The Marketing Department Is Going. The Marketing Isn't.

The marketing function inside professional services firms is being hollowed out, and it's happening faster than the cuts to the people who bill clients directly. That's the other half of a squeeze I wrote about on the fee side: clients are forcing fees off the clock, which compresses the revenue line. When a firm then goes looking for savings, it starts with the cost lines. Marketing is a cost line. It goes early.

The mistake is reading a smaller marketing team as less marketing needed. The request queue didn't shrink. The audience didn't shrink. Only the people paid to handle it did.

The cuts land on marketing first

When these firms trim, marketing and back-office go before the fee-earners. When PwC cut around 150 US support roles late in 2025, the jobs came out of marketing, HR and other back-office functions, roughly 1.5% of its business-services staff, framed openly as modernising the back office with the help of AI. Note which roles those were. Not the client-facing consultants. The support layer that keeps the firm visible.

The pattern holds across the Big Four. EY is running what's been called its most significant redundancy plan in decades, with partner exits concentrated in consulting, and PwC has made record cuts to its partner ranks. More than 900 UK Big Four roles went in 2024 alone. Firms over-hired after the pandemic and are now correcting, and a correction starts where the cost sits, not where the fees come from. Marketing sits squarely in the cost layer. AI is the stated cover story, cost is the actual reason, and the result is the same either way: fewer people, unchanged demand.

I've been talking to the people still in those roles

The people who kept these jobs are drowning, and the ones who didn't are being quietly worked around. Two versions of the same story keep coming up when I speak to marketers inside these firms.

The first is the overwhelmed one. The request queue has become the entire job. More comes in than any team that size could realistically ship, so most of it gets politely declined. One marketer described spending more of the week saying no to reasonable asks than doing any actual work, which is its own kind of reputational damage: every partner turned away now files marketing under "the team that can't."

The second version is stranger. In more than one firm there's no marketing budget line left to speak of, and the marketing still needs doing, so it gets done off the books. People producing content in the margins of other roles, funded out of nothing, because the alternative is the firm going silent in its own market. Nobody signed it off. It just has to happen, so someone quietly makes it happen.

Both point at the same thing. The demand for marketing has come completely unhooked from the resource assigned to it.

Everyone is a marketing person now

With no central function to absorb the work, it routes to whoever is closest to it. Partners and practice leads are producing their own visibility. Writing their own posts, briefing their own case studies, recording their own explanations, because there's no queue to join and no team to hand it to.

That direction was already set. Once you're selling outcomes and trust instead of hours, being known for the specific thing is what wins the work, which is the argument the fee-side piece ends on. What's changed is that there's no department standing between the expert and the audience any more. The expert is the department now.

This is the uncomfortable part. Most partners didn't take the job to make content, and most of the tools they'd reach for to do it weren't built for anyone like them.

Fewer people changes what good looks like

When everyone is making their own marketing, more stops being the goal. A central team could measure itself by volume, pieces shipped and campaigns run, because producing was its job. A partner doing this alongside real client work has no capacity for volume and no reason to want it. The only version that works for them is a handful of things that actually land: the one explanation a client remembers, the single piece that shaped how a prospect saw the firm before the first call.

That was always the better measure. Volume was a proxy a central function could hit to look busy, and it never survived contact with the question of whether any of it changed a buyer's mind. Take the function away and the proxy goes with it. What's left is the harder, more honest question, asked by the person who now has to answer it personally.

This is survivable, and it might be better

Two things make me fairly relaxed about where this ends up.

First, the tools to make decent marketing without a marketing department now exist. Someone who isn't a designer or a video editor can put together something on-brand and credible without a production team or a three-week brand-review queue, working from the assets the firm already owns rather than a blank timeline. That genuinely wasn't true a few years ago. It is now, and it's the thing that turns "everyone's a marketer now" from a threat into a shrug.

Second, and this matters more, the people closest to the expertise were always the best source of the content. The partner who argued the case, ran the deal and sat in the room knows things no central marketer could ever fully brief out of them. For years the marketing function sat in the middle of that, translating and, honestly, slowing it down. Remove the middle and the expert speaks to the market directly, which is what the audience wanted in the first place.

I won't pretend the redundancies are pleasant. They aren't. But the version of marketing that comes out the other side, fewer people, closer to the expertise, measured on what lands rather than how much ships, is the better one. It's arriving through a cost-cutting spreadsheet rather than a strategy offsite, which is a graceless way to get somewhere. It's still the right direction.