Marketers: Who Has the Ball (And Do They Need a Blocker)?
TL;DR: In time for Super Bowl LX, our project management analogy is about handing off the ball. Marketers, but especially external marketing teams, have a responsibility to understand their teammates' functions well enough to make handoffs smoother.
It’s Super Bowl season again, and it always seems to sneak up on me, which, as a marketer, is probably a little embarrassing.
What it has me thinking about isn’t advertising budgets or halftime commercials, though. It’s a comment someone made to me recently that stuck.
“It’s very hard to get the right sustainable support.”
That sentence shows up in more marketing conversations than people realize. Teams don’t usually lack effort, talent, or even ideas. What they struggle with is continuity. Momentum. The ability to move work forward without constantly stopping to re-explain, re-prioritize, or re-build context. Marketing starts to feel less like progress and more like handing off a ball to someone who isn’t sure they’re supposed to catch it.
As marketing teams flatten and layers get removed, work becomes more collaborative by necessity. Fewer handoffs are formal. Fewer roles are cleanly defined. Project management turns into a team sport whether anyone intended it to or not. And when that happens, the culture around preparation and handoff matters more than the org chart.
In sports terms, someone always has the ball. The question is whether the rest of the team knows how to support that moment, or even that they need to. Not everyone needs to be the quarterback. But if no one blocks, no one creates space, and no one anticipates the next move, progress stalls fast.
This is where I like the Total Football idea popularized in Ted Lasso. The concept isn’t that everyone does everyone else’s job. It’s that players understand the game well enough to step into support roles fluidly when the situation demands it. There’s shared context, shared responsibility, and an understanding of how individual actions affect the whole.
Marketing often struggles here because people retreat into job boundaries. “That’s not my role.” “That’s not what we were hired for.” And while those statements are understandable, they can quietly undermine momentum. Growth work doesn’t pause just because ownership is unclear. The market keeps moving whether the team is aligned or not.
At Column 13, this is why we believe so strongly in a One Team model, across internal teams and external partners. Sustainable support doesn’t come from rigid scopes or perfect plans. It comes from shared preparation, clear handoffs, and enough understanding of each other’s work to reduce friction before it shows up.
This ties closely to something I’ve written about before: being a good steward of marketing resources. Stewardship isn’t just about budget discipline. It’s about time, attention, and readiness. External teams, in particular, have a responsibility to predict what’s coming next, prepare for it, and give internal teams enough runway to respond well. Surprises feel exciting in creative work, but they’re expensive in execution.
When marketing works best, it feels coordinated without feeling constrained. People know when to carry the ball, when to block, and when to clear space. Support feels sustainable not because everyone is doing more, but because fewer things are dropped.
That’s not about heroics. It’s about preparation.
