…and it’s gonna have a ripple effect on everything

I’m part of this in-house brand and creative leader community. The brands represented are amazing. There’s big brands and small brands, household names and ones just coming up, and of course, competitors. But that doesn’t stop people from asking questions and sharing opening and honestly.

A few weeks ago, someone asked a question that opened up a can of worms (at least for me).

Creatives per marketer and total employees across three segments

At startups, it's 1 creative for every 3 marketers. Tight but doable, because everyone still knows each other and there are only so many simultaneous projects going on.

At mid-market companies, that ratio stretches to 1 creative for every 8.5 marketers.

At enterprise, it's 1 for every 7 marketers, but now spread across 183 total employees per creative.

The spread across individual companies is the part that actually stopped me. The leanest company in the thread runs 1 creative for every 2 marketers. The heaviest runs 1 for every 25. On total headcount, the densest company staffs 1 creative per 13 people. The leanest runs 1 per 350. That's a 27x gap, inside the same rough industry, doing the same rough job.

This is the part where I have to admit that this isn’t exactly statistically significant. There were 14 complete responses (a few “a lots” and “not enoughs”). I'd love a bigger sample, and if you've got numbers to add, reply and send them my way. But in any case, small doesn't mean wrong. The pattern showed up company after company, and it lines up with what most of us already see and feel everyday.

Why the ratio erodes as companies scale

The instinct is to say "creative gets deprioritized as companies grow." That's not completely true. What actually happens is simpler and more mechanical.

Marketing headcount, historically, was used to cover execution. You needed X people because producing Y campaigns (and all the associated activities) took X sets of hands. Creative headcount was never really sized the same way, it was sized subjectively based on exec opinions, which don't exactly scale linearly with company size the way production volume does (read: we have enough creative, we need more hands).

So as companies grew marketing headcount grew to keep the execution machine running. Creative headcount didn’t need to keep pace because the perception was that the same set of guidelines can serve a 200 people company as well as a 20,000 one. Most marketing teams have caught up to this not being real but it took a long time.

And it's worth noting that creative hasn't always been the victim here. For a long time creative teams were happy enough to do the execution work and they did plenty of it (some of it was due to self-preservation, and some because it’s just easier). The thing is production and busywork should have never lived with them in the first place. That's why we build brand systems. You build the system once, let marketing self-serve, free creative to actually take the big swings they were supposed to be taking this whole time.

All that said, everyone was generally happy enough but it’s time to talk about AI…

AI is changing the ratio

We're thankfully at the tail end of a really annoying part of this AI bubble. The last couple years have been dominated by one loud, mostly wrong idea: that AI can do creative work. It can generate images, it can draft copy, it can spit out a hundred variants before lunch. And for a minute that became a real threat to creative headcount specifically because if AI could create an execute, why do you need creatives, right?

A lot of good creatives lost their jobs due to a fundamental misunderstanding of the tech. You see AI can execute on orders all day long. It can’t think. Without detailed instruction it doesn't know what your brand looks or sounds like, it doesn't push back on bad ideas, it just works off of best practices to do the bare minimum. That's the whole argument behind AI being a magnet to the middle. On it’s own, AI always defaults to meh, and the only thing that keeps it from landing there is a strong point of view that someone needs to actually take the time to define, document, and distribute (this is a framework, isn’t it?).

But if someone does put that POV together. And creates those comps. And builds machine readable guidelines. And continues to evolve it all then AI can execute like a champ. And remember who’s job execution was? Marketing.

Creative already outsource a bunch execution work to Marketing through brand systems and self-serve tools. Now marketing is outsourcing that work to AI. Not because marketing's job stopped mattering (none of this is a slight on marketers btw), but because the thing a lot of marketing headcount was brought in to do just got a lot cheaper to do with a $20/mo license. This is why we’re hearing so much about T-shaped marketers and deep generalists again.

Based on the old numbers, logic would dictate that if marketing is shrinking creative will too. I don’t think it will. I think it’s going to grow, because AI can’t do the things creative was always supposed to be doing. Things like building a point of view, coming up with original ideas, and evolving the brand. As everything around brand and creative gets automated, it’s the actual creativity that becomes more and more important.

I can easily see a world where the ratio shifts to 1:1 over the next few years as companies figure out how they want to show up in the market and what AIs role in that is, that ratio is going to flip. It may not always show up as in-house headcount. I predict companies will invest way more in the right agencies and consultancies to fill the gap (OhSNAP! says hi!), but regardless of of it’s in-house or out, the perception of brand is going to transform in a way B2B hasn’t seen maybe ever.

What else is changing with brand?

We’ve spent a lot of time talking about creatives and marketers, but we’re finally getting to a point where brand’s influence is reaching beyond marketing. And I’m so hear for it.

Brand doesn't belong in marketing. Not because marketing doesn't matter, but because brand is bigger than marketing. Brand impacts sales, product, CS, people ops, facilities, and literally anywhere someone interacts with the company. If I had my way, brand would sit next to finance, legal, and ops, because it has the same impact on the business overall.

That argument was just Dmitry being delusional before. Now there’s real merit behind. When brand's day-to-day responsibility was to make marketing assets and campaign work look good, it sorta made sense to keep them under one roof. AI is what removes that excuse though.

AI doesn’t just live with marketing, does it? Nope, everyone is creating with it. And if you thought marketers were bad at design, I promise you they’re artists compared to sales. The future of brand isn’t supporting marketing, it’s supporting the whole company. That 1:1 ratio doesn't just happen because AI is reducing marketing orgs. It’s because AI is going to force the organizational structure that always needed to happen..

What do we from here?

If I’m a marketing leader, I’m making sure my creatives are as far away from pure execution mode as possible. All this talk about ratios is cool but the numbers alone don’t build brands. You need to start focusing on the systems that enable your marketers to use AI properly. The amount of tokens wasted on regenerating alone should make you nervous. You need to get ahead of the ratio shift so that you’re not behind.

If I’m a brand leader, I’m pushing my team into AI tools yesterday. It’s not simple prompting anymore, it’s connectors, MCPs, projects, skills, simple coding projects, and the like. Your colleagues (in and out of marketing) are going to be using these tools whether you like it or not. Become the teachers. Enable them. Become indispensable so the mistakes of the past 12-18 months don’t get repeated. And please, go out and build bridges across every org at your company.

This is the part where I tell you that this is the whole reason OhSNAP! exists. We saw this coming in a world before AI where brands couldn’t take big swings because they were so focused on simple execution. Things got wilder.

If you have a brand system and you’re unsure if it’s ready for the future, our brand systems audit is here to help. If you don’t have a brand system then you need to hit us up ASAP. Planning season is starting, let’s start 2027 with a bang.