Tara, you've led marketing through periods of massive change in technology, platforms, and customer expectations. How do you think the role of marketers has fundamentally evolved over the last few years?
Marketing has always been about understanding people and telling a clear story about who you are and the value you bring. What has changed is the complexity surrounding that work. When I talk to marketing leaders today, they're navigating more channels, more data, more technology, and higher expectations than ever before, all while being asked to move faster and deliver more personalized experiences. The role has become much more cross-functional and operationally demanding.
At the same time, the best marketers are still doing what the function has always done at its core: helping organizations understand and serve their customers better. The challenge today is that this work sits within a much more fragmented ecosystem of tools, data, and stakeholders than it did even a few years ago. Modern marketing leaders have to connect brand, demand, product, customer experience, analytics, and technology in a way that feels coherent to the business and meaningful to the customer. That requires creativity, but it also requires orchestration and discipline to bring all of those moving pieces together. The marketers who are succeeding are the ones who can balance both.
Optimizely's latest research highlights what it calls a growing "passion-pressure paradox" in marketing. Why are so many marketers spending less time on creative and strategic work, despite entering the field specifically to do that kind of work?
The paradox comes from the fact that marketers still love the work. They are motivated by creativity, storytelling, problem-solving, and seeing the impact of what they do. But the day-to-day reality has become much heavier. In our research, 41.8% of marketers said their role is only “50/50 creative on a good day,” and nearly 38% said their work is primarily coordination rather than creative or strategic output.
That tells us this is not a passion problem. It is a systems problem. Marketing teams are often asked to manage more campaigns, more channels, more internal requests, and more technology without the structure to make that work sustainable. So the creative and strategic work is still there, but it gets pushed into the margins of the day. For leaders, the opportunity is to create an environment where marketers can spend more time doing the work that drew them to the profession in the first place.
AI is improving efficiency for many teams, but far fewer marketers say it's creating more space for strategic thinking. Why do you think that gap exists?
Efficiency gains are absolutely real. The challenge is that saved time doesn't automatically become strategic time. Our research found that 61% of marketers say AI saves them time, yet only 36% say it meaningfully creates more space for strategy. That gap exists because saved time often gets filled immediately with more requests, more content, more meetings, or more expectations.
The issue is not whether AI can help, it can. The issue is whether organizations are intentional about where that time goes. If a team uses AI to complete a task faster but does not rethink priorities, workflows, or decision-making, then the benefit gets absorbed into the same operating model that created the pressure in the first place. To turn efficiency into strategic capacity, leaders need to be clear about what AI should take off marketers’ plates and what kind of higher-value work that capacity should be redirected toward.
You've said that using AI solely to increase output can "accelerate the chaos." How should leaders rethink AI adoption so it improves clarity and effectiveness, rather than just speed?
Leaders should start by asking a different question. Instead of asking, “How can AI help us produce more?” they should ask, “Where is complexity preventing our team from doing better work?” That shift matters because marketing does not need more volume for the sake of volume. It needs better ideas, clearer priorities, stronger customer insights, and faster paths from strategy to execution.
AI adoption should be tied to outcomes that improve the work system, not just the output quantity. That could mean reducing manual reporting, summarizing inputs from across teams, helping marketers move from brief to draft faster, or making experimentation and optimization easier to act on. When AI is used this way, it creates more consistency and focus. When it is used only to increase throughput, it risks making already fragmented teams move faster in too many directions at once.
The research shows that marketers are spending more time coordinating than creating. How do you structure your marketing organization to protect time for strategic thinking and creativity?
It starts with prioritization. As a leadership team, we have to be disciplined about what matters most and what trade-offs we are willing to make. That clarity gives teams permission to focus, rather than constantly react.
The second piece is protecting time. We all know creative thinking doesn't happen when every minute of the day is booked. It’s called focus time for a reason. Teams need clear ownership, aligned goals, and enough uninterrupted time to think deeply. That means being thoughtful about meetings, handoffs, approvals, and the tools people are expected to use. I also think leaders need to model the behavior they want to see. If we say strategy matters, we have to create space for it in how we plan, review work, and measure success.
Optimizely's vision around connected workflows and AI orchestration seems closely tied to these challenges. How do platforms like Optimizely One and Opal help reduce fragmentation rather than simply adding another layer of complexity?
The goal is to bring more of the marketing lifecycle into a connected flow. A lot of teams are not struggling because they lack tools. They are struggling because the work is spread across too many places, and context gets lost as ideas move from planning to content to experimentation to personalization and measurement. That fragmentation creates delays, duplicated effort, and a lot of coordination overhead.
Optimizely’s platform is designed to help teams connect all of those parts of the lifecycle, while bringing AI orchestration into the work marketers are already doing. The distinction is important. AI should not feel like another destination or another disconnected layer. It should help teams move through the work with more context, consistency, and momentum. When the platform can support planning, creation, experimentation, and optimization in a more unified way, teams can spend less energy managing the process and more energy improving the customer experience.
If you could redesign the modern marketing function from scratch for the AI era, what's the first thing you would remove?
I would remove fragmentation. One thing I often say is that AI amplifies the system it's placed into. If the system is clear, AI can help teams move faster, make better decisions, and focus on higher-value work. If the system is messy, AI can make the mess move faster.
A lot of the pressure marketers feel today comes from having to stitch together work across too many tools, too many processes, and too many competing priorities. It creates a lot of activity, but not always enough progress. When I talk to marketing leaders, that's one of the most common challenges I hear: not a lack of ideas or ambition, but the complexity of getting work done.
So if I were redesigning the marketing function for the AI era, I'd start by simplifying how work flows, how decisions get made, and how teams align around priorities. Once you create that foundation, AI becomes much more powerful because it's supporting a healthier, more focused system. The goal isn't simply to move faster. It's to create more space for marketers to do the strategic, creative, and customer-focused work that drives growth.
