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There's a story we tell ourselves about how marketing careers work.

If you're great at marketing, you'll advance. Master the craft, and the promotions follow. Work speaks for itself.

This is incomplete.

The people who advance fastest in marketing aren't the best marketers. They're the people who figured out, earlier than everyone else, that they have two jobs. Only one of them is marketing.

Everything in marketing education is about the craft. Strategy frameworks. Analytics methodologies. Creative development. The entire apparatus of marketing pedagogy is designed to make you better at marketing.

Job descriptions reinforce it. "Develop and execute marketing strategy." "Drive pipeline." The message is clear. Your job is marketing. Get good at it.

And for a while, this works. Early in your career, being good at marketing is sufficient. You're measured on deliverables. The feedback loop is tight. Do good marketing. Get rewarded.

Then something shifts.

At some point, the rules change. And nobody tells you they've changed.

You've seen this play out. The CMO with great numbers who can't survive a board meeting. The one with mediocre results who keeps getting promoted. The difference isn't the marketing.

The CMO who gets fired usually isn't failing at marketing. They're failing to make marketing legible to the people who control their fate. The board nods politely at MQL velocity charts, then asks questions that reveal they haven't understood a word. The CEO loses faith, not because marketing isn't working, but because they can't explain to their board what marketing is doing.

Excellent at Job #1. Never figured out Job #2.

Job #1 is the Marketing Job. Strategy, campaigns, brand, demand gen, creative, analytics. It's what you trained for. It's what's on your job description.

Job #2 is the Translation Job. Making your work legible to people who don't think in marketing terms. Communicating value to stakeholders who have different mental models.

Job #1 is about being good at marketing.

Job #2 is about making non-marketers believe you're good at marketing.

These are not the same thing.

The word is precise.

The CFO doesn't distrust marketing. The CFO doesn't understand marketing. They think in ROI and payback periods. When you present brand awareness metrics, you're speaking a foreign language. It's not that they're against what you're saying. They can't parse it.

The CEO isn't hostile to brand investment. They can't see the ROI the way you can. They pattern-match to what they know, sales dashboards, product metrics.

Confusion, in a boardroom, looks a lot like skepticism.

Translation isn't dumbing it down. It's bridging worldviews. It's taking what you know to be true and rendering it in a language your audience can receive.

I think of this as the Career Leverage Ratio.

Early in your career, maybe 80% of your advancement comes from Job #1 and 20% from Job #2.

By the time you're a CMO, the ratio inverts. You might spend 80% of your time on translation. Securing budget, maintaining credibility with the board, positioning marketing's contribution in terms the CEO can defend to investors.

Most marketers spend 90% of their time on the job that contributes less to their trajectory, and squeeze the critical job into the margins. A rushed slide deck before the board meeting. An awkward budget conversation with the CFO.

We over-invest in the job that matters less and under-invest in the job that matters more.

At the manager level, Job #1 dominates. Hit your metrics, produce deliverables, get promoted. Translation matters a little, but the craft carries most of the weight.

At the director level, maybe 70/30. You need to convince leadership your programs deserve investment. Translation becomes how you get the budget and headcount you need.

At the VP level, it's closer to 50/50. Half your job is running marketing. Half is positioning yourself as executive material. This is where careers diverge. Two equally talented VPs can have completely different outcomes based on translation ability.

At the CMO level, Job #2 dominates. Your team does the actual marketing. Your job is to secure resources, maintain credibility, and survive.

The irony is we're trained entirely in Job #1, then promoted into roles where Job #2 matters more.

Think about the marketing leaders you know. The best marketer in the room isn't always the one who gets promoted. Often, it's the one who makes everyone else confident that marketing is working.

The board doesn't evaluate marketing. They evaluate their confidence in the person running marketing. The CMO who walks into every room knowing what question is really being asked, and what answer will land survives. The one presenting dashboards nobody understands doesn't.

This isn't about deception. Results matter. But results that nobody can see might as well not exist.

It's learning their language. The CFO thinks in ROI and payback periods. The CEO thinks in strategic priorities. You know how to talk about marketing. Translation is learning to talk about marketing in their terms.

It's leading with outcomes. Your stakeholders don't care that you launched a campaign. They care what it did. Start with the answer. Work backward to the proof.

It's building trust before you need it. The worst time to build credibility with the CFO is when you're asking for budget. Translation is the one-on-ones where you're not asking for anything.

Most career advice for marketers is about getting better at Job #1. Be a better strategist. Be more data-driven.

This isn't wrong. It's just incomplete.

The marketers who advance fastest figure out that Job #2 is also a skill. Learnable, practicable, essential. They don't wait until they're a VP to start thinking about executive presence. They build the muscle early, when the stakes are lower.

Most people figure this out too late. Usually, after a setback that didn't make sense at the time.