Earlier this year, my hours at IOA were cut back. Not dramatically, but enough to force a question I'd been avoiding: was the plan still to find another full-time Head of Marketing role, or is something else actually going on in the market that I should be paying attention to.
I sat with it for a while. Not because I didn't have an answer, but because the answer wasn't comfortable. After a decade in senior marketing roles and a decade before that behind a camera, I'd built the kind of judgment that doesn't come from a course or a certification. It comes from being in the room when a campaign underperforms and having to figure out why, in real time, with budget already spent. That kind of instinct doesn't transfer cleanly into a CV line. But it transfers very cleanly into a conversation with someone who's stuck.
What I noticed, once I stopped trying to force my way back into a single full-time seat, was a pattern across almost every organisation I'd worked with or around. The problem was rarely a lack of marketing activity. It was a lack of someone senior enough to say no to the wrong activity. Budget had gone into producing more content, more campaigns, more output. Very little of it had gone into the judgment needed to make sure that output was pointed in the right direction.
That's the gap fractional work sits in. Not cheaper marketing. Better-positioned marketing, delivered by someone who's seen enough failure modes to recognise one early. An outsider looking in sees things an insider stops seeing after eighteen months. You stop noticing the dry corporate language and the off-brand emails the same way you stop noticing the noise of your own air conditioner. Coming in fractional means I see it on day one, because I'm not yet used to it.
The other half of why this works now, and didn't work quite the same way five years ago, is what AI has done to the cost of execution.
I'll give you a real example rather than a general one. Continental Currents is a recurring LinkedIn series I write for IOA, pan-African business intelligence, delivered in a specific voice: confident, analytical, investor-aware, allergic to corporate jargon. When I tested whether AI could draft a first pass to save time, it did save time. It got the structure right, it got the facts right, it was fast. What it didn't get right was the voice. It read like every other LinkedIn business post, competent, forgettable, interchangeable with a thousand others. The editorial instinct, the thing that makes a reader stop scrolling because it actually sounds like someone with a point of view wrote it, had to come back in my hands.
That's the actual shape of 2026: not AI replacing strategic marketing, but AI quietly removing the cost of the parts that were never the valuable part to begin with. The drafting, the formatting, the first-pass structure. What's left, the positioning, the judgment, the editorial voice that makes a brand sound like itself and not like a template, is exactly the part that doesn't compress. If anything it gets more valuable, because it's now the only part a client can't get for free from a chatbot.
Which is, in a roundabout way, why I think this is a good year to be doing what I'm doing. Organisations don't need another full-time hire to handle execution they can now do faster than ever. They need someone who's spent over a decade learning where the mistakes hide, coming in for a few days a week, asking the uncomfortable questions, and making sure the fast execution is actually pointed in the right direction.
If that's where your organisation is right now, book a call and I'll talk you through it.
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