The Optimization Paradox: A Missing Bridge Between Marketing and Impact

I have been thinking about something that comes up repeatedly in my work, and I wanted to put it here in case it is useful for others.

There is a lot of conversation in EA about talent bottlenecks. People often mention researchers, operations, policy, governance, entrepreneurship and specialist roles. One group that almost never appears in these discussions is marketing.

After several years in performance oriented marketing and creative strategy, this feels like a blind spot. Many marketers already operate with the same mental models that EA uses. They think in marginal returns. They make decisions with incomplete data. They run constant experiments. They adjust quickly based on evidence. They focus on scaling what works and discontinuing what does not. None of this is framed as “impact evaluation,” but the cognitive habits are similar.

What has surprised me is how few marketers apply this mindset to altruistic decisions or consider impact focused career paths. And when I speak with people in the field, many say they have never encountered EA presented in a way that connects to the frameworks they use professionally.

This leads me to a simple hypothesis:

Marketers may not be underqualified for impactful work. They may simply be under engaged, because our entry points are not framed in a way that fits their existing skill set.

A few patterns keep pointing me in this direction:

• Marketers are trained to notice very large performance gaps and reallocate resources quickly. This is very close to cause prioritization.
• They are used to messy attribution, uncertainty and probabilistic reasoning.
• Many EA bottlenecks are communication bottlenecks rather than analytical ones.
• Marketing is a large, global profession with people who already have generalist, high agency skill sets.
• With the right framing, many marketers seem to “click” immediately with impact concepts.

If this hypothesis is correct, there may be a meaningful opportunity to engage a talent pool that could support high impact organisations with outreach, message testing, community growth, fundraising strategy, adoption of evidence based interventions and clearer communication around complex issues.

For anyone interested, I wrote a longer reflection on what I call the “optimization paradox” and why marketers often overlook the same 100x differences in impact that they would immediately act on in their professional lives. It includes examples of marketers already working in high impact roles and some possible ways to translate marketing concepts into impact oriented tools.

Happy for any reactions or critique.