The pyramid flip: how lean marketers spend their week on strategy, not slog

"Marketing was a pyramid: strategy at the top, execution at the bottom. You'd spend very little time at the top because execution took so long — thin on strategy, deep on execution. With effective use of AI you can flip that pyramid. If you have super strong strategy, the execution can happen really fast."

Michelle Geere built a company on the same observation. Adbot exists because optimising Google Ads properly is roughly thirty hours a week of keyword research, competitor analysis and bid fiddling — work she describes with the candour of someone who ran agencies: "I loved that there was this channel called search. But I hated doing it, and nobody in my team loved doing it." Her conclusion belongs above every lean marketer's desk:

"When you give a marketer headspace, it lets them be strategic and creative. That's what humans are really good at. The day-to-day optimisation — humans aren't good at that anyway. Just give it to a machine."

The weekly triage

The discipline hiding in the joke is a real sorting rule. Once a quarter, list everything you did in a typical week and sort each task into three buckets:

Judgement work — strategy, positioning, customer conversations, creative direction, internal advocacy. This is human, always. Protect it; schedule it first.

Optimisation work — bid management, keyword lists, resizing assets, reporting mechanics, scheduling. Repetitive, rule-bound, measurable. Automate or hand to a tool; your only remaining job is checking it still matches strategy.

The residue — things that are neither: status meetings, formatting, ad-hoc requests. These are candidates for simply stopping.

Matt's test for whether the flip has worked is brutally simple: does your calendar show more strategy hours this quarter than last?

The boss with the AI song

Michelle's favourite scenario will be familiar: the boss comes back from a weekend having generated a song with AI, and now marketing must "use AI." The lean marketer's move isn't to roll your eyes, and isn't to become a developer overnight. It's to pick the tools where the unglamorous steps have been done for you — and to be seen using them. "You can go back to the boss and say: we are using AI, in this way." Executive enthusiasm is budget. Spend it on the version that works.

The hours you reclaim don't vanish. They move up the pyramid — to the strategy and creative that no tool will do for you, and that lean teams never had time for before.

Try this week: run the weekly triage. Mark every task J, O or R. Take the single biggest O-task, find the tool or automation that absorbs it, and diarise what those reclaimed hours will now do instead.

Sourced from recorded, on-the-record interviews on the South African Digital Marketing Podcast. Every practitioner quoted above is named in the text.