Most marketing work does not fail because the people involved lack talent or intent. It fails because the systems surrounding the work are fragile, misaligned, or optimized for outcomes that cannot be sustained once pressure increases. Over time, familiar patterns emerge. Strong ideas lose momentum, campaigns reset instead of evolving, and performance becomes harder to explain even as effort increases.

The renewed push toward return-to-office policies across Canada and other markets has reintroduced a familiar narrative, one that frames physical presence as a prerequisite for collaboration, culture, and accountability. This shift has been reinforced not only by private employers, but also by public institutions, including the Government of Canada, which has moved to re-establish in-office requirements across large portions of its workforce.

As creative organizations grow, they tend to solve complexity by segmentation, separating strategy from execution, execution from performance, performance from analytics, and analytics from business outcomes.