Marketing as a Service

Once upon a time, ideas bore the name of the person who conceived them. Today, marketing presents itself like an Excel spreadsheet: organized, modular, silent. Welcome to the era of Marketing as a Service. Where everything is requestable. Everything is traceable. Everything is scalable. And everything, precisely for this reason, has become interchangeable .

Accenture, EY, Deloitte, Publicis: they build platforms, networks, strategic supply chains. Brands, meanwhile, stop being storytellers and transform into clients. They monitor. They approve. But they no longer question anything .

The Strategic Investigation: Everything Works, Nothing Vibrates

The CRM is in the hands of a platform. The content is produced by a content factory. Performance is monitored by a media agency. The strategy comes from a consulting firm.

The brand? Supervises. The brand manager sits in a sort of control tower: he sees all the suppliers moving in perfect sync, but he no longer "inhabits" the strategy, he doesn't pilot it. He simply manages the traffic.

And real cases prove it.

Intel, for example, has just entrusted Accenture and AI with a significant portion of its marketing. The official motive is to cut costs, but the result is to redefine the role of internal teams, which in some cases, according to reports, are even training their own external replacements.

EY, on the other hand, has consolidated 37 of its creative acquisitions into EY Studio+, a CMO powerhouse that includes names like CX agency Blackdot, design studio Doberman, and strategy consultancy Seren.

The result is a seamless supply chain, where everyone does something. But no one makes decisions. No one puts their face on the idea.

It's not a question of efficiency. It's a question of authorship.

THE PARADOX – The Faustian Pact of Efficiency

Why are brands making this Faustian bargain?

Why do they trade soul for efficiency? The answer, as always, is human: fear of risk. In a system where responsibility is scattered across five agencies, two levels of procurement, and an algorithm, no one can fail alone. And above all, this model speaks the language C-level executives prefer: KPIs, dashboards, controllable processes. The chaotic and chaotic art of marketing has been transformed into a reassuring and measurable science.

But a brand's identity is never reassuring. It's a statement. It's the culmination of a thousand small, courageous decisions. Delegating it to a process means emptying it, turning it into a soulless shell.

3 Takeaways for Orienting Yourself to Marketing as a Service

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1. Identity requires a leader, not a process. A supply chain produces output, but only one person (or team) can ensure consistency and courage.

   
   

2. The supply chain optimizes the "how," but doesn't answer the "why." Before building the machine, you have to decide where to go. Otherwise, you're speeding toward nothing.

   
   

3. The real strategy isn't eliminating risk, but choosing it. The answer to what makes us unique isn't found on a dashboard, but in a position we take.

   
   

Conclusion: Which Side Are We On?

"Marketing as a Service" optimizes, accelerates, and distributes. But it doesn't decide. And when no one decides anymore, when no one is willing to defend an inconvenient idea, when everything is replaceable, then we no longer have an identity.

We only have one supply chain.

To follow the entire investigation and delve deeper into the case, listen to the Cherry Picking episode