The following is a guest article by Alison Steinlauf Anziska, Senior Vice President of Marketing at Edmunds. The views expressed are solely those of the author.

The marketing industry attracts the most creative minds, but even with top talent, organizations can still fail to deliver results. The reason is that they build the wrong systems and then embed great people within them.

This is a structural problem that no new product launch or campaign brief can solve. Today, as AI has fundamentally changed the channels and ways consumers discover brands, this problem is becoming costly.

In a report released by Deloitte and Duke University,the 2026 "CMO Survey"the capability gap most cited by marketing leaders is not a missing skill. Instead, more than one in five respondents said the biggest gap is the lack of people, time, and budget needed to put existing skills into practice. This is the hole created by siloed organizations: each function gets the resources to do its own job, but the work of connecting between functions is left undone.

For years, the linear funnel allowed organizations with siloed functions—from product to marketing to sales—to get by. Audiences acted in a predictable sequence: search, visit the site, convert. Brands could mask internal disconnects with enough media spend. But things are different now. The paths consumers take to discover brands are spread across AI-generated answers, social media, PR, communities, and product interfaces, and often happen simultaneously. If the organization behind it is fragmented, the audience will feel that disconnect.

No one deliberately builds silos

Organizational silos rarely stem from bad decisions—they often form during rapid growth.

When a company expands quickly, the instinct is to hire specialized leaders and give each person ownership over their function. There is nothing wrong with that in itself; deep expertise is critical. The problem lies in what follows: product teams test relevance with existing audiences, brand teams seek value propositions for audience growth, performance teams optimize efficiency, and PR teams chase media coverage. Each team does its own job well, but no one is responsible for the overall system, and silos hinder true integrated impact.

By the time fragmentation becomes obvious, silos have become load-bearing structures. Realigning processes and ownership around them is slow, expensive, and politically complex. The cost of fragmentation is real, but it rarely shows up on dashboards. Value that was never created is not seen as a loss—it simply never appears.

I have spent nearly two decades building integrated marketing functions, and the deepest lesson I have learned is this: integration comes not just from bringing the right people together, but from designing a system where those people are jointly accountable for the same outcomes.

For us, the change was simple to describe but hard to execute. We brought market insights into product development early to influence its direction, and tied the goals of owned, earned, and paid media to the same business outcomes. Once those two connections were established, downstream influence became possible.

The key is signals, not spend

In an AI-driven environment, the winning brands will not be those that spend the most or publish the most, but those that are consistent across every touchpoint—AI answers, social media, earned media, and product interfaces—because their organizations are designed to produce interconnected signals.

I think of it as "surround sound"—not an omnichannel media strategy, not a campaign alignment exercise, but an organizational design where functions like brand, performance, PR, product marketing, lifecycle, and design reinforce and complement each other in real time. When this system works, the audience experiences not channels but a "force multiplier." The impact of this coherent brand signal not only reaches consumers, but also opens doors with business partners and translates into B2B credibility that no media plan could foresee.

This requires a leader who can truly see across all functions and has the authority to make trade-offs—an integration point with real accountability.

Building such a system is harder than it sounds and takes longer than most organizations expect, but constraints bring clarity. When you cannot outspend competitors, you must outthink them. That means deeply understanding consumers, concentrating resources where impact is greatest, and building organizational alignment so you can move quickly when unexpected opportunities arise. When product teams view marketing as a post-launch promotional tool, the audience and market dynamics that shape the roadmap must be brought in early to exert influence.

In a world where audiences engage with brands nonlinearly and AI continuously reshapes discovery paths, the leaders who build enduring marketing organizations will not be those with the deepest channel expertise, but those who understand how functions connect, where integration creates value, and what lack of integration costs.

I built an integrated team not because it was an elegant solution, but to maximize our impact and amplify our efforts. In a category where trust is the primary purchase driver, consistency is not optional. What I did not fully anticipate was how beneficial and enduring this architecture would become when circumstances changed.

For leaders who inherit organizations with existing silos, the path is harder, but the direction is the same. The question is not whether to integrate, but whether you understand clearly enough what you are trying to achieve. The companies that deliberately break through in this environment will not be the ones with the most channels.

It turns out the org chart is the strategy itself.