I read the Allwyn announcement twice, and the word I kept going back to was the one sitting in front of the new marketing chief's title. Interim.

Allwyn UK told the market on 5th November that it is reshaping its top team, and the gambling trade press covered it. Two new executive roles are being created, a chief marketing officer and a chief digital officer, with a director of social impact alongside them. And the marketing seat has already been filled, but only for now.

Stephen Taylor, who founded his own marketing advisory business, starts as interim chief marketing officer on 17th November.

I have no inside track on Allwyn. What I do have is a fair few years of watching what happens when a business needs a marketing leader and nobody can say whether the hire should be permanent or temporary. But that situation is far more common than a lottery operator reshuffling its top team.

What did Allwyn UK actually change at the top?

Allwyn UK pulled a lot of responsibility into one chief marketing officer seat. According to Gambling.com's report, the new chief marketing officer role covers brand, marketing, creative, CRM, communications, product marketing, winners' services and customer experience. Three executive roles are being phased out, including the chief technology officer and the managing director of digital.

The chief digital officer job has no name against it yet, and the company hasn't said what the changes cost.

Read that remit slowly. Customer experience and CRM sitting next to brand and creative is a very wide job. Plenty of mid-sized businesses write a head of marketing job description in exactly this way, a bit of everything, without noticing that nobody in the building has ever held all of it at once.

But nobody is being daft when they do it. The business grows, the team grows with it, and one day somebody pastes four old job titles into a single advert and calls it a role.

Why would a company fill a brand-new marketing seat with an interim?

Because a new role has no track record behind it. Nobody inside the business has done this exact job, so whoever takes it first spends the opening months finding out what it really is. An interim can start quickly, work out the true shape of the role, and leave the permanent brief better written than it began. That's my reading, to be clear, and not something the company has said.

But there's a second reason, and it's less glamorous.

In my experience a permanent search for a senior marketer takes months once you count notice periods. Leaving the seat empty for that long, while campaigns and agencies carry on without anyone senior steering them, costs money in ways that never show up on a spreadsheet.

I've watched founders work out how long a marketing director's seat has been empty, usually on their fingers. They run out of fingers on one hand and say a word I'll leave out. The agency has typically carried on billing the whole time, and nobody has been senior enough to ask what for. It adds up faster than anyone admits.

How do you know if your own marketing seat needs an interim or a permanent hire?

Try writing the first ninety days of the job on one page. If you can, and the page makes sense to the people who will work with the new person, you probably want a permanent hire. And if you can't, you aren't ready to hire for the role yet, and you may be better off bringing in someone who can define it first.

Two other signals are worth a look.

One is whether the last departure came with a mess attached, like a team that has lost confidence or an agency relationship gone sour. An interim who has done it before is often better at steadying that than a first-time permanent hire, who arrives needing to prove themselves while also clearing up after somebody else.

The other is whether you've decided where the business is heading. Interim leaders are brilliant at running a clear plan hard. They're less use when the plan itself is the open question, because they'll be gone before anyone finds out whether the answer was right.

It's also worth asking whoever is leaving what they think, if they're still talking to you, since exit conversations are the cheapest research a business ever gets and most skip them entirely.

Where do interim hires go wrong?

Interim hires most often go wrong when nobody plans for what comes next. Say the interim is good, the business gets comfortable, and six months on they're still "interim" with nobody having decided anything. And the title carries the uncertainty for everyone. The team doesn't know who they'll report to, and the agencies can't tell who is really in charge.

Then there's the opposite problem. A business brings in an interim head of marketing to get past a gap, never writes down what it wants them to leave behind, and ends up running a permanent search that starts from the same blank page as before.

Done well, an interim finishes with a clearer brief for their successor than the one they were handed. If yours can't tell you what that brief will look like by the end of week four, ask why.

And then there's the money. Day rates look alarming next to a salary, and finance directors notice the rate long before they notice the empty seat. Fair enough. A day rate is a number you can see, and a vacancy is a cost you can't.

But set that rate against what a vacancy costs in stalled decisions and drifting agencies, and the sums look different.

None of this makes the interim route right for Allwyn, and I wouldn't claim to know. It does make it a sensible question to ask about a role that didn't exist last month. One small word in a press release, and it says a lot about how much a business has decided.

If your own marketing leadership seat is open, or about to be, and you can't yet tell which kind of hire it needs, our marketing recruitment team is happy to talk it through before you commit to either.