describes an ABM campaign that used an influencer inside an account to map stakeholders, created joint thought leadership, went deeper, then mapped that against lookalike accounts and reused the content. Speaking slots and co-created content she counts as metrics in themselves. Getting a client to speak with you is a win, and it all drives word of mouth.

There's a data rabbit hole, she warns, where businesses only look at last-touch attribution and pour everything into PPC, ignoring the thousands of touchpoints before. She describes a share-owning tech company obsessed with five or six metrics analysed to the second, where the CMO is too scared to do anything creative because the model is performing. That works for SME e-commerce, less so for enterprise with multiple stakeholders.

She loves the braver B2B work of the past two years and rejects boxing it into a B2B category. With AI flooding the market with dross, brands are forced to be more creative and stand out for something distinct, not just differentiated, with ownable assets that make people recall the brand in a saturated space. She favours high-growth mid-market clients unburdened by rigid brand guidelines.

People are 20 times more likely to buy when the whole buying group knows you, from procurement to finance, so adapting content and treating each as its own market is worth it, guided by propensity and ICP alignment. AI helps, but you need the right blend of AI and human intelligence. Beyond marketing pushing content, Edwards wants to empower key people, a head of procurement owning a thought leadership space, to do some of the selling in the WhatsApp groups aligned to their persona or sector.

With the customer journey often starting in an LLM, you now influence humans and machines. Become a trusted voice with verified experiences, show up consistently, and optimise your website and FAQs to answer the right questions so you're surfaced. She likens it to the pub: someone tells you something, you fact-check with friends, someone Googles it, and an LLM works the same way.

She believes marketing leaders have had a gut full of being order takers off the board. She sees a step change towards commercially minded marketers who align to business outcomes, model data and argue the cost of not doing something rather than the cost of doing it. The CMO is now part strategist, part technologist and part commercial operator, while staying the voice of the customer feeding intelligence into product, pricing and positioning.

Newcomers are uniquely placed to get deep in AI, learn to prompt correctly and use it as an ally, because they learn quickly. The middle is being squeezed between experienced CMOs at the top and people coming up at the bottom. If newcomers prove they can operate smarter, faster and more effectively with the human and AI blend, Edwards thinks it could be game-changing. Her one capability for every leader: resilience.