Most marketing teams are organised around channels. That’s why they lose.

Look at almost any marketing function and you’ll find the org chart is a list of formats: social, performance, brand, content, PR. Each with a head, a budget and a number to defend. It looks organised. It is actually a machine for producing formats.

Nobody in that structure owns the thing the customer actually experiences, because the customer doesn’t experience a channel. They experience a company that seems to know them, or doesn’t.

Given a blank page, the reasonable move was to hire an agency and split the work by discipline. I built in-house instead and organised around outcomes — brand, media, product, AI, community — with people expected to think across all of them rather than defend a lane.

The hiring consequence is the part people find odd: I recruited for appetite over category expertise. In a category most of them had never worked in, a team that wanted to learn markets outperformed a team that already knew the formats.

The fair objection: channels are genuinely specialist. Performance media is a craft, and a generalist who ‘thinks across outcomes’ will lose money against someone who lives inside the auction all day. Structure by outcome and you can absolutely end up with enthusiastic amateurs.

So the honest version is a hybrid: own the outcome, rent or hire the craft — but never let the specialists own the definition of success. The moment the channel owns the number, the channel owns the strategy.