Marketing is supposed to be an industry that exists to serve others. It’s meant to connect businesses with their audiences, to promote brands, and ultimately, to help clients achieve measurable success. Yet, paradoxically, the marketing world seems to be more obsessed with promoting itself than delivering real results.

At its core, the industry is deeply self-indulgent—more focused on impressing its peers, winning awards, and looking innovative than on actually doing effective work. But what makes this self-indulgence even worse is that it is fuelled by another glaring problem: the industry is full of people who don’t know what they’re doing.

The marketing industry has long relied on a shotgun hiring approach, bringing in large numbers of young, inexperienced employees, often with no formal education in marketing and little to no real-world experience. Instead of investing in expertise, agencies and in-house teams gamble on the idea that a few of these hires might stumble into competence while the rest churn through the system. The result? A workforce that lacks depth, relies on trendy gimmicks, and reinforces the industry’s self-congratulatory nature rather than challenging it.

Marketing’s obsession with itself

Marketing professionals spend a lot of time talking about marketing—to each other. Conferences, LinkedIn thought pieces, industry awards, and flashy campaigns seem more focused on impressing fellow marketers than actually driving business results.

This self-indulgence takes many forms:

  • Awards over effectiveness – Many campaigns are designed not to sell products or grow brands, but to win industry awards. If a campaign makes a splash within marketing circles, it’s deemed a success—even if it fails to deliver for the client.
  • Buzzwords over strategy – Terms like “omnichannel engagement,” “brand storytelling,” and “growth hacking” make for great boardroom presentations, but often amount to empty jargon. The real work of marketing—understanding customers, refining messaging, and driving conversions—gets lost in the noise.
  • Trends over fundamentals – Marketers love to jump on the latest digital trends. Whether it’s AI-generated content, influencer marketing, or whatever the newest social media platform is, there’s often little thought given to whether these trends actually serve the client’s business goals.

But why does this happen? Why does an industry that exists to serve customers instead spend so much time indulging in its own hype? The answer lies in how marketing hires and trains its workforce—or rather, how it doesn’t.

The inexperienced workforce driving the problem

A major reason marketing is so self-referential is that most of the people in the industry don’t have a strong foundation in marketing itself. Unlike professions such as law or medicine, marketing has no strict barriers to entry. Many people enter the industry without a marketing degree, and even those with a formal education often lack real-world experience in how marketing actually drives business results.

This creates a workforce that:

  • Lacks strategic depth – Without a grounding in consumer psychology, data analysis, and business strategy, many marketers rely on superficial, trend-driven thinking rather than evidence-based approaches.
  • Chases trends rather than results – With little knowledge of long-term brand building or conversion strategies, young marketers tend to focus on what’s flashy and new rather than what works.
  • Fakes it until they make it – Since marketing lacks clear accountability in many cases, there’s a strong "pretend-you-know-what-you're-doing" culture. Junior employees mimic industry jargon, copy whatever seems to be working, and hope they don’t get caught out.

A revolving door of mediocrity

Because agencies and in-house teams prioritise hiring young, inexpensive talent, high turnover is the norm. The industry is notorious for burning through junior employees, many of whom leave within a few years due to long hours, lack of mentorship, and chaotic management. Instead of fixing this, marketing firms just replace them with more inexperienced hires, ensuring the cycle continues.

This means that very few people actually develop into truly skilled marketers. Those who do are often drowned out by trend-chasing juniors and agency execs more focused on their personal brand than delivering value.

No real accountability = no pressure to improve

In most industries, poor performance leads to clear consequences. If a surgeon is bad at surgery, people die. If a lawyer is incompetent, their clients lose cases. But in marketing, results are often subjective and hard to measure. A flashy campaign might not increase sales, but it can still be deemed a success if it "creates brand awareness" (a vague metric that’s often just an excuse for failure).

This lack of accountability allows the industry to remain self-indulgent. There’s no pressure to fix hiring practices, invest in proper training, or prioritise substance over style because there are no clear repercussions for getting it wrong.

Can AI help break the cycle?

While self-indulgence is deeply ingrained in marketing culture, AI could help disrupt the industry's over-reliance on cheap, inexperienced workers. Instead of continually cycling through junior employees who lack experience, businesses could use AI as a co-pilot to provide guidance, automate repetitive tasks, and inject a level of strategic intelligence that young marketers lack.

Here’s how AI might help break the cycle:

  • Replacing unnecessary roles – AI tools can handle many of the tasks that agencies currently assign to undertrained junior staff, such as content creation, data analysis, and campaign optimisation. This could reduce the need for mass hiring of inexperienced workers, leading to a smaller but more skilled workforce.
  • Providing expertise on demand – AI-driven marketing assistants could bridge the experience gap, offering insights on best practices, customer segmentation, and data-driven decision-making. Instead of relying on intuition and trend-chasing, marketers could make smarter, evidence-based decisions.
  • Minimising wasted client money – By automating inefficient processes and helping businesses target their marketing spend more effectively, AI could help reduce the industry’s tendency to burn through client budgets on ineffective campaigns.
  • Holding marketing more accountable – AI-powered analytics and attribution models can provide clearer, data-driven proof of what works and what doesn’t, making it harder for agencies to hide behind vague metrics and flashy presentations.

While AI won’t immediately transform marketing’s hiring practices, it does have the potential to force the industry to be more accountable and efficient. If businesses start shifting toward AI-driven marketing strategies rather than relying on bloated teams of junior staff, the industry may finally have to prioritise results over reputation.

Until then, marketing will likely remain what it has become: an industry more focused on marketing itself than actually delivering results.