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00:00:01
Speaker 1: CMOs now have to completely fight for budgets. The relationship with the customer has changed drastically. I think for a long time, freelance was a dirty word. I think that the dependence on the holding company relationship has changed drastically. And so back to the smarter CMOs I know rethinking everything, they have figured out what capability suits the tactic.
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Speaker 2: And so.
00:00:29
Speaker 1: If budgets aren't guaranteed and you need to do more with less, it is really rethinking, what do I need to get done? And what is the best method to get that piece of work done?
00:00:42
Speaker 3: Welcome to today's episode of Free of Commerce.
00:00:45
Speaker 2: I'm Sarah Hofstadter.
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Speaker 4: And I'm Rachel Tippegraph. And this is a show that talks about what's relevant in commerce for the world's biggest brands.
00:00:52
Speaker 1: Welcome to Free of Commerce.
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Speaker 4: Sarah, what do you think the most common job is within a CPG marketing team?
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Speaker 2: What do you think is the most common role?
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Speaker 3: Most common role, I guess, theoretically would be brand manager, I guess, because brand manager includes marketing as a part.
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Speaker 2: Of the function.
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Speaker 3: Then all these different like large companies, you never know what's in-source versus out-source.
00:01:20
Speaker 2: Companies have such different reliance on their partners. I think it's, probably the most needed role might be the orchestrators.
00:01:31
Speaker 4: Oh, you're just going right there.
00:01:33
Speaker 1: I don't know.
00:01:33
Speaker 3: I mean, I look at it and I'm like, wow, there's within any marketing organization, it's almost like there's a CMO on the top and then you've got like divisions and those divisions can be, you know, somebody responsible for media and somebody responsible for analytics and some responsible for brand development. And then anytime anything happens or needs to change, you got to go all the way down and then you got to go all the way back up. So if something's going to change with the brand architecture, you go up, Back up to the CMO, you go across to the media.
00:01:59
Speaker 2: Person or the creative person and you go back down. It's complicated.
00:02:04
Speaker 3: And what makes all that work are like junior people like project managers.
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Speaker 2: So maybe that's the more common one. I don't know. What do you think?
00:02:13
Speaker 4: I agree with your assessment for like traditional CPG organizations. It's probably brand manager. If I think outside of that category... Project managers, social media teams, I honestly see a lot of inefficiency there within large portfolios of companies.
00:02:29
Speaker 2: Is that because of where they sit organizationally? Help me unpack that.
00:02:33
Speaker 4: I think it's this idea of capacity. Let's say you have multiple brands under a portfolio, and then all of a sudden, the social media manager felt overwhelmed. And the next thing you know, you hired a social media manager for every brand, but every brand isn't made equal. And just all these inefficiencies that exist.
00:02:49
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a very good point. And then especially... over.
00:02:53
Speaker 3: The COVID fog of war, if you will, the overhiring became a bit of a problem as well. So if there was a problem or somebody left, they were just like, I don't know, gap filling that was happening that didn't really have much of a reason. Easy to say that after the fact, but it definitely has that, right?
00:03:10
Speaker 4: Yeah, no, absolutely. So what's interesting is that we have a shared friend who has built a business around helping cmos build modern day marketing organizations through a marketplace for fractional talent in housing and yeah i mean mostly i guess in housing and freelance projects.
00:03:32
Speaker 2: So with that let's have her onto the show.
00:03:34
Speaker 4: About to bring the founder lara onto the show who really has her finger on the pulse of what's happening within the talent marketplace today.
00:03:43
Speaker 3: Today, we are happy to have Laura Vandenberg, CEO and founder of Assemble, which you may not have heard of Assemble, but you definitely have heard of Laura because she is sitting at the intersection of so much, which we will.
00:03:58
Speaker 2: Be unpacking today.
00:04:00
Speaker 3: Now, Assemble is the artist formerly known as Publicist or Publicist.
00:04:05
Speaker 2: I don't even know.
00:04:05
Speaker 3: It doesn't really matter anymore because the name of the company is Assemble. So Laura, you have built your company around this idea that brands should not rely on any one agency or internal team.
00:04:15
Speaker 2: To do everything.
00:04:17
Speaker 3: What was it that pushed you to rethink how marketing talent should be assembled?
00:04:24
Speaker 1: Thank you both so much for having me. And look, it's a great question to jump right into. So my background, I was a marketer first. I was a practitioner. And so I had lived in the world of agency and then enterprise and then high growth startups. And I really saw that so many companies were just adhering to the status quo. And I spent years watching brands lock themselves into relationships that were really designed for a different era, whether that was a retainer built around a monthly fee and an account team that rotates every 18 months or an internal hire that potentially takes six months to interview for and then onboard and then six months to figure out if they're the right fit or not. I found that the work was always moving faster than the structure. And over the last two years, really, and 2024 and 2025 were really pivotal because the smartest CMOs I know were forced to rethink everything. Every strategy has gone out the window when it comes to hiring. And I think what emerged from that was a really honest question. What is the output that we need? And then what is
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the best method to get that work done? Is it an agency? Is it a full-time hire? Is it a freelance hire? Is it a vendor? Is it a gentic? And so the decoupling and separating the job from the work is the most important shift that we're seeing in marketing organizations now. And I think that Assemble was built, and I don't think I realized when I was building this six years ago, but Assemble was built to sit at the center of that. It's not who is on your team, but it is whether the system is designed to to get to the correct capability fast enough.
00:06:07
Speaker 4: You mentioned 2024 and 2025. So what happened prior? Is it because of the pandemic and then people overstaffed and then they couldn't meet their numbers? Just give us sort of the macro backdrop that you think forced this change.
00:06:23
Speaker 1: So I think a couple of things. I think, first of all, everyone was adhering to the status quo. Long gone are the days where you were getting a 3% confirmed budget for guaranteed headcount where you had a very repeatable job description and you would just hire that person and maybe the salary would increase slightly. Going back to decoupling the job from work, CMOs now have to completely fight for budgets. The relationship with the customer has changed drastically. I think for a long time, freelance was a dirty word. I think that the dependence on the holding company relationship has changed drastically. And so back to the smarter CMOs I know rethinking everything, they have figured out what capability suits the tactic. And so if budgets aren't guaranteed and you need to do more with less, it is really rethinking, what do I need to get done? And what is the best method to get that piece of work done? And so- holding companies or retainers are moving to more project-based, whether it's production or comms or some media. I also think that agentic and technology is pushing some full-time roles into not being needed at 100%. And we've seen that block recently. I am very much of the belief that not many roles go to zero. I think a lot of roles go to 75% or 50% or 25%. And an example of that is When we started the business during the pandemic, we never saw a media role. No media buyers, no media strategists, no media planners. Now, we see them all the time because technology can do part of the job. It can do all of the job. And I don't think we'll ever see it do the full scope. But I think that we'll see a lot of those generalists in the middle being pushed to a freelancer. And then another point that you mentioned, which I think is really interesting, is we are still undoing the overhiring from 2020. Absolutely.
00:08:32
Speaker 4: And so you have this front row seat to how CMOs want to build their team today and potentially the next two, three years moving forward. When you look at the current landscape, where do you think these teams are currently overbuilt and where do you think that they're underbuilt?
00:08:50
Speaker 1: Oh, it's a really good question. And I think the imbalance is pretty consistent. Most organizations are overbuilt in those generalist middle layers, people that are just managing process. And I think where teams are completely underbuilt is the operational layers. It's usually the last hire. It's usually we're bringing ops folks in a marketing team in to fix everything. But as CMOs are doing reorgs almost twice a year at this point, one of the most critical roles that need to be hired upfront is and we're seeing a big spike in it, is almost like a COO of a CMO's team. And they can take different titles. It could be like a chief administrative officer, a chief of staff, a head of marketing operations. And that is really someone to design the architecture and the systems. So that process layer of where is being overhired, I think those generalist project managers, we will see a lot of those roles disappear. Very interestingly, Another big spike in roles that we're seeing right now is brand, which I love because it is something. that I just don't think technology will ever be able to take away that taste and tenacity of a human. But I think that there is a huge imbalance in that messy middle of just status quo of that's how we've been hired and promoted pretty much forever.
00:10:16
Speaker 3: Let's unpack the part about that marketing COO, because I think it's really interesting. There are some CMOs that we've had on the show that I think are just so operationally freaking awesome. Not because they themselves are so operational. I mean, they are, but they put a lot of structure and leadership in place to make it work versus hiring these like PMs.
00:10:42
Speaker 2: That get things done.
00:10:42
Speaker 3: And so their responsibility, the people that they hire are at a very senior level, like their COO or chief of staff that is really building out and rebuilding and rethinking this whole architecture.
00:10:55
Speaker 2: But most, most are not.
00:10:58
Speaker 3: Either they leave it to their agencies or they just expect the work to just flow. When you look at the way marketing has been organized from the CMO down, versus how the work is getting done. Like, where do you think that disconnect happens when you don't have that COO or chief of staff or master architect, if you will?
00:11:20
Speaker 1: I mean, I think you'll find that they're the companies that are reorganizing twice a year, because what often happens is they'll get, whether it's a consultant or, you know, an external third party to come in and they leave them to execute. They do the work and they tell them what to do. And there are these fantastic decks and then it stops. Right now, the CMO is almost needing to be an architect or a re-architect of work and how they're leading systems. And I think the biggest issue we're having right now is, I don't think it's a talent problem. I don't think it's an agency problem. I don't think it's a vendor problem. I think it's a systems problem. And so kind of to
get back to your question, those CMOs that are very operational, I think they are, the systems are working. And so work is having to be redesigned completely. And I think the ones that aren't thinking like COOs, they're just completely behind right now.
00:12:20
Speaker 2: I totally agree.
00:12:20
Speaker 3: I think there's an insane amount of work that happens that is invisible or actually more importantly, I think there's just an insane amount of work that is not getting done because the flow itself is invisible. Unless you've got somebody who understands how the sausage is made or how the sausage making has changed, you're still going to have a tremendous amount of inefficiency no matter who comes in and assesses your organization.
00:12:46
Speaker 1: I completely agree with you. And on that, there are these brand new roles that we've seen pop up on the platform that I didn't even know existed or I didn't even know were a part of marketing. Q1 of 25, the number one hired skill set on our platform was a process improvement analyst. How fascinating.
00:13:04
Speaker 2: Say more. What does that person do?
00:13:06
Speaker 1: It's a different skill set at different companies, but it's almost a creative technologist who is going beyond the org chart because the org chart, I mean, it's a static document that doesn't tell you anything. It doesn't tell you who's a budget owner. It doesn't tell you who's owning relationships. And so it's almost someone that is bringing that org chart to life to ensure that all of the budgets and the relationships with the customers and the tactics to get there are completely intertwined. And then that person often ladders up into that COO at a brand, if you will. But it usually is someone with almost like a technical PM background, often someone that doesn't come from marketing, which is, I think, really important.
00:13:51
Speaker 2: How do you find those people?
00:13:54
Speaker 1: Assemble.
00:13:56
Speaker 4: I want to get into assemble in a second, but I guess I'm sitting here and I work with brands, but I haven't worked at a brand in 13 years. So what I know from my time then is now irrelevant in terms of how these brands are functioning internally. But I'm thinking about my own business. For us, Salesforce is our core system. If revenue isn't in there, if customer tickets aren't in there, then there is no source of truth and there's no accountability across the teams. So if I'm understanding you correctly, are you saying there is no core... operating system, like a single piece of technology where multiple flows of work can come through. So there's transparency and connectivity and accountability within these marketing organizations.
00:14:43
Speaker 1: Rachel, that's a really good question. And at most companies, yes, there is the single source of truth, but a lot of the time it's not intuitive technology that serves a marketing organization. And so it turns into the wild west that different teams and working
on disparate technologies often that don't speak to each other. And so going back to the importance of this process improvement analyst, yes, that is absolutely their objective of trying to weave everything together because it's critical.
00:15:12
Speaker 5: Yeah.
00:15:13
Speaker 4: It's funny. I'm seeing this role also at software companies. You called it a creative technologist.
00:15:18
Speaker 5: Yeah.
00:15:18
Speaker 4: It's like an internal solutions engineer to connect all of these disparate systems. So here you are at Assemble. And you're being tasked with finding this next generation of talent. And I don't mean age, it's like roles and responsibilities that modern marketing organizations need. How are you finding the talent?
00:15:38
Speaker 1: So there has never been more unbelievable marketing and creative talent in the industry right now. At the beginning of the company, we launched May of 2020, which was a wild time to launch any company. But we, and when I say we, it was my CTO and I at the time, we launched at the time where it was the whiplash of layoffs from the pandemic. And so we found ourselves as almost this landing pad for people who found themselves out of a job, not true freelancers at the time. So we got a great tailwind there of building community of people who found themselves out of work. Fast forward, you know, five or six years, we've had amazing referral networks, we've had incentives, we've had, you know, great relationships with industry bodies. But Now, great talent comes to us for a few reasons. One of my pain points when I was hiring talent in the 2000 teens was I didn't think that MSPs were designed for marketing. A marketing role is very different to an engineer or an accountant where you have a binary skill set. We love to live in the gray. At the same time, I didn't think that the current solutions, which were big staffing agencies, I didn't think that they empowered talent because financially, they were just skimming rates off the top. And so I wanted to provide economic and creative opportunity to those in the marketing workforce. And so a lot of people came to us because we're a closed marketplace where they knew that the best brands were using us. So the jobs were really premium. It wasn't like a LinkedIn where there's just a bunch of passive candidates who may or may not be interested in a role. And so we wanted to create this very engaged system where there were great jobs and great talent who were available, who were true freelancers. So yeah, that's how we're finding the talent.
00:17:30
Speaker 2: That's fantastic.
00:17:31
Speaker 3: And clearly you're going in a lot of different places to make sure that these organizations are as optimized as possible.
00:17:38
Speaker 2: This is a podcast about commerce and bravery. No question. Bravery, check. Now let's check the box on commerce.
00:17:46
Speaker 3: As you think about this modern marketing organization, Commerce has been in one of these places that sometimes sits outside of marketing writ large. It's sitting in the commercial organization. It could be sitting in analytics and business analytics. When it's in a marketing organization, where do you think the.
00:18:04
Speaker 2: Talent should or should not be residing?
00:18:06
Speaker 3: And how upskilled should anybody in marketing be as it relates to the role of digital commerce, regardless of vertical?
00:18:13
Speaker 1: What we find at Assemble is a lot of organizations are still operating in a brand first model. And that gap between how people are shopping is really widening. And so one of the things we spoke about at MarketingOS is commerce and content have completely collapsed into each other. We know that the consideration phase is happening on podcasts, on TikTok, sometimes in a creator's comment section, but not in a funnel that marketing has designed. And so At MarketingOS, a summit that we recently hosted is we spoke about the funnel a lot and the marketing teams that are still arguing between top and bottom of funnel, that structure needs to still separate from brand to performance and both from commerce. So there are different teams, different metrics, different agency relationships and different budget owners, but there's this juxtaposition because The consumer is still moving through all of this in a single scroll. And I think the customers that get it right realize where their customers are rather than operating kind of the former marketing organization model. Does that make sense?
00:19:28
Speaker 4: Yeah, we face it every single day. Ultimately, we think the organizations that are winning are the ones where names can change, whether it's CMO or chief growth officer or chief commercial officer, but they end up owning both. But structurally, that has to change. We got to ask you our famous last question, which is what's the bravest thing you've ever done?
00:19:46
Speaker 1: I was thinking about this and it's so interesting. because I don't think it was brave at the time, but I moved to New York at 21 after college from Australia with no visa, with no friends, with no apartment and just figured it out. And here I am 13 or 14 years later and, you know, I have a business, I have a son, I have a family here. And it didn't feel brave at the time, but looking back, I'm like, how the hell did I pull that off? And so it was an amazing decision, a very brave decision that paid off, but it has to be that.
00:20:25
Speaker 5: No doubt.
00:20:26
Speaker 3: I think that sometimes the things that we do at 21, it may be the benefit of not having to overthink things because at 21, how much do we really overthink? But look at what it has done to change the trajectory of everything.
00:20:39
Speaker 2: In your life. It's pretty extraordinary, as are you, as are you. We are so thankful that you joined us today, Laura.
00:20:45
Speaker 3: I like that we got into the heart of it all because it really brings forward some of the biggest critical issues that are plaguing us today.
00:20:54
Speaker 2: There's a lot of conversation about tech.
00:20:57
Speaker 3: And data and tools and not enough about how work gets done and the talent that's necessary to get it done.
00:21:03
Speaker 2: So thank you very much for highlighting this for all of us.
00:21:06
Speaker 1: It was so much fun. Thank you for having me.
00:21:10
Speaker 4: If you like what you heard and you want to think about talent from someone who's within an organization, go check out an episode we recorded a few months ago with Andrew Letterman from Mondelez. If you like what you heard, tell a friend, write a review. Thanks for listening.
00:21:34
Speaker 1: Thank you.
00:21:48
Speaker 5: Hi, I'm Jackie Cooper, Global Chief Brand Officer at Edelman and the host of Touch of Truth, a new podcast launching on the Adweek Podcast Network. My dad gave me this incredibly smart piece of advice. Meet everyone once. As a result, I've met some of the most fascinating and inspiring people on the planet. Now on Touch of Truth, we're coming centre stage and sharing the mic to experience stories of truth, insights and visions for the future that will challenge your way of thinking. Touch of Truth is available wherever you listen to podcasts. New episodes come out every Tuesday. I do hope to see you there.