This report captures the experience of over 200 modern marketers, most of whom work in lean, system-heavy B2B environments across a range of strategic, leadership, and executional roles. Respondents demonstrated strong intrinsic motivation for the craft of marketing, citing creativity, strategic problem-solving, and impact as key reasons they entered the field and as the most fulfilling parts of the work today. Their most memorable marketing moments were associated with collaboration, breakthrough thinking, and real-world results, indicating that the profession continues to hold meaningful appeal.

· 38% entered marketing for the mix of art + science

· 35% for creativity & storytelling

· 28% for strategic challenge

At the same time, respondents described structural challenges that make it harder to access those rewarding aspects of the work. Expanded mandates, fragmented tools, reactive coordination, and increased operational load surround and compete with the strategic and creative activities that marketers find most energizing and valuable. This is what we call the passion-pressure paradox. Commitment to the field remains high, but it has become more conditional on sustainability: practitioners are not questioning whether they want to be in marketing, but rather if they can remain in marketing under current conditions.

Respondents did not ask for motivation programs or additional tools; they asked for environments that reduce friction, protect strategic and creative time, and enable clearer prioritization and alignment. Their orientation toward AI was similarly conditional: they embraced AI when it removed work and simplified workflows, and they resisted it when it accelerated output expectations or added complexity.

In short, the craft of marketing remains strong, but the system around the craft now requires redesign. This report works to address what can help rebalance the marketing work system.

Methodology

Optimizely joint. forces with Heinz Marketing to develop a “For the Love of Marketing” survey that gathered 227 survey responses from current marketing practitioners working across a mix of B2B industries, company sizes, and organizational structures. Respondents represented a range of functions and seniority levels, including brand, content, demand generation, product marketing, marketing operations, and marketing leadership.

The survey combined structured multiple-choice questions with open-ended qualitative prompts. Structured questions captured motivations, enjoyment drivers, challenges, workflow patterns, and sentiment toward AI. Qualitative questions captured lived experience, emotional drivers, and conditions that would make the work more sustainable. Qualitative responses were coded into thematic categories to identify patterns across the respondent population.

The findings are directional rather than statistically representative and are intended to illuminate how modern marketers experience their work today, what they value, and where structural friction has emerged within the marketing operating environment.

Respondant Demographics

Marketing today is not practiced by a single type of professional; it spans roles, functions, channels, and levels of seniority. The data reflects the lived reality of people who are actively responsible for planning, executing, coordinating, and measuring modern marketing work.

A total of 227 qualified respondents participated in the survey. The sample skews toward experienced, cross-functional practitioners, making the dataset particularly relevant to understanding marketing as it is practiced today rather than as it is often theorized.

Functional Representation – Not One Role but Many

Functional roles were anchored by Marketing Leadership (Director+) and Digital Marketing, followed by product, brand, content, customer, and field/event functions. This spread reflects how broad the modern marketing charter has become and how interdependent disciplines are inside contemporary go-to-market systems.

Seniority leaned toward managerial and director levels, but job titles revealed a notable trend: seniority does not translate into separation from execution. Many respondents with director- and head-level titles reported ownership of channel execution, reporting, content development, and system usage.

Team size additionally contextualizes the data. Most respondents work within lean marketing organizations (≤ 20 people) responsible for broad mandates, multi-channel orchestration, and cross-functional work. In environments where output expectations continue to rise faster than headcount, practitioners are required to span strategy, execution, measurement, and coordination without specialized buffers or handoffs

· 72% manager-level or higher (Manager 21.15% + Sr Manager 17.18% + Director+ 46.13%)

· 83% have 8+ years of experience (8–12, 13–20, 20+)

· 74% work on teams of 20 or fewer

Finally, the sample reflects marketers operating primarily in B2B and B2B-adjacent industries, where buying cycles are longer, marketing systems are more complex, and internal orchestration is more demanding. These environments rely heavily on digital channels, measurement, content, and collaboration, making them well-suited to analysis of topics such as tooling, workflows, AI, orchestration, and team energy.

Why this matters

The findings in this report represent the perspective of marketers who are both – decision-makers and doers. They are not purely leaders setting direction from a distance, nor purely specialists executing in narrow lanes. They are hybrid practitioners responsible for managing modern marketing systems in conditions of expanding scope and limited time. Their sentiment offers credible insight into how marketing feels today, what it demands from its practitioners, and how it could operate more sustainably in the future.

Why Marketers Entered the Field (& Why They Stay)

Marketing is not an accidental career for most respondents. People enter the field intentionally, drawn by a mix of creative expression, strategic problem-solving, and career optionality. Notably, the same attributes that attract marketers to the field in the first place remain the most fulfilling aspects of the work today — a signal that the core craft of marketing has not lost its intrinsic appeal even as the operational environment has grown heavier.

1. The Creative–Strategic Duality That First Attracted Marketers

   Respondents were particularly drawn to the interplay between creativity and analysis — the “mix of art and science” that many described as uniquely energizing. Storytelling, ideation, and messaging live alongside segmentation, data, and strategic challenge in a way that few other functions replicate. This blend differentiates marketing from adjacent business disciplines that skew either far more analytical or far more creative, and it helps explain why the field attracts individuals with broad cognitive range and interdisciplinary curiosity.

2. Career Growth, Optionality, and Skill Versatility

   A second major driver was career optionality. Respondents saw marketing as a function that offers upward mobility into leadership as well as lateral pathways into product, strategy, operations, and customer roles. Marketing skills transfer well across industries and business models, and the work is visibly connected to commercial outcomes — all of which make the field an attractive long-term professional identity.

Why They Stay: The Core Craft Still Holds Its Appeal

Importantly, the attributes that first attracted respondents are the same attributes they continue to enjoy. The top drivers of fulfillment included seeing impact, solving creative problems, collaborating with strong teams, and shaping brand narratives. Marketers described their most rewarding moments as energizing, proud, validating, and impactful, often tied to difficult challenges, competitive wins, breakthroughs in positioning, or visible improvements in customer experience.

This alignment suggests that the passion for marketing is not eroding. The field still offers meaning, creativity, and intellectual challenges. Where tension emerges, as later sections show, is not in the craft itself but in the structural conditions surrounding the craft: the operational drag, fragmentation, and coordination overhead that make it harder to access the parts of marketing that marketers find most rewarding.

What Marketing Feels Like at Its Best

To understand current sentiment, respondents were asked to recall one of their best marketing moments and describe how it felt. Their answers establish an emotional baseline for the profession — a glimpse of the conditions marketers are trying to access more often in their day-to-day work.

When marketing is at its best, it feels impactful, collaborative, creative, and challenging in a way that produces clarity or results. Respondents repeatedly used words like rewarding, energizing, proud, and accomplished. These emotional highs did not arise from simplicity; they often followed difficult, uncertain, or complex initiatives where teams worked through ambiguity to achieve visible outcomes

1. Impact and Visibility Drive Fulfillment

   The most consistent positive driver was impact. Marketers were energized when they could see the real-world effects of their work on customers, internal stakeholders, markets, or on the business. These moments made the work feel consequential rather than ornamental. Impact took many forms: enabling Sales to win a competitive deal, shaping a narrative that shifted perception, launching a new product successfully, or improving an experience in ways customers noticed.

1. Collaboration and Shared Wins Matter

   The second cluster of positive sentiment centered on collaboration. Marketing is rarely experienced as a solitary craft. The best moments were often described as shared victories: cross-functional wins, launches, campaigns, or initiatives where teams aligned around a purpose and moved collectively. Collaboration was not valued merely for social reasons but because it made outcomes better and made the work feel bigger than individual contribution.

1. Creative Breakthroughs Sustain Engagement

   A third driver was creative breakthrough: ideas clicking, narratives resonating, insights emerging, or strategy crystallizing. Respondents valued moments where creativity was not ornamental but instrumental: solving problems, shaping markets, influencing perception, and generating competitive advantage. Creativity in this framing is not about aesthetics; it is about advancing strategy through imagination and clarity.

Interpretation for Leaders

These emotional signatures reveal what “good marketing work” feels like to practitioners. It is meaningful, collaborative, creative, and effective. Crucially, these attributes are not abstract morale boosters; they are the same drivers that make marketing work in the market. The emotional peak aligns with the commercial peak.

This alignment explains why marketers remain committed to the craft even when the day-to-day environment becomes more difficult. The challenge is not a lack of passion — it is a lack of access to the conditions that make the work both fulfilling and high-performing.

Structural Friction in Modern Marketing

While respondents described marketing at its best as energizing and impactful, they also made it clear that these peak conditions are not consistently accessible. The field is becoming harder in ways that are not primarily rooted in creativity, strategy, or audience complexity, but in the expanding operational surface area surrounding the work.

Modern marketing now spans brand, content, digital channels, experiments, customer data, go-to-market alignment, sales enablement, operations, and analytics. These functions increasingly sit within the same team, and in lean orgs, often within the same individual. This expansion drives up the number of cognitive, collaborative, and operational touchpoints that marketers must navigate in a given week.

· 41.8% say their job is only “50/50 creative on a good day”

· 37.9% say it is 25% creative / 75% coordination

· 3.5% say they are “full-time project managers now”

The Task Surface Keeps Expanding

Respondents described modern marketing roles as a blend of strategist, project manager, analyst, operator, writer, and coordinator, often simultaneously. Tools, processes, and cross-functional dependencies have proliferated faster than organizations have adapted structurally. Marketing has expanded in scope, but support systems, operating models, and staffing levels have not expanded proportionally.

Operational Load Crowds Out Higher-Value Work

A central tension surfaces here: the work that drives fulfillment (impact, creativity, strategy, collaboration) is increasingly surrounded by operational tasks that consume time and attention without producing equivalent strategic value. Reporting, status alignment, internal negotiation, approvals, rework, handoffs, scheduling, and tooling logistics act as a kind of operational drag on the system.

Marketers did not describe these tasks as unimportant. They described them as overrepresented, occupying too much of the work week relative to their contribution to business outcomes. The result is not burnout from challenge, but fatigue from fragmentation.

Fragmentation Erodes Depth & Momentum

Respondents highlighted context switching as a major source of cognitive tax. The work jumps across tools, tasks, and stakeholders with shifting priorities and unclear sequencing. Fragmentation does not replace strategic or creative work; it surrounds it. It therefore becomes harder to generate the focused time blocks required for messaging, analysis, experimentation, or lateral thinking.

This pattern matters because the highest-leverage marketing work is not merely labor-intensive — it is cognitively intensive. It requires depth, synthesis, and time. Fragmentation breaks depth into shards.

Work Spills Beyond Normal Boundaries

The survey also indicated that a meaningful portion of marketing work is handled “on the go” via mobile devices, commutes, late evenings, and transitional spaces between meetings. What appears at first glance as flexibility often materializes as spillover, where tasks bleed outside the workday not to create autonomy but to compensate for operational congestion during it.

The System in Misaligned with the Craft

Taken together, these conditions illustrate a structural gap: marketing work has expanded faster than marketing organizations have modernized. The craft still demands creativity, insight, experimentation, and strategic thinking, but the system surrounding the craft increasingly demands coordination, reporting, tooling, and reactive alignment.

The result is a misallocation of talent. Marketers are hired for strategic and creative capability but increasingly deployed as operators of fragmented workflows. This is not simply inefficient; it is unsustainable, both emotionally and economically.

Commitment is Still High – but Conditional

Despite these frictions, respondents demonstrated a continued commitment to the field. They believe that marketing matters, they want to do the work well, and they take pride in their impact. But their commitment is becoming more conditional. The sentiment shifts from “I love marketing” toward “I can’t sustain this version of marketing indefinitely.”

Respondents did not express a desire to exit the profession so much as a desire for a version of the profession that preserves access to its peak conditions. Their relationship to marketing remains motivated by craft, not by convenience.

Interpretation for Leaders

The conditions described in this section signal a shift in where marketing performance is being won or lost. The primary constraint is no longer creative capability or strategic ambition, but the structure of the work system itself. As operational load, fragmentation, and coordination demands expand, they steadily displace the depth, focus, and synthesis required for high-impact marketing. Left unaddressed, this dynamic does not simply exhaust teams; it quietly repositions marketing from a strategic growth function into a reactive production function. For leaders, the implication is clear: improving marketing outcomes increasingly depends on redesigning how marketing work flows, how priorities are protected, and how strategic capacity is structurally enabled.

The Role of AI in the Future of Marketing

As AI enters the marketing stack, respondents do not see it as a replacement for the craft but as a potential reallocation mechanism. They are less interested in AI as a generator of generic output and more interested in AI as a reducer of operational drag: the administrative, coordination, and low-leverage tasks that crowd out higher-value work.

This distinction matters. AI is often framed in terms of speed and scale, but speed without structural relief risks accelerating the wrong parts of the workflow. Respondents want AI to make room for depth, not drown them in more throughput.

AI as a Relief Valve – Not a Content Hose

When asked how AI could positively affect their work, respondents pointed first to research, data synthesis, structuring documents, summarizing meetings, and handling repetitive formatting tasks. They were drawn to AI’s ability to compress the parts of the job that are cognitively expensive but not creatively fulfilling.

By contrast, responses were more cautious around AI-generated content intended to replace ideation or strategic messaging. Marketers still see narrative, positioning, and creative breakthroughs as human-led functions that require taste, context, and judgment — capabilities not easily abstracted into a model.

The highest enthusiasm appeared when AI was framed as additive rather than substitutive: accelerating drafts, clarifying thinking, offering variations, preparing frameworks, and enabling practitioners to move into deeper work faster.

AI Will Reshape Workflow More Than Headcount

Respondents do not expect AI to dramatically reduce marketing headcount in the near term. They expect it to reshape how work is sequenced, who touches which tasks, and how much surface area individual contributors can manage.

If AI meaningfully reduces operational drag, it may allow lean teams to preserve or expand strategic capability without needing to scale headcount at the same rate as complexity. Conversely, if AI is introduced purely as a speed mechanism without corresponding operational redesign, it may exacerbate fragmentation rather than reduce it.

The inflection point is not technological — it is organizational. AI requires new workflows, role definitions, and expectations to unlock upside. Without this structural adjustment, AI becomes another tool added to a crowded stack rather than a shift in how work actually happens.

· 61% say AI saves them time

· 55% say it makes certain tasks easier

· 36% say it frees space for strategy

· 28% say it increases output expectations

· 13% say it adds workflow complexity

What Marketers Say Would Actually Help

Respondents were clear-eyed about what would make marketing work more sustainable and more effective. Their answers clustered around five major levers: (1) headcount and resourcing, (2) better cross-functional alignment, (3) clearer prioritization, (4) operational support, and (5) AI-powered automation that reduces busy work rather than adds more tasks.

· 39% more strategic time

· 34% fewer meetings

· 33% less reactive work

· 30% clearer priorities

· 29% better tools/integration

More Headcount & Resourcing

The most direct request was more staff. Marketers are asked to cover expansive mandates with insufficient personnel, forcing trade-offs between quality, speed, and strategic focus. More headcount is not about comfort — it is about viability.

Improved Alignment with Sales, Product, & Leadership

Misalignment with adjacent functions was a recurring theme. Marketing often sits at the intersection of Product, Sales, and Customer teams, but lacks the structural authority to enforce clarity around goals and sequencing. Respondents did not ask for less collaboration; they asked for smoother collaboration: aligned objectives, shared definitions, and less firefighting.

Better Prioritization & Fewer Competing Urgencies

Competing priorities surfaced as a major constraint. Everything feels important, urgent, and strategically consequential. Without clearer prioritization, marketers struggle to allocate the deep-focus time required for work that actually moves markets, not just metrics.

Operational & Project Management Support

A significant portion of marketing work today behaves like operations work: coordinating, tracking, scheduling, briefing, aligning, updating, and reporting. Operational support would free practitioners to spend a greater percentage of their time on activities only they can do: strategy, creative problem-solving, experimentation, narrative design, and analysis.

AI for Synthesis, Structure, & Acceleration – Not Volume

Respondents want AI to handle synthesis (research, summaries, data extraction), structure (briefs, outlines, frameworks), and acceleration (drafting, alternatives, revisions). They are far less interested in AI as a generic content hose. The goal is not more output, rather more access to the meaningful parts of the job.

Conclusion: Rebalancing the Marketing Work System

The survey findings reveal a core truth about the marketing profession today: practitioners continue to find meaning in the craft itself. They are motivated by creativity, strategy, collaboration, and impact, and remain committed to producing work that advances customers, teams, and organizations. The passion for marketing has not diminished.

What has changed is the environment surrounding the work. Expanded mandates, lean teams, fragmented tools, and persistent coordination demands make it harder for practitioners to access the strategic and creative activities that originally attracted them to the field. The risk is not disengagement from marketing, but disengagement from unsustainable versions of marketing. Marketers are not asking for incentives or morale programs; they are asking for better conditions to do the work well.

For leaders, the implication is clear: improving marketing performance requires reducing operational drag and rebalancing time toward high-value activities. AI can play a role in that shift, but only when deployed to remove friction rather than accelerate output expectations. The craft of marketing remains strong — it is the system around the craft that now requires redesign.

Where Optimizely and Heinz Marketing Fit In

This report was jointly developed by Heinz Marketing and Optimizely, two organizations addressing complementary dimensions of the marketing work system.

Optimizely is on a mission to make the lives of marketers better with Optimizely One, the world’s first operating system for marketing teams. Optimizely One combines industry-leading solutions across content management, content marketing, experimentation, commerce, and personalization, powering every stage of the marketing lifecycle through a single, AI-accelerated workflow. With the flexibility of a fully composable platform, Optimizely is proudly helping global brands like Salesforce, Zoom, and Toyota create content with speed, launch experiments with confidence, and deliver experiences of the highest quality. Learn more at optimizely.com.

Optimizely, Optimizely One, and NetSpring are the trademarks of Optimizely North America Inc., and are registered (or registrations are pending) in the US, EU, UK and other countries. All third-party trademarks cited are the property of their respective owners and are used only for reference purposes. (https://www.optimizely.com/)

Heinz Marketing offers consultative services on marketing orchestration — the playbooks, operating models, workflows, decision rights, and alignment mechanisms that determine how marketing actually gets done. Through advisory and implementation support, Heinz helps organizations reduce coordination costs, improve cross-functional alignment, and give practitioners the space to engage in the strategic and creative work that drives differentiation. Orchestration ensures that new capabilities, including AI, don’t become “just another tool,” but are integrated in ways that make the work system more effective and sustainable. (https://www.heinzmarketing.com/marketing-orchestration/)

Together, Heinz Marketing and Optimizely address both sides of the rebalancing challenge surfaced in this study: the operating model (how work flows) and the platform (how work is supported). This combination enables organizations to modernize marketing in a way that benefits both performance and practitioner experience, making it possible for marketers to do what they love more often, and for companies to achieve the outcomes they rely on marketing to deliver. And this is why, at Optimizely, our methodology is grounded in Human Centered Design. We started by mapping real-world experimentation processes, identifying genuine friction points, and designing solutions that complement, not disrupt existing workflows.