MARKETING DECISIONS FOR FOUNDERS
Execution Got Cheap. Judgment Got Expensive.
Agencies are cutting the people who make things and paying more for the people who decide what to make. That payroll shift says something about where your own marketing budget should go.
By Michelle Richard • September 4, 2026
Resources / Marketing Decisions / Execution Got Cheap Judgment Got Expensive
ON THIS PAGE
You are probably producing more marketing than you were two years ago. More posts, more emails, more pages on the website. If it does not feel like it is working any better, you are not imagining that.
Something shifted underneath, and the clearest evidence is showing up somewhere you would not think to look. Marketing agency payrolls.
What Agencies Are Doing With Their Own Staff
Gartner’s 2026 survey found that 23% of agencies cut junior copywriting positions in 2025, with 31% planning more cuts this year. Junior design and production roles are moving the same direction. Over the same period, demand for senior strategists grew 18%.
Forbes reported in August that roughly 10,000 marketing jobs have disappeared, and Forrester expects 15% of agency roles to be gone by the end of the year.
The people who made things are going. The people who decide what to make are getting more expensive.
Notice what is being cut and what is not. The people who made things are going. The people who decide what to make are getting more expensive.
Agencies are not making a prediction here. They are making payroll decisions with their own money. When a business restructures around a belief, the belief is worth a look.
What That Means for You
You have access to the same tools they do. You can produce a month of content in an afternoon. That is real, and it is genuinely useful.
But it changed what is scarce. Making things used to be the bottleneck. Now the bottleneck is knowing what is worth making.
Most owners have lived some version of this already, long before AI showed up. You try Instagram Reels. Six weeks later you drop it for a podcast. Then you blame the platform. The platform was never the problem. There was nothing above the tactic deciding whether the tactic made sense in the first place.
AI does not slow that cycle down. It speeds it up. You can now run through ten times as many tactics in a year, with the same nothing underneath them.
Strategy Is Smaller Than It Sounds
If the word strategy makes you picture a forty page document and a consultant’s invoice, set that image aside. For a business your size it is usually one or two decisions, written down.
ONE DECISION, WRITTEN DOWN
Take a bookkeeper who serves small businesses. Her strategy is not a document. It is a decision. Service business owners, in her county, between one and five million in revenue, reached through one weekly networking group she actually shows up to.
Nothing about that is clever. All of it fits on an index card. What makes it work is that everything she does now has something to be measured against. When someone suggests she start a podcast, she has a way to answer the question. Before, she would have just tried it.
That is the whole difference. Not a bigger plan. Enough clarity to answer the next question that comes at you.
To Be Clear
None of this means execution stopped mattering. Someone still has to write the page, build the site, and send the email, and doing that well still takes real skill. Nobody has ever won with a great strategy and sloppy work.
The point is narrower. Hands are no longer the scarce thing. Judgment is. And judgment is what your marketing budget should mostly be buying right now.
Where This Leaves You
The agencies letting junior staff go are being forced to answer a question they could avoid back when execution was expensive. Were we ever selling judgment, or were we selling activity?
That is a fair question to ask about your own marketing spend. Not whether you are producing enough. Whether someone actually decided what is worth producing, or whether the tactics have been deciding for you.
SOURCES CITED
Gartner 2026 survey — 23% of agencies cut junior copywriting roles in 2025, 31% planning more; senior strategist demand up 18%.
Forbes, August 2026 — roughly 10,000 marketing jobs disappeared.
Forrester — 15% of agency roles expected to be gone by year end.
NEXT STEP
Offer & Audience Blueprint
It gets you clear on who you serve and what you sell, so the next decision is easier.