Essay · Nov 2025
Jazzing Marketing Production
Marketing · OKRs · processes · production
“Don’t play what’s there, play what’s not there.” — Miles Davis
Music is one of the most structured creative activities. Each song has a sheet that determines the notes, rhythms, and instruments of the piece. The same song can still carry a wide range of nuances that separate a professional musician from a beginning student.
That is especially clear in jazz. To some listeners it can sound arbitrary, but an experienced ear can hear just enough structure to allow freedom without tipping into chaos.
Below are three ways of working that can shape a more creative marketing production model—helping teams build sharp marketing stories at the speed of culture, without a metronome.
Common Language
When we decide to write a song, we choose a clef. It sets the pitch of the written notes and gives a shared reference point for everything on the stave.
In marketing teams, every stakeholder often has a clear vision of what needs to get done—but struggles to fold those different visions into one shared set of objectives that can guide everyone’s energy and effort.
To create autonomy and force trade-off conversations early, Objectives and Key Results (OKRs)1 offer a simple frame: qualitative, inspirational goals (objectives) tied to strategy, paired with quantitative key results that define, for a given period, what progress looks like.
Like sheet music, OKRs work best when they are public and current. They give stakeholders and the team shared context, while leaving each person free to decide how they do the work.
- KR 1Measurable outcome that proves progress
- KR 2Measurable outcome that proves progress
- KR 3Measurable outcome that proves progress
One branch open at a time. Hierarchy is the product; decoration is not.
Same Tempo
Like most coordinated efforts, every song has a tempo: an expected pace at which each person contributes to the whole.
OKRs need a matching communication cadence so people stay aligned—from planning and shaping a shared vision, through recalibrating execution, learning, improving, and supporting one another. That is the job of feedback loops2.
Self-organizing teams can handle unexpected tempos the way jazz musicians do—and have more energy for it—when they control how they reach their goals. What they still need is the right context at the right moment to make good decisions.
Bar length = how often the loop fires. Open a row for focus, approach, and purpose.
Jazz musicians rarely play with the same people forever. The most inventive ones often seek collaborators with approaches different from their own.
If marketing wants a diverse mix of internal and external makers who can produce strong work with local authenticity, it has to think beyond internal procedures. The aim is to find and integrate new partners and teammates more easily—lowering transaction costs with onboarding that works more like an API in software development: clear inputs, clear outputs, easy to plug into.
Evolving Style
A band usually starts by playing other people’s songs before it finds its own sound and, eventually, influences others. That arc is a useful map for how to innovate and scale production.
Depending on how familiar a format is—and how much volume it carries—teams need different approaches to cost, time, and quality. Think of three mindsets3 for sizing and shaping opportunities in creative production: from function analysis, to process analysis, to benefits analysis, judged through feasibility, desirability, and viability.
This way of working puts weight on choosing partners and teammates for skill sets, not for a fixed list of deliverables. It also helps teams adapt when demand shifts, and reduces the people-cost pressure that creative production often carries.
Compare all three. Established formats, new-to-org, and new-to-market — select a type to isolate trade-offs.
| Dimension | Core | Adjacent | Transformational |
|---|---|---|---|
| Deal-making | Reverse auction | Negotiation | Cap cost |
| Efficiencies | Process · productivity · partners | Process · partners | Partners |
| In-project focus | Quality control | Time control | Cost control |
| Optimization | Economies of scale | Economies of scope | Economies of density |
| Cost per unit |
Low1/5
|
Medium3/5
|
High5/5
|
| Volume |
High5/5
|
Medium3/5
|
Low1/5
|
| Time to market | Stable | Mixed | Volatile |
| Quality | Standardized | Guided | Patternless |
| Automation |
High5/5
|
Selective2/5
|
Low1/5
|
Select a type — or a column header — to focus. Arrow keys when the panel is focused. Select Compare to reset.
Meters show relative level (1–5) for cost, volume, and automation. Marker tracks novelty from core to transformational.
Over time, AI will take a large share of cost out of advertising production. Much of the optimization once tied to manual review of data will be handled by systems that work in partnership with people to surface insights and freer creative output.
To make that shift possible, teams need:
Standardized metadata (to manage combinatorial complexity) · Clear taxonomy (for consistent governance) · Ways to spot patterns (efficacy insights) · Ability to reuse assets (template content modeling) · Room to scale automation (extensibility) · A bias against tool fatigue—fewer, better tools rather than more of them
That evolution is cultural as much as operational. Marketing teams and their partners have to free capacity for higher-value work: the human side of the business, which at its core is creativity. With the right production ecosystem, creative marketing production stops being only about producing assets and becomes a strategic partner in brand management, transformation, and growth.
- Doerr, J. (2018). Measure What Matters: OKRs—The Simple Idea That Drives 10x Growth. London: Portfolio Penguin. ↩
- Klein, S., & Hughes, B. (2019). The Loop Approach. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag. ↩
- Viki, T., Strong, C., & Kresojevic, S. (2018). The Lean Product Lifecycle. United Kingdom: Pearson Education Limited. ↩