Marketers Should Be Working on their Organization’s A+ Problem

I’m a fan of Shaan Puri, co-host of the entrepreneurship podcast “My First Million,” and a nugget of his that occurs to me often is, “Work on the A+ problem,” which is advice he dispensed to full-time employees thinking about how to crush it at work. I think many marketers, whether CMOs, marketing managers, or agency folks, would do well to heed this advice. It’s very easy for us to lose sight of the problems that really matter.

Consider how this plays out for a CMO or VP of marketing. They get hired. There’s a ton of enthusiasm around the big mission: what the company is trying to accomplish in the aggregate, what it’s aiming to become, the no. 1 problem on the CEO’s mind (the A+ problem). Then, the work begins. Personnel issues arise. Execution gets tricky. Events happen. Content needs to be pumped out. Eight months go by, and the CMO looks back at their strategy docs. What were they supposed to be working on again?

The same thing happens with agencies (as I myself can attest). The CEO or marketing leader brings in an agency. They have a bunch of big ideas. They analyze the company’s place in the industry. They may even create a new story for the company. All of this is supposed to help solve a business problem, not just a marketing problem — the kind of thing the CEO and board care about. But fast-forward half a year, and the agency is just doing tactics without a clear understanding of how they support that key objective.

All of this is natural, but it’s a problem. Because when marketing isn’t working on the A+ problem — the problem that is most important to the organization as a whole — it’s expendable. A cost center. The kind of thing that feels worth doing in good times but gets cut as soon as a bad quarter strikes. Attributing opportunities to high-value B2B marketing (unlike, say, performance advertising for toilet paper) is hard. And, when tough times materialize, a CEO, CFO, or board will just make up some margin by cutting the marketing team that maybe isn’t contributing to business success anyway.

Refocusing on the A+ problem is how marketing takes back control of the internal narrative by making a concerted, conscious, and continuous contribution to the organization’s no. 1 strategic objective. 

But what does an A+ problem look like?

Consider the case of The Trade Desk. TTD is unusual in that it’s a genuine market leader: the no. 1 independent demand-side platform. So, unlike most adtech companies, TTD’s main problem isn’t commoditization or differentiation within its category. The primary task for marketing is not differentiating from other DSPs because brands and agencies know why they go to TTD: it’s the biggest DSP, the self-branded portal to the open internet. Instead, TTD has a bigger problem than intra-category commoditization. Its problem is threats to the independent DSP category as a whole as well as the open web to which it acts as a gateway, plus the contest between the open web and Google, Meta, and Amazon.

So, what is a marketing strategist for TTD to do? The challenge goes beyond creating content to showcase the results TTD unlocks for its clients or differentiating it from its many mini-mes. The problem is the fate of the open web itself and TTD’s role as the gatekeeper of its inventory. It’s the company’s ability to accrue enough inventory to justify its hearty valuation — and compete with walled gardens whose O&O (replete with reams of first-party data) looks more attractive each quarter.

Accordingly, what a strategic marketer with leadership ambitions at TTD would not want to do is fall into the nearly inescapable tactical trap of ‘just creating content’ or reinforcing the company’s relatively secure position as the leading non-Big Tech DSP. If their work is to matter beyond marketing — if they are to be more than fungible and truly relevant at the highest levels of the organization — TTD’s marketers need to go beyond reinforcing the status quo and instead focus on solving the A+ problem, or helping the company go where it wants (as opposed to staying where it is). Which, in TTD’s case, would mean devising and amplifying a brand story that supports the open web itself or shifts the definition of it to benefit TTD’s position. This is why you see TTD making the discursive shift from the “open internet” (rife with quality issues) to the “premium internet,” of which, by the way, it happens to be the arbiter and thus the one true gatekeeper. 

There’s a pernicious view of marketers as order takers: sales just needs stuff, and marketers create that stuff. Of course, that’s part of marketing’s job. Marketing exists to build the company’s reputation and relationships, which creates and accelerates sales opportunities. But that doesn’t mean that marketing should be a merely tactical function that just creates collateral as needed — at least not if marketing is to make a big impact on the organization and if strategic marketers want to keep their jobs. Rather, marketing should figure out what the biggest problem facing the company is — what the CEO is losing sleep over — and determine how the tools of reputation and relationship building can be used to help solve it. In other words, marketing should work on the A+ problem.