A weekday, in agents
There’s a job title going around called marketing engineer. My card says Director of Marketing, and it will keep saying that. But when I describe what I actually do all day, marketing engineer is the phrase that fits, so I’ve started using it for the function.
The short version: I build the systems my team runs on, then I run on them too. Here’s a weekday.
6:45 am
Before I’ve had coffee, an agent opens my Asana and sorts every task into Today, Upcoming, or Recently assigned by due date. I did this by hand for years, and it was the worst 4 minutes of every morning.
7:00 am
A second one sweeps every Meta and Google Ads account we manage. It can read the accounts but can’t change anything. It looks for disapprovals, delivery that stopped, spend that jumped or vanished, CPA and CTR drifting past their bands, ad sets stuck in learning-limited, frequency creeping up. Then it reports only the exceptions. On a good day the message says nothing needs me. On a bad day it names the account and the problem, and I’m fixing it before the client has noticed.
7:30 am
The morning brief. It reads yesterday’s meeting notes, the task list, Slack, and the calendar, and it reshapes itself by weekday. Monday previews the week. Tuesday through Thursday, it catches me up on yesterday and preps whatever meetings are on today. Friday recaps the wins so I’m not scraping for them at 4 pm.
The brief is a skill, in the technical sense: a packaged workflow with steps, tools, and a definition of done. I type a prompt and get an answer I still have to act on. A skill runs the steps and hands me the finished thing. A prompt gives you an answer. A skill gives you an outcome.
The rest of the day is on demand
Someone needs ad copy for a school with 4 programs. The copy skill pulls the account’s own creative analytics, checks it against a 2026 benchmark report, and comes back with 6 to 10 variations, at least 4 per program, each one tied to a reason it should work. I edit from there instead of starting from a blank page.
A franchisee wants a content upgrade for their location page. I hand over the URL. The mockup skill reads the live page, drafts the answer-engine content (the stuff AI search actually quotes), rebuilds the page inside the client’s real design framework with the new blocks flagged in color, and exports a PDF, so the client sees the before and after in their own brand.
A client emails the month’s announcements. Another skill turns the email into a scheduled batch of posts across Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and drives the scheduling tool through the browser. I add the creatives.
Monthly and quarterly
The monthly reports for 2 colleges come out of a pipeline I wrote: platform data in (GA4, Meta, Google Ads, Bing, Google Business Profile, CRM exports), a report in our own design system out. Every number carries a source chip. Every report ends with a data QA section that says what was checked and what wasn’t. We’re replacing a third-party dashboard tool one report at a time, and each new one shows where its numbers came from.
Once a quarter, for a national home services franchise, a skill pulls the trailing 90 days of creative performance for one franchisee, keeps the proven winners, proposes 4 new themes with 3 benchmarked copy versions each, and ships a deck plus a companion file of design prompts. It also adds the run to Asana so the account team knows it’s coming.
What’s left
Every system on this list replaced a chore I used to do by hand: sorting tasks, checking accounts, writing first drafts, reformatting reports. The team still does the work that needs a person, like talking to clients and deciding what’s worth building next.
It’s also why I hold the title loosely. Marketing engineer sounds grander than the work. In practice it’s a marketer who got tired of doing the same thing 3 times and wrote it down as a system. Before I spent client money, I spent my own. I’d have paid for every one of these when I was the owner on the other side.
Hiring a marketing director who builds? Get in touch.