Welcome to the Marketing Hot Seat – a fortnightly series of honest conversations with senior marketers about what’s really shaping marketing today.
It’s a space for clear thinking, real experience, and the trade-offs behind modern marketing decisions, and we’re delighted to share them with you.
In this edition, we speak to Katie Jackson, Chief Audience & Marketing Officer at Channel 4. Katie leads audience growth, marketing and streaming for one of the UK’s most distinctive broadcasters, helping steer its transition to a digital-first future. With a career spanning media, entertainment and consumer brands, she brings a sharp commercial perspective to brand building, audience engagement and organisational change.
What’s the one thing in marketing right now that isn’t getting the attention it deserves?
I’d say niche community building. We’ve gone from a time when brands were able to communicate ‘one-to-many’ because you had audiences that were in the same place at the same time, into a ‘many-to-many’ world – but we’re still holding onto the idea that our brand should show up in exactly the same way everywhere.
We need to think about reshaping ourselves in different guises depending on who we’re engaging. And rather than searching for mass awareness across everything we’re doing, it’s the Olympic approach, right? It’s the lots of littles approach. That’s where the opportunity is.
What separates a really good marketing partner from a great one?
For me, it comes down to agility and reliability.
Things move quickly, and they’ll only move faster. It’s difficult to work with a partner who sticks rigidly to a brief when the context has already changed. The best partners move with you, and sometimes even ahead of you.
At the same time, it’s about doing what you say you’re going to do. It sounds simple, but it’s everything. If you commit to delivering something at a certain time and cost, you need to deliver it.
Trust is built in those small moments. Getting a document in on time, following through on a promise. Without that, you’ll never get to the bigger, more ambitious work because the confidence just isn’t there. How you manage the relationship is just as important as the work itself. You can be incredibly talented, but if you can’t manage expectations and communicate properly, it makes it very hard to build a long-term partnership.
What’s holding marketing back from delivering on its ambitions right now?
I think we’ve swung too far towards quantification.
With budgets under pressure, there’s been a relentless focus on measuring everything, which can quickly turn into justifying everything. In that process, we risk losing sight of value creation.
Marketing isn’t just about driving commercial outcomes, it’s also about mitigating long-term risk – reputation, emotional affinity, mental availability, the strength of the brand. I wonder if we’ve become a bit one dimensional in how we talk about value.
