A games studio in Cambridge just handed its marketing boss the keys to the whole business.

Frontier Developments, the AIM-listed studio behind Jurassic World Evolution and Planet Coaster, made Jo Cooke chief executive on the first of January. She had been running marketing for about five months at that point, having rejoined the company the previous August after several years away. Five months in the marketing seat, then the top job.

Whatever she was doing in that time, it clearly was not just approving trailers and picking fonts. On the sixth of August, four days before we sat down to write this, Frontier confirmed her replacement.

A marketing job that lasted five months

Dan Lazarides joins as chief marketing officer after seven years running marketing for SEGA Europe and six more at Bethesda Softworks, working across franchises like Fallout and The Elder Scrolls. There was agency time before that too, at Edelman and M&C Saatchi. On paper it reads like a fairly standard senior appointment. And in most companies, that is exactly what it would be treated as.

Frontier's board saw it differently. They watched one person do the marketing job for under half a year and decided she was ready to run the whole company. Not a comfortable, gradual handover either, but a straight appointment onto the board as chief executive while her predecessor stayed on only long enough to steady the ship.

It was less a hiring decision than a verdict on what the marketing job had quietly been testing the entire time.

Why should a marketing hire in your business care about a games studio in Cambridge?

Because most employers still write marketing director job specs as though they are hiring someone to run campaigns and manage a bit of budget. Useful, commercial even, but firmly a supporting function, several rungs below anything resembling succession planning. Frontier's board just treated the marketing seat as the best proving ground it had for the entire business, and it is not the only one thinking that way.

It comes up constantly in client conversations that never make it anywhere near a stock exchange announcement, usually the moment a founder realises the person running marketing is also, quietly, the person they trust most with the numbers. We hear a version of it most weeks.

The marketing director job description that is too narrow

Most of the marketing director briefs that land on our desk are written around output.

Campaigns delivered, channels managed, a brand guideline nobody reads past week one. Fine, as far as it goes, but it misses the part of the job that actually decides whether the hire works out. Whether this person understands the commercial engine well enough to make calls a chief executive would recognise as good business, not merely good marketing.

We have placed marketing directors who were brilliant on brand and fairly hopeless at commercial reasoning.

Also placed a couple who came in looking slightly underwhelming on the creative side and quietly became the person the founder rang before every big decision, not only the marketing ones. Guess which type tends to still be there three years later. Neither is a bad marketer, to be clear. They are just built for different jobs, and most job specs cannot tell the difference between the two.

This is not only a big-company story

It is easy to read Frontier and assume this only applies to listed businesses with boards and stock exchange announcements to make.

Our own clients are mostly private and founder-led, hiring their first marketing director rather than replacing their fifth. The pattern holds just as hard at that size, if not harder, with fewer layers between the marketing seat and the founder's desk. A founder who hires on portfolio and a slick deck can end up with someone who cannot hold their own where pricing, headcount or a delay gets decided.

And in a small business, that room is every room.

So what should the interview actually be testing?

Forget the portfolio and the campaign case studies for a moment.

If you want to know what to look for in a marketing director, ask how they would cut a budget by a third and what they would protect first. That answer says more about commercial judgement than any awards submission ever will. Ask what they would do if sales disagreed with their read on the market, and watch whether they defend it or fold immediately to keep the room comfortable.

Neither answer is automatically wrong.

But a flat, agreeable response to a properly difficult commercial question is the tell most interview panels miss, mostly because nobody asked one in the first place. Or worse, they asked it and did not notice the answer was empty.

Where that leaves your next marketing hire

Frontier is not unusual because it promoted a marketer into the top job. Plenty of businesses do that quietly, without a stock exchange filing to mark the moment. It is unusual because it happened fast enough, and publicly enough, for the pattern to become visible from the outside.

Most businesses make roughly this same underestimate every time a marketing seat opens up.

They just never find out, because the person they hired was never given a chance to prove otherwise. A marketing director who is only ever asked to deliver campaigns will only ever be judged on campaigns. Whatever wider commercial instinct sits underneath that never gets tested, let alone used or paid for properly.

Yet the businesses that get this hire right rarely go looking for a marketer in the narrow sense.

They go looking for someone who happens to be brilliant at marketing on the way to being useful at everything else the business needs.

It is also, based on what just happened in Cambridge, the brief worth writing. If you have a marketing director or head of marketing vacancy open right now, that gap is worth thirty minutes before the spec goes near a job board. Send us the brief and we will help you work out what the role needs to be, not just what the last person happened to do.