The conversation was recorded in the founder's office in central London on an unusually cold Thursday in May. The founder — call him Anders, as agreed — has run the company for eleven years, is the sole surviving co-founder, and has held opinions about how the marketing function should be organised for at least half of that period. I had heard the story about the reporting line third-hand from another founder some months earlier; I asked Anders whether he would talk about it on the record. He agreed, on the condition that the company would not be named.
The choice
Yara Delacroix: When did you decide the social function should sit under editorial rather than marketing?
Anders: About four years ago. It was not a strategic decision I planned. It was a response to something that had gone wrong. We had, at the time, a head of marketing who was, by most objective measures, quite good. She was managing our paid channels well, our email programme well, our lifecycle work well. The one part of the marketing function she was not managing well, in retrospect, was the social account. It was drifting. The voice was inconsistent. The output was heavily weighted toward campaign moments that didn't compound. The audience was, by our own read, disengaging.
The head of marketing was not incompetent. She was managing the social account the way marketing functions manage social accounts, which is as a distribution channel for whatever the marketing calendar had committed to that quarter. The social account, in that arrangement, has no independent editorial voice. It is a mouthpiece. Mouthpieces, on the modern platforms, don't work.
The trigger for the change was a specific incident. We had, in Q2 2022, a moderately successful product launch that produced a burst of social content around it. Two months after the launch, we had a piece of independent research that came out of our internal analytics team — genuinely interesting, arguably the most important piece of content we had produced that year — that the marketing function judged did not fit the campaign calendar and therefore should not go on social. I disagreed. The disagreement produced the reorganisation.
What the new structure looks like
Yara: Walk me through what the new setup is.
Anders: We have a head of editorial, who reports to me directly. Under the head of editorial sits the content function — long-form writing, research, and, since 2022, social. The social function reports up through editorial, not through marketing. Marketing operates its paid channels, its email, its lifecycle work — everything transactional. Editorial owns everything that is, broadly, publication.
The distinction matters because the two functions optimise for genuinely different things. Marketing optimises for conversion, transaction, and immediate return on the specific spend. Editorial optimises for audience trust, voice consistency, and long-run brand equity. Both of those are legitimate objectives. But they push in opposite directions on any given piece of content, and if the two are combined under one function, one of them wins and the other loses. On our platforms, at our stage, editorial's objectives were the ones getting lost.
The head of editorial has, in her contract, explicit authority to veto any social piece that the marketing team wants published if she judges it violates the account's editorial standards. She uses that authority perhaps once or twice a quarter. The knowledge that she has it, however, changes what marketing proposes in the first place. Marketing has learned, over four years, what will and will not pass editorial review, and their proposals now come in pre-filtered.
What changed
Yara: What has this produced?
Anders: Two things, one of which was expected and one of which surprised me.
The expected thing is that the social account's voice consistency, audience engagement, and follower growth have all improved substantially. On our own metrics, weighted engagement rate is up something like 130% since the reorganisation. Follower growth on our primary platform is about 4x what it was in the twelve months prior. Inbound audience conversations, in the comments and direct messages, have shifted from mostly transactional inquiries to substantively editorial engagement — people responding to the arguments we're making, extending them, disagreeing with them.
The unexpected thing is that our commercial function has done better under the arrangement, not worse. I had expected some short-term commercial cost as the social account moved away from directly promotional content. The cost, if there was any, was substantially smaller than I had budgeted for. And the medium-term commercial benefit has been substantial. Our inbound sales pipeline attributes a larger share of its origin to social than it did four years ago. Our brand-search volume has roughly doubled. Our net-promoter-score in customer surveys is up, and the free-text responses cite the brand's public writing far more often than they used to.
My working theory is that the trust the account has built up as an editorial voice — as an account that publishes because it has something to say, rather than because it has something to sell — has translated into commercial trust downstream. Buyers who follow us for our writing seem to convert to opportunities at roughly the same rate as buyers who arrive through paid channels, but they convert at higher deal sizes and lower discount pressure. The editorial function is, in effect, quietly doing the pre-sale work that our sales team used to have to do.
"The temptation, when you're running a marketing function, is to have every channel work as hard as possible for the immediate quarter. On modern social platforms, that temptation destroys the compounding function of the channel. The channel needs editorial authority to work, and editorial authority is incompatible with reporting to a marketing function whose quarterly commitments are transactional."
What he'd tell another founder
Yara: Would you recommend this structure to another company?
Anders: Not universally, but for a specific category of company, yes.
If your business relies substantially on building trust with a sophisticated audience over a long consideration window — B2B software, professional services, media, some categories of consumer subscription — I think the argument for putting social under editorial is close to overwhelming. The channel needs editorial authority to build the trust; without that authority, the channel is either transactional (which works badly on the platforms) or reports up through a function whose quarterly incentives push it toward transaction.
If your business relies on rapid product discovery — much of DTC, mass-market consumer categories, high-frequency commerce — the argument is less clear. Social there may reasonably sit under marketing, because the objectives are more directly transactional and the audience trust question is less central.
The specific test I would apply, if I were another founder thinking about this, is: does your best customer buy from you because they've spent months following your writing, or because they saw a product they liked and clicked? If it's the first, social belongs under editorial. If it's the second, it can reasonably sit under marketing. Our best customers, at this stage of this business, are the first kind. The structural choice followed from that.
Yara: Last question. Are there costs to this arrangement I haven't seen yet?
Anders: Yes. The head of editorial and the head of marketing occasionally disagree on the calendar in ways that require me to arbitrate. That's an ongoing tax. The alignment between editorial and paid is less tight than it would be if both reported to the same person. And the head of editorial function has, over time, become more powerful than I originally intended, which produces some organisational tensions that a more conventional structure would not.
None of these costs, on balance, come close to the benefits. But they are real, and a founder considering the same reorganisation should go in with eyes open about them.