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Mike Montague is the founder of Avenue9 and a pioneer in Human-First AI Marketing, boasting over 25 years of experience in internet marketing, public speaking, and sales. He specializes in helping small to medium-sized businesses leverage AI technology to enhance marketing strategies while maintaining authenticity. His expertise has been recognized through various speaking engagements, including the Org Design Podcast, where he shares insights on integrating AI with human-centered business practices. Learn more about him on his expert page.
In this episode of The Org Design Podcast, Damian Bramanis and Amy Springer sit down with Mike Montague, founder of Avenue Nine, to explore how marketing is becoming a microcosm for the future of organizational design. They dive into:
• How AI is disrupting entry-level marketing roles while amplifying mid- and senior-level capabilities
• The shift from “feed the beast” content creation to message-first, strategy-driven marketing
• Why brand voice and positioning remain the unshakable core amidst rapid technological change
• How small and medium-sized businesses can leverage AI to compete with—and even outpace—big agencies
• The storytelling essentials leaders need to bring teams along during times of rapid transformation
Packed with practical insights, this episode reveals how marketing orgs are adapting to AI’s impact, what skills will matter most, and how leaders can design teams that thrive in the new landscape.
https://avenue9.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/company/avenue9ai/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mikedmontague/
[00:00:00] Damian Bramanis: G'Day. Welcome to the Org Design Podcast. Today joining us, we have Mike Montague from Avenue Nine. G'day, Mike.
[00:00:10] Mike Montague: Yay. Good to be here.
[00:00:12] Damian Bramanis: Also, we've got Amy Springer, joining us from Perth, Western Australia.
[00:00:17] Amy Springer: Mike and I were just discussing, you almost can't get further apart in the world than we are right now. We've got you here on the Org Design Podcast. Can you give us a little bit of a sense about how org design shows up in your space, in your week, in your month?
[00:00:33] Mike Montague: Yeah, I don't have a lot of experience in other departments, but I find org design and marketing to be fascinating because it's almost such a big term that you can structure departments inside of marketing. We have outsourced marketing agencies we can leverage, we might have content marketing people or product marketing people that are doing mostly internal generation stuff. We have lead generation people that are outside doing public marketing and forward facing, there's obviously a lot of different layers of marketing leadership in every organization.
But what I'm finding fascinating is the shakeup with because I think it's happening in all the departments, but it's really taking those intern jobs or those specialist jobs first and so we need the marketing strategy and the marketing leaders that, that AI can't do that for us. But what it can do is write that blog post or write that email campaign that we send out. And it can take a lot of the intern entry level jobs of the content creation, which for the last 20 to 30 years, content marketing has been the majority of what we do, so it seems to be a major disruption.
But when we think about just the org design in general, I think there's a lot of interesting marketing questions because you have to decide are we doing it based on the function, based on the target demographic and the audience, or based on the type of marketing that we're doing. And I've tried all of the above and it can get a little messy.
[00:02:13] Damian Bramanis: Yeah. One of the things I think is really interesting about marketing is, when we look at organizations and we break it down toward all of the functions that happen across the organization, you asked the question, how many people do this function? How many people do this function? But in marketing, it's almost the other way around. It's how many functions does this person do, how many functions does this person do? The ratio seems to be quite different, there's a lot more breadth of work the number of people that are in that department. Is that something that you've noticed as well?
[00:02:44] Mike Montague: Yeah, that's a great point, and I think you articulated it perfectly, that a lot of times marketers are generalists. We grow up and especially in small business where you have to do everything, you have to figure out social media and the CRM and the email marketing and the blogs and the event marketing, if you have any events throughout the year. And so I think a lot of people in smaller organizations or early in their career have to be generalists, and then you have to get to a pretty large organization before those become separate functions.
And a lot of creative people in marketing like doing multiple roles. So I think when you're looking at org design, you gotta really think about the type of people that you want in there, and do you want problem solvers, creatives, people coming up with interesting messages, human connection and originality and authenticity in your marketing? Or do you want someone that can do a function for a lot of people? Because I've also had those roles where I was a designer and a graphic designer for an advertising agency. And I basically made over 200 websites and thousands of different graphical pieces for different customers. And I think that's fun too, there's a couple of different ways there where if you have a wide, organization and you have a lot of product lines you might need just somebody to do graphic design for all of the different brands, so that way they have the same look and feel, but they have their own colors. Graphics people are really great about their systems and their branding and giving a consistent look and feel to everything.
On the other hand, if you have separate companies, you may want a graphic designer or a marketer for each one of those product lines. As a product marketing person, if they have a different look and feel are one's going for a low cost provider and the other one's a luxury brand. It might not be the same skillset for those, And so I think you have to think a lot about this, especially when combining.
So I've worked for large organizations that do acquisitions or purchase brands, and in that case, you have to really rethink are we sticking with our existing structure or do we need people that know how to market in this industry on the team, and then we can maybe overlap or outsource resources, like pay per click ads are pretty standard, it doesn't really matter what you're marketing, it's the same, uh, same keyword, same budget, same monitoring. That's pretty easy to replicate. But those are the tough questions for marketing leadership for sure.
[00:05:18] Damian Bramanis: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:05:19] Amy Springer: Mike, those of us that aren't familiar with marketing, assume it's all quite similar. You're very quickly making me realize there's a lot of variety and, what I heard you say is that, we need to be clear on the value chain that particular agency is offering and then their core values.
Do you think that is a strong skillset across the industry? Do you think that people tend to have a clear sense of that and how it might show up in their organization? Or do you think there's a bit more winging it?
[00:05:53] Mike Montague: Oh, I think there's a lot more winging, and I think there's a lot of mistakes being made. So I started Avenue Nine, my agency, because I wanted to do human first AI marketing. In marketing there is a ton of stuff that can just be spam, it can just be bad. It's a quantity over quality issue. And so I think a lot of people that don't know marketing just think oh, we just need a sell sheet for this, or we just need an email blast just post on social media every day. And they don't really care what you post. And they think posting anything is fine. And it's been proven that really doesn't work.
Then there's also very expensive, I would say like movie production level creative. So you have these huge agencies that do like these deep brand audits, and they come up with the very, wanna say like esoteric marketing campaigns where this color evokes this feeling and they're spending $10,000 a minute on a video for a campaign or a Super Bowl commercial. That's something completely on the other end of the spectrum.
Where I think most organizations need to look is you want to decide what lines up with your voice and your audience. So one of my favorite marketing writers, Seth Godin, always talks about, who's your product for? And what's it for? What does it do? so if we're again, a high-end luxury product selling to a small select group of executives, we don't need to buy a Super Bowl commercial. That's reaching the mass audience. I think when you're looking at the structure of your marketing department, you really have to think about your business plan and your marketing strategy and decide, like I said, do we need quick, nimble, creative people? Like we're a challenger brand and we need to really make a voice and stand out from everything else in the market. Are we an established brand, Proctor and Gamble products or your breakfast cereals or something where everybody knows what it is. We just need good quality routine, crank it out, I call it Feed the Beast marketing, where it's like, we just need to do the heavy lifting of keeping this stuff in front of everybody every single day, and that really decides what you can outsource and what you can't. I think there's. You can find a really great specialist to come up with a campaign or a website or something, and there's some things that are easier to outsource, but I think the hard part that you can't is that brand voice, the strategy that you're taking and the position you're taking in the market.
[00:08:26] Damian Bramanis: Yeah. Mike, there's two things that I think are on every org designer's mind at the moment. And I think marketing really hits right to the core and what your experiences is, hits right to the core of these two things. So one of them is, how do we deal with things changing faster and faster? And so org design might have historically taken a couple of year, might have had a couple of years Lifetime, where you go through the org design process and it's relevant for a couple of years and that's getting shorter and shorter. And I think marketing deals with rapid change, maybe more than any other department in an organization.
And the second thing that's on every org designer's mind is what happens when AI becomes a member of the workforce? When work is done by AI, as much as it's done by humans, and again, the marketing department is maybe hit first by that huge amount of change. Of work being done by ai. So I'm interested to learn about how you've experienced that and what is changing over the last couple of years as those two tidal waves hit at the same time.
[00:09:34] Mike Montague: I think the first question is one that's easier marketers. So I think one's easy and one's hard. The change, you're right, is something that marketers have done our whole career, the medium's changed. There's always a new platform and maybe not 50 years ago, but certainly in my lifetime, in my career, it's like okay, the internet and the website is the big thing. Oh no, it's social media. Oh, now there's different conversations. Okay, now we can build online communities. And all of a sudden there's a new channel, a new site, and a new method popping up all the time. And that's what I find fun about marketing. So I think, in some ways, you're right, AI is gonna hit marketing first or the hardest, but we're prepared for that part of the change management. My advice for people that are not is just marketing and AI needs to be a team sport, there's so much there that no one person can possibly know everything there is to know about marketing or about AI. And so whether that's getting an external board of directors, a community you're engaged in, listening to podcasts where other people are rolling up ideas from different industries or if you have the resources to hire a team, getting people focused in different directions, so you're not all just looking at the same thing, I think is the best advice for dealing with the change management.
The part that is impacting the org design is what I'm really worried about, I think there will be, obviously, like every industry, 20% of people that are 5 to 10 years away from the end of their career, they don't really wanna learn AI, and continue doing what they're doing and until they're done with their career. There's a lot of young people in marketing that I think are gonna really struggle. Because those entry level positions are going away. So if I don't need somebody to do that heavy lifting, feed the machine type of marketing that I was talking about earlier, I don't know how you learn the marketing leadership stuff and the strategy and why things work and why things don't. You just learn by doing it over time, what works, what doesn't how to get traction. And I'm afraid that with the speed up of the industry, but also with AI automating a lot of that stuff, I don't know how a college graduate learns marketing without doing marketing. There's gonna be a gap there at the bottom of the organization and then the people in the middle there I think I could be biased here, but I think most of the people in marketing are adaptable, they figure it out. They're used to technology, they're savvy using tools. I think they're happy to jump on it.
And I think the people that are in the to upper levels of marketing are still things we can't outsource, like I mentioned. So somebody has to review what AI output is going out there. It's not to the point where we can just set a social media campaign and forget it for the rest of the month, so I think that mid-level jobs are safe for the foreseeable future and they already have built up some of those skill sets, like taste and discretion and strategy that are gonna be necessary to direct the AI. Is that what you're seeing in other departments too, or is that
[00:12:55] Damian Bramanis: yeah, the interesting what you're saying about how do we learn without junior positions, what I'm seeing is that junior people are able to upskill and hit their stride much faster. So there's so much more of a leg up to be able to be productive very quickly. While maybe junior positions are disappearing, those people can into what we'd more traditionally think of as mid-range positions because they're, they've got so much more weight of skills around them.
[00:13:25] Amy Springer: Do you think? But I guess Mike, you talked about the AI spits it out, someone needs to read it. Damian, we were earlier talking about the way coding is now happening, and you said that the code comes back and someone gets to review it. But how do they actually, do you think they can quickly learn to fine tune that skill to know if it's worth publishing live?
[00:13:50] Mike Montague: from my perspective, I think computer programmers are the other industry that's gonna get hit hardest and fastest with marketing because of the code generation. I don't know. I feel a little bit like, an old person at this time, but when I started designing websites, I had to write every character by hand. Design websites now and don't know any code whatsoever because the programs are that good. I feel like I learned how to make better websites and better structure and better code by doing it by hand first, just when we think about other human skills, you gotta kinda learn the fundamentals. And if we were looking at writing, you probably need to learn your block letters before you learn cursive. And you need to learn sentence structure and verbs and adjectives before you start writing a novel. But that's not necessarily true. Every time I think about that I think about how many times I skipped steps in my career. I figured out by jumping ahead and trying to write a book, then I learn a lot more about structure by doing the bigger project. So I think it can lean both ways.
What about you, Damian?
[00:14:58] Damian Bramanis: Yeah. Interesting. So the, I think there was a time where surgeons were prized based on how quickly they could complete a surgery. Complete a surgery up until the advent of painkillers. And now we care about surgeons being really precise and patients living. Then
there was a time when dentists were prized based on how hard they could yank your tooth out. But now. It's obviously there's a lot more to dentistry about keeping teeth healthy. And so I think the same thing's happening is I think that writing code, that understanding is less important, but what's more important is your perspective, the understanding of am I building something that's valuable and will help people, and being able to connect it back to real problems in the world. then maybe that's the same with marketing, is that there's the core skillset of being able to design something that looks right or right in a particular way, maybe those are less important, but that innate understanding of another human is still that solid anchor that really, those are the skills that make a good marketer.
[00:16:01] Mike Montague: that's what I'm banking on for sure. Because at this point in my career now I know how to do all those things, I don't necessarily want to do all those things but the speed of businesses moving up so fast, there's so many channels. A small department,. A small agency, can't all of those things without AI.
So the interesting thing for me is now if we get really focused on the message and the context and understanding how to connect with our audience, there's no barriers. The variable cost of creating content has essentially dropped to zero. So that's what I think the fascinating opportunity is.
We're talking a lot about the challenges, but you can now repurpose a message in any format. Like to three years ago, video is very expensive. You needed copywriters and social media writers and stuff to create all of the copy that we needed. For one of the companies I worked for, I was writing 10,000 words a week, which is about a full length book there, Just of different blog posts, social media, white papers, webinars, presentations, and all of the stuff that you need to make. All of that becomes free when you can use AI to create it, but you still have to know what to make and how to tie those things into a strategic marketing plan so that you get any sort of business out of it at the end.
So I, I think you're right there. I think we can still teach the strategy, we can still lean into message first and then use these tools to us with the heavy lifting part. Now, I don't have to repurpose this blog post into five social media posts and an email blast.
[00:17:48] Damian Bramanis: Yep. you mentioned a little while ago about, throughout your career, the platforms are changing constantly, the new ways that you can deliver marketing, but there's something that holds steady. All the way through that, the sort of the the brand holding true. Can you tell us more about that? And through, through that rapid change, what is it that makes brand hold steady and what is it around that, that you see being fundamentally different to, to change or resilient to change?
[00:18:18] Mike Montague: Yeah, I think we call that brand in marketing, and whether you wanna call it the brand voice or the positioning statement. What I think doesn't change very often is the problem that you're solving for the clients, even if the way that you're solving it changes in your business, most companies are built around a key question that their buyers and their clients are struggling to answer and so that's what I focus on is what's that pain, that problem or challenge that they're trying to overcome, that they're willing to pay somebody else to fix. And if we focus on that, then it doesn't matter, I think of the rest of it as storytelling in marketing.
So I should be able to tell that story in one sentence. for me at Avenue nine, and I'll just use this as a chance to shameless plug, but also use an example I think there's a lot of small and medium sized businesses that are trying to ask the question, how do I use AI to amplify my results without maximizing my budget and hiring a whole, big agency or spending a ton of dollars on marketing. And I think they're afraid of what's gonna happen if they don't leverage AI. The disruption that we saw, 25 years ago with the internet can be the same thing here with AI. And they want to be the ones that shake up the legacy big brands. How they do that could be a lot of different ways, or the tools that I use to reach them and tell that story could be a lot of different things.
So I host the Human First AI marketing podcast because I like video. I'm collecting knowledge from an expert every single week, that I can then repurpose into my stories to help them answer that question. How does a small business leverage AI? that could be for video creation, it could be for content writing, it could be for automation and output. It could be for data and analytics they didn't have before. There's a lot of ways to answer that question, but that's the core question.
[00:20:21] Damian Bramanis: Yeah, it's, I do think that if AI is as transformational as we expect it to be, every leader on Earth is going to need to make significant changes to the way that they work and to way that the way that their team works. And the way to bring people along for that ride is to tell the right story and that is the way that humans connect and get motivated to do that. How do you tell a story of change in that situation where things need to change and it could be difficult for people and it could be that people don't want to hear, but they need that need for change is there. What's the core element of telling a good story in that situation?
[00:21:07] Mike Montague: I think of a few things and there's much better storytelling experts than myself, but I do think the same thing and agree with you, Damian, that the best way to build trust and get a prospect's attention is to tell their story better than they can tell it themselves. So when we think about telling our story for business, I think there's a few things. You wanna start with a good description of where they are, which is usually their pains and their problems, and what they're experiencing, what they're worried about, what they're concerned about, what they've currently tried or are trying to do to solve the problem. And if you can describe that really well, people go, wow, they must know what they're talking about because they just read my mind, that's what I'm seeing in my business or my life.
The second thing then painting a really clear picture of what an ideal future looks like. So you know, again, for me in my business, what I think about is like that small business that wants to do better, maybe they've even succeeding and they've got some extra cash they could spend on marketing, but they don't know where to go with it. They don't wanna hire a big agency and waste 30% of their dollars just on the overhead or their management fees. They need every dollar to get an ROI. They also don't want to waste money hiring a full-time person that then maybe can't solve their problem because they're hiring one person that needs a multi-level approach.
So for me, there's some sort of fractional marketing, smaller agency value that, "oh, if I can talk to somebody that's done this for a lot of other people like me, and they can maximize my budget without, going crazy, like again, I don't need a Super Bowl commercial I just need, some extra calls at my roofing company that that would help me get business". That's a different challenge than what most people do. So if I can describe their world and then I can say, what if, instead of hiring a full-time person, you spent half the money on an outside expert and we invested the other half in AI tools that could do the rest of the work. Do you believe it's possible that we could get agency level results without spending agency level money?
[00:23:31] Amy Springer: Yeah, it sounds like you've captured where you believe org design in marketing is going, before you even summarized it, so well, that's where my brain was going too. Where if the big agency's not needed anymore because the tooling can become in-house, and then you can add your trusted partner to come alongside you and be better resourced in the new AI world.
[00:24:02] Mike Montague: Yeah, so part of the reason I started my agency too is that I had this full-time job at a large international organization doing content marketing for the last nine years, and I realized that with AI I could do it in a 10th of the time. Think about what that means for my clients. They get somebody that they could not have afforded if you had to pay my full-time corporate, a smaller, medium sized business, couldn't afford that person. So you can get that level of expertise at a 10th of the time and price of the full-time, but then we can leverage the AI tools that might cost another small amount of money or in time and resources to invest in, but we can amplify those results with either our internal team and resources or hiring some people for execution.
[00:24:52] Damian Bramanis: That story of accessibility is exactly what's happening in the world of org design, is that traditionally it's been dominated by large management consulting firms and AI is enabling people to do far more of the work along the way, and so it levels the playing field so smaller boutique organizational design consultants and firms are able to get a leg up. Internal org design teams are able to achieve far more and have less need for those large firms. And then there's the individual leaders themselves who are able to achieve more because there's more AI tools. And we're just at the very beginning of that journey. And so the idea of every leader becoming an org designer is really where the future's taking us.
[00:25:41] Mike Montague: Yeah, it's exciting and really fun to think about because I think across almost every industry that same thing is gonna happen. think as anybody's listening to this, I think it's a cool but also as you're restructuring your team, there, there's benefits. I think it's win, win for all three levels because even the large organizations are gonna save money and they're gonna do that anyway on staff. They've been doing that. They're gonna optimize and hire as few people as possible to do the job. But now I think we can do it in a humane way that actually doesn't blow up careers or you have to lay people off. We're moving skill sets and we're leveraging skills maybe in instead of roles and full-time positions, it's more the full-time equivalent idea.
[00:26:32] Damian Bramanis: Mike, I wanna thank you for today. It's been a really interesting topic. We've covered all sorts of things from marketing being the microcosm of a whole organization, and how things happen with our junior positions moving out. We've talked about job safety, we've talked about cost of copywriting dropping to zero, and that sort of fear of not adopting AI, what it means, And we've talked about AI enabling smaller organizations to level the playing field with larger organizations by focusing on the things that you're able to do with AI and grounding yourself in what things like brand and positioning and business outcomes, still need to be focused on. And you've given us some great examples of really good storytelling. So thank you very much. I do wanna check if people are interested in learning more about you or hearing more about the things you've got to talk about. What's the best way for them to get in touch or find out more?
[00:27:25] Mike Montague: avenuenine.com. Mike Monague on LinkedIn is great too. If you search for either one of those, you'll find me 'cause I'm okay at marketing and SEO, happy to connect anywhere.
[00:27:33] Damian Bramanis: Fantastic. Thank you very much for your time today. Mike, thank you very much, Amy. I've had a really good conversation and thanks everyone for listening.
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Functionly empowers organizations to navigate the complexities of modern marketing and organizational design by providing a user-friendly platform that streamlines team structures and enhances collaboration.By integrating AI tools and facilitating effective communication, Functionly enables businesses to adapt quickly to market changes and capitalize on new opportunities. The platform's focus on clear brand positioning and strategic messaging ensures that organizations can deliver impactful marketing campaigns while efficiently utilizing resources, ultimately helping them achieve their goals without the overhead of traditional large agencies.​