The following is a guest piece written by Alison Steinlauf Anziska, senior vice president of Marketing at Edmunds. Opinions are the author’s own.
Marketing attracts the most creative minds, but even with top talent on hand, organizations can still fail to deliver. That’s because they’ve built the wrong system, then hired great people into it.
This is the structural problem that no new product launch or campaign brief will fix, and it’s becoming a significantly more costly problem now that artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed where and how consumers encounter brands.
In Deloitte and Duke University’s 2026 “CMO Survey” report, the most cited capability gap by marketing leaders wasn't a missing skill. Instead, more than one in five respondents described the largest gap as the missing people, time and budget needed to put existing skills to work. That's the result of the holes that form in a siloed organization. Each function gets resourced to do its own work, but the work between functions doesn't get resourced at all.
For years, the linear funnel gave fragmented organizations — from product to marketing to sales — a pass. Audiences moved in predictable sequences: search, site, conversion. A brand could paper over internal disconnects with enough media spend. This is no longer the case. Discovery now happens across AI-generated answers, social, PR, community and product surfaces, often simultaneously. If the organization behind it is fragmented, audiences feel it.
No one decides to build silos
Organizational silos are rarely the result of bad decisions — they’re created when fast growth ensues.
When a company scales quickly, the instinct is to hire specialized leaders and give each one ownership of their function. That’s not wrong, deep expertise matters. The problem is what happens next: product tests relevance against current audience, brand seeks value props for audience growth, performance optimizes for efficiency, PR earns coverage. Each team does its job well, but no one owns the system, and silos stand in the way of truly integrated impact.
By the time fragmentation becomes visible, the silos are load-bearing. Realigning the processes and ownership built around them is slow, expensive and politically complicated. The costs of this fragmentation are real, but they rarely show up on a dashboard. Value that never gets created doesn't read as a loss, it just never shows up at all.
I’ve spent the better part of two decades building an integrated marketing function, and the most clarifying thing I can say about that experience: Integration doesn’t only happen by getting the right people in a room, it happens by designing a system where those people share accountability for the same outcomes.
What changed for us was simple to describe but harder to execute. We brought market insights into product development early enough to shape it, and we tied earned, owned and paid goals to the same business outcomes. Once those two connections exist, the impact that follows becomes possible.
It’s about the signal, not the spend
Brands that win in an AI-driven environment won’t be the ones that spend the most or publish the most. They’ll be the ones that feel consistent across areas like AI answers, social, earned media and product surfaces because their organization is designed to produce an interconnected signal.
I think of this as surround sound — not an omnichannel media strategy, not a campaign alignment exercise, but an organizational design that allows brand, performance, PR, product marketing, lifecycle and design to reinforce and complement each other in real time. When that system works, audiences don’t experience channels. They experience a force multiplier. The impact of that coherent brand signal reaches consumers and also opens doors with business partners. It compounds into B2B credibility that no media plan anticipates.
This requires one leader with genuine line of sight across all functions — and the authority to make tradeoffs. A single point of integration with real accountability.
This is harder to build than it sounds, and it takes longer than most organizations want to allow, but constraints clarify. When you can’t outspend the competition, you have to outthink them. That means going deep on consumer understanding, concentrating resources where they’ll have the most impact, and building the kind of organizational coherence that lets you move fast when an unanticipated opportunity opens up. When a product team treats marketing as more than a post-launch promotion, the audience and market dynamics that shape the roadmap must come early on in order to influence it.
In a world where audiences encounter brands nonlinearly and AI continues to reshape discovery, leaders who will build durable marketing organizations won’t be the ones with the deepest channel expertise. Instead, they’ll be the ones who understand how functions connect, where integration creates value and what it costs when it doesn’t.
I didn’t build an integrated team because it was an elegant solution. I built it to maximize our impact and amplify our efforts. In a category where trust is the primary purchase driver, coherence is not optional. What I didn’t fully anticipate was how beneficial and durable that architecture would prove to be as the environment shifted around it.
For leaders inheriting organizations where silos are already established, the path is harder but not different. The question isn’t whether to integrate, it’s whether you understand clearly enough what you’re working toward. Companies that deliberately break through in this environment won’t be the ones with the most channels.
The org chart, it turns out, is the strategy.
