Eimear Colleran, Head of Marketing, Prophet
If you saw my desktop right now, you'd probably question how I maintain employment.
There are screenshots everywhere. Files called FINAL_V7_USETHISONE. Random images I've saved because they might be useful one day. Enough open tabs to slow down a small country's internet infrastructure.
For years, I assumed this was a flaw.
Marketing always seemed to reward the organised people. The spreadsheet lovers. The colour-coded calendar crowd. The people who knew exactly where every file lived and could probably tell you what they were doing on a specific Thursday in 2028.
In other words, not me.
Lia Carruthers joined Prophet in February and, somehow, the output of our two-person marketing team has exploded. We've launched campaigns, produced case studies, hosted events, built sales assets, managed PR, written newsletters, run a guerrilla stunt, published thought leadership and generated enough LinkedIn content to ensure at least a few people have quietly muted us.
When I hired Lia, it wasn't because she knew every marketing platform inside out. It wasn't because she'd mastered some secret growth tactic. In fact, the older I get, the more I find myself hiring for character rather than technical skill.
What stood out about Lia was that she could handle herself. Put her in a room full of senior marketers, and she'd be fine. Throw her into an event, and she'd be fine. Ask her to tackle something she'd never done before, and her first instinct wasn't panic, it was curiosity.
It can be tough to find people like that, and those things are much harder to teach than how to use a marketing platform.
Now, to be fair, I thought we were pretty similar, but then I discovered she actually files her emails. Voluntarily. Which, frankly, raised some questions.
But aside from that, we operate remarkably similarly.
Neither of us are particularly attached to process. Neither of us needs six workshops, three stakeholder meetings and a steering committee before making a decision.
Most days involve a constant stream of messages that simply say:
"Have you seen this?" Or: "This is clever."
A surprising amount of time is spent sending each other things we've spotted on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn or out in the real world. A clever retail activation. A beauty brand doing something unexpected. A sports team building community. A fast-food chain tapping into culture. A creator telling a story in a way we haven't seen before.
The funny thing is that most of it has absolutely nothing to do with B2B marketing.
Some of our best ideas come from categories we'd never traditionally look at. Because we're not really looking at what they're selling. We're looking at how they're making people feel. How they're earning attention. How they're creating talkability. How they're getting people to care. People are people, whether they're buying sneakers or software.
And I think that's what modern marketing increasingly rewards.
Not perfection. Not process. Curiosity.
When I started my career, marketing felt much more structured. Campaigns took months to launch. Reports took weeks to build. Entire teams existed to do work that now happens before lunch.
Today, two marketers with a decent tech stack can produce the output that once required an entire department.
The problem is that nobody has reduced expectations. If anything, we've added more. More channels. More content. More reporting. More events. More platforms. More AI tools.
Every week, there seems to be another technology promising to save us 10 hours. Somehow, we immediately use those 10 hours to create 12 hours of new work.
It's one of marketing's greatest achievements. And greatest scams.
The bottleneck is no longer production. The bottleneck is deciding what deserves your attention.
That's why I think that the marketers thriving today share a very different characteristic to the ones we traditionally celebrated.
They're adaptable. They can switch gears quickly. They can spot an opportunity and move on it. They can make decisions without having every possible variable neatly tied up in a deck.
Most importantly, they don't panic when the plan changes. Because the plan always changes. Consumer behaviour changes. Platforms change. Algorithms change. The economy changes.
Half the things we thought we knew about AI six months ago already feel outdated. For years, businesses built systems designed to explain what happened. Annual reviews. Quarterly reports. Post-campaign analysis.
But increasingly, competitive advantage comes from responding to what's happening now. From learning faster. From adapting faster. From making decisions without waiting for perfect information.
Which brings me back to Type Bs…
Maybe modern marketing doesn't favour them because they're more relaxed. Maybe it favours them because they've spent their entire careers operating in a state of controlled chaos.
They're comfortable navigating ambiguity. They're endlessly curious. They're happy to have a crack. And they understand that your next great idea probably won't come from a planning document.
It'll come from a random TikTok, a beauty campaign, a screenshot buried somewhere on your desktop, or a message from a colleague that simply says: "This is clever."