Today, StackedGTM is launching its second arm: Forward Deployed Marketing.

Here's the part that matters: this isn't starting today. It's being announced today. Over the last few months we've been running this quietly with some of the most extraordinary brands in tech and AI, building AEO programs, deploying marketing agents, wiring automation into real growth teams. The model has been earning its name in the field before we gave it one in public.

Now we're giving it one.

Forward Deployed Marketing puts senior marketing operators inside your company. They ship the work themselves, solve one defined growth problem, and hand the entire working system to your team in 90 days.

Software has had this model for a decade: engineers deployed forward into the customer's business, building on the customer's data until it works. It's the highest-trust way to deliver expertise anyone has invented, and marketing never got its version.

And to be super clear on the word senior, because in most firms it means the person who no longer does the work. Our operators do the work. They write the pages, build the agents, wire the tracking, rebuild the copy. Hands on keyboard, inside your accounts. Seniority here means it gets done right the first time, not that somebody junior does it for them.

Write the term down. You're going to start hearing it.

If your marketing is broken today, you have two options, and both are designed to fail slowly enough that nobody gets fired for choosing them.

The executive hire. Two quarters to find them. Half a million+, fully loaded, in year one. Two more quarters to learn whether you guessed right, and severance if you guessed wrong. Eighteen months and the better part of a million dollars to learn one thing.

The agency retainer. Thirty grand a month, and each agency runs exactly one lane. The paid agency runs paid. The SEO agency runs SEO. The brand shop does brand. Nobody sees the whole picture, so you end up as the integrator, coordinating five vendors who each swear their channel is the one working. The senior partner from the sales call vanishes by week two…and when you finally leave, everything stays with them. You didn't buy any of it. You rented it. Renting is the business model.

Both were built for a version of marketing that's already dead.

The work collapsed. What took five departments now gets done by small crews who do all of it. One operator can pull your buyers' real questions on Monday, ship the pages that answer them on Wednesday, and read the scoreboard on Friday.

And buyers stopped waiting. They ask ChatGPT what to buy. They've compared you to three competitors before your sales team knows they exist. They decide before the demo.

Every deployment is one mission. Fixed at 90 days. One fixed fee. There are five missions, and every one of them exists because of something broken we kept running into in the field.

1. AI search, AEO, and SEO. The AEO budget arrived. The results mostly didn't. What most teams bought is their old content strategy with a new label and a dashboard on top. The dashboard keeps score, it doesn't move it, and everything ships onsite while AI engines assemble their answers from the sources they trust most: reviews, communities, creators, comparison pages you don't control. Those answers are winner-take-most, and every week you're not in them, someone else compounds. We build the full system, on your site and off it. Buyer questions mined from sales calls and win-loss data, ranked by the pipeline they touch. Content and third-party sources that answer them. Tracking that ties citations to revenue, not traffic. One board-ready number: the share of your buyers' answers you own.

2. Marketing agents. Every team bought the tools this year. Walk the floor and count what's actually shipping: pilots everywhere, production nowhere. The model was never the problem. An agent without an operator is just faster noise, and noise at scale is worse than nothing, because now someone senior has to read it all. We build agents that do real jobs inside your stack: research, content, monitoring, reporting. Each one starts from a workflow worth automating, gets your standards and your taste encoded into it, gets wired into the tools your team already lives in, and ships with quality gates and a human who owns it. Then we teach your team to run the fleet and extend it. We built our own stack first and run our whole operation on it, the research, the newsletter, the deployments. We're installing the thing we use every day, not a thing we read about.

3. Messaging and positioning. Here's how most positioning actually gets written: an offsite, a whiteboard, and whoever argues longest. The doc gets approved in a meeting and ignored by the market. Six months later every rep tells a different story and the homepage says something no customer has ever said out loud. And vague now costs more than it used to, because AI engines compress your whole story into one answer, and they can only summarize what exists. Vague in, vague out, at the exact moment buyers decide from the summary. We rebuild positioning on evidence. Your buyers' own words, pulled from sales calls and win-loss interviews. Every message tested against panels modeled on your real customers before a word goes live. Then it ships where it counts: homepage, sales narrative, launch copy, in front of real buyers. Live pages, not a slide deck about live pages.

4. Growth channels. Five channels, five agencies, five versions of the truth. The paid agency reports ROAS. Email reports opens. Content reports traffic. Add up the vendor decks and you apparently tripled the company last quarter while pipeline sat flat, because every channel grades its own homework and claims the same revenue. Meanwhile budget gets set by inertia: whatever last year's split was, defended by whoever owns the line. We run your channels as one portfolio. One scoreboard, tied to booked revenue instead of channel metrics. Incrementality instead of claimed attribution, so a dollar has to prove it created something before it keeps its seat. Weekly reallocation, in the open, until the building can finally answer the only question that matters: where does the next dollar go? It's the discipline I ran through an IPO. Almost nobody applies it, because every silo has a reason not to.

5. Marketing engineering. Marketing has always rented its engineering. A borrowed sprint from the product team, a favor from IT, a Zapier held together with hope. So every idea waits in someone else's backlog, the team buys another tool to compensate, and now the stack has forty logins and still nobody who can connect the data, the tools, and the shipping into a machine. That's the job we do. We are your marketing engineers. We build the instrumentation, wire the data to the work, and ship the pipelines your team has wanted for years: Gong calls mined into product marketing and battlecards that update themselves. Webinars turned into evergreen blog and answer content the week they air. Product usage wired into lifecycle sends. Then we run the weekly operating rhythm on top of it all. By day 90 the machine is built, documented, and running in your team's hands. Your marketers stop waiting on someone else's roadmap, because the engineering is in the building.

6. Marketing measurement. Ask finance what marketing contributed last quarter and you'll get three numbers and zero agreement. The attribution tool says one thing, the platforms say another, and the CFO trusts neither. Last-click gives credit to whatever touched the buyer last, so the work that actually created demand shows up nowhere, and marketing spends every QBR defending its budget instead of directing it. We build the measurement system that settles it. Incrementality testing built into how you operate, holdouts and geo splits, so every major line of spend has to prove what it caused, not what it touched. A model finance signs off on, because they helped build it. Credit assigned where value was created, including the channels attribution can't see. What you end up with is a budget you can run like a portfolio: capital deployed against the highest-value areas, moved when the numbers say move it, with proof the board trusts behind every dollar. The measurement earns the budget.

If you run a company, a deployment changes four things.

Operators in weeks, not quarters. People who have run marketing at scale and still do the work with their own hands, inside your team, without the search and without the retainer.

Work live by day 21. Pages, messaging, campaigns, tracking, shipped in your stack. The first ten days are pure evidence. Then it ships.

Proof before strategy. Every play runs against your data and your buyers before it becomes the plan. What works gets funded. What fails gets stopped.

Ownership at day 90. The playbooks, the dashboards, the working system, handed over. Your team runs it. We leave. Nothing auto-renews.

An agency is designed to stay. A deployment is designed to end. The bill ends. The system doesn't.

Stacked is a media property first. The top growth brands sponsor our newsletter and research to reach the 21,000+ operators who read it. That doesn't change today, and it isn't going to.

Here's the honest answer: the deployments are where the research comes from.

Everything worth reading in this newsletter came from doing the work, not watching it. That’s what has made us successful and will continue to drive our success. The AEO playbooks came from building the practice inside real companies. The agent essays came from running agents on our own operation until they broke, and then fixing them. Writers who stop practicing start guessing, and you can always tell.

So the two sides feed each other. Deployments generate the evidence. The newsletter distributes it. You get research written from inside the work, and the companies we deploy with get operators who have to prove what they know in public, every week.

Most firms have clients. We have 21,000 fact-checkers (no pressure 😅).

One personal note, I turned down four CMO offers earlier this year. VC-backed, late stage, companies that are going to have real outcomes. I wasn't window shopping. I was genuinely interested at the time, and I went deep into every process.

Somewhere in the late stages, the question changed. It stopped being which company and became where I could have the most impact on the industry. One company's marketing, or the way every company buys marketing.

I chose the industry. This launch is that choice.

Any company serious about growth, from a founding team still doing the marketing themselves to an enterprise org with every channel staffed. The mission changes with the stage. The model doesn't: embed, ship, prove, transfer.

If that's you: stackedgtm.ai/services. One mission, one fixed fee, 90 days, everything transfers.

If it's not you, nothing changes. You'll just notice the essays getting sharper, because now you know where they come from.

The way marketing gets bought is changing. We went first.

More from the field soon 🫡.

Josh