There’s a growing disconnect in modern go-to-market hiring. The traditional approach has broken down as advertising platforms have become algorithmic black boxes, leaving marketers with less granular control and far more responsibility for the quality of their inputs. Executives bring on growth leaders expecting fast net-new expansion, but the day-to-day work increasingly looks less like lead gen and more like orchestration. The real differentiator now is not who can manually optimize Google or Meta better. It is who can architect the full revenue system underneath them.
Roberto Ercole, Marketing Director at Lankin Investments, has spent much of his career closing the gap between those expectations and reality. He built a four-person department from scratch that produces output from more than 20 professionals, relying heavily on AI and automation. His track record offers a straightforward look at what modern growth roles actually require: moving toward modern, automated marketing.
"We're not doing traditional digital marketing anymore," he says. "We're doing algorithm advertising. The marketer's job now is to make sure the creative is strong, the message is clear, the pillars are in place, and then let the algorithm do its job."
As AI upends marketing, practitioners are giving up some of their more granular targeting approaches. Following this, Ercole relies on fully automated ad-creation systems that can sometimes infer consumer intent more effectively than manual setups. "If you run digital campaigns on Google or Meta, you set parameters like geo-targeting and interests. But that doesn't mean other people aren't going to be targeted as well," he says. "The way those platforms are evolving nowadays, they know way more than we do as marketers about what people are looking for."
That reality has pushed him to stop fighting the system. The disappearance of manual toggles in algorithmic targeting on Google or Campaign Budget Optimization on Meta means even traditional A/B testing now runs into interpretive limits, with platforms quietly serving different ads to different audiences behind the scenes. "I find more success when I have the pillars of a campaign dialed in, but I don't try to control it," Ercole says. "I give the algorithm the power to decide who to target, how to target, and how much to spend."
The approach is subtle but profound. Companies seem to be shifting from "marketing wizards" who can master different channels to architects who can design revenue infrastructure: demand generation, lead handling, CRM visibility, KPI design, and executive alignment. Ercole says the disconnect shows up immediately on the job. "Companies often hire because they think they are going to find a magician who is going to fix everything for them. And that's not how it works. The company should be better prepared before they even hire the person."
He learned this firsthand. "I previously joined a company that hired me as their growth marketer, but they had an internally made CRM," he says. "I could see how many leads I was generating and our cost-per-lead, but I couldn't extract any data regarding sales-qualified leads. I had no visibility into how many of those actually turned into a sales-qualified lead." Without that revenue operations clarity, building a full-funnel ecosystem becomes nearly impossible, and marketing and sales alignment becomes a hard requirement.
When marketing is about architecture, the effective marketer focuses on growth leadership, shifting toward building processes, defining KPIs, and tightening accountability, all while using AI to remove drag. Ercole frames AI as a force multiplier rather than a replacement for human judgment. "It's like having a robotic arm in a commercial kitchen doing the meal prep and cutting the vegetables," he says. "AI co-workers can automate scheduled tasks that a traditional marketing team would do. We're no longer researching content for social media or writing the copy because we can set the parameters on the back end. The AI knows the company's voice, the tone, and the content sources, and it automates the entire process."
But he is quick to warn against layering AI on top of a broken foundation. Untangling multi-layered go-to-market motions demands a robust, modular AI stack that Ercole calls a toolbox alongside cross-departmental alignment. "AI is a buzzword, so companies just bake it in without caring how it will actually work," he says. "There needs to be intent behind everything the company is doing. Otherwise, you just create a chaotic environment where everyone is doing what they've always done, just with AI layered on top of it."
The challenge for growth leaders is that the black-box nature of AI doesn't mean they aren't accountable for revenue outcomes. Their job is to design the system, clarify the goals, and connect activity to business impact. "It doesn't matter if it is a black box or if it is all in your face. It is still your job to use it to the best of your ability," Ercole says. "And honestly, the black box works better than what we had before. We don't have the manual toggles we used to, which means we have to test more. But if you have the right pillars in place and you're testing at a high volume, you're going to see results."
In practice, that has meant using AI to take execution off his team's plate so they can focus on decisions. A specific AI lead generation workflow helps his group reduce manual noise and operate further upstream. "Instead of my digital marketing manager spending hours inside ad platforms checking performance and building manual reports, we produced a way for AI to scrape the data from the platforms," Ercole says. "She becomes a strategic decision-maker behind the scenes, rather than an executor pulling reports."
Still, no amount of AI tooling can compensate for a company that has not done the operational groundwork before bringing in growth talent. The structural problem, Ercole argues, is that the conversation that should precede a growth hire rarely happens. "It all comes down to a good boardroom session with leadership to truly understand the issues, set expectations, and build a roadmap. If you don't do that homework, the expectations won't be met," he says. "The issues are when hires are not planned properly, when even whole departments, whole verticals are not planned properly. Companies should be looking at doing the homework before they actually hire somebody, because otherwise it's all going to explode in the hands of whoever's in that role of the growth marketer."
