The Six Frictions

My work nickname is “The plumber”. This is because I care about flow, I fix leaks and probably most of all because I don’t mind rolling up my sleeves and being covered in excrement to fix something properly.

I called this newsletter ‘Brandflow’ because I see the importance of achieving flow increasing with the growing demands on orchestration of marketing scopes.

And improving flow is to reduce friction.

So while the industry obsesses over AI capabilities and platform integrations, we can’t ignore the resistance forces that turn sophisticated marketing ecosystems into expensive chaos. Today, I want to share the framework I've developed for understanding and eliminating these performance killers.

First things first: addressing these points of friction isn't a technology problem. It's an orchestration problem that extends across your entire marketing ecosystem.

Here's what makes the Six Frictions particularly dangerous: they don't operate independently. They create reinforcing cycles of compounding problems.

Strategic misalignment creates organisational confusion about priorities, which fragments data quality across isolated systems. Data fragmentation prevents partners from integrating effectively, which amplifies process inefficiencies and governance challenges. Process breakdowns compound data quality problems and prevent effective partner coordination. Partner disconnection undermines strategic execution and organisational confidence in a downward spiral that can destroy marketing effectiveness despite sophisticated individual capabilities. And the cycle continues...

Here they are:

The Performance Killer: Unclear vision and conflicting priorities at the core of the marketing team.

How It Destroys Value: Strategic friction begins with decision paralysis as competing goals across AI and other systems create endless internal debates about priorities. Resources get diluted across too many uncoordinated initiatives. Customers experience this as inconsistent brand messaging and jarring experience transitions, while internal teams suffer from initiative overload without clear strategic focus to guide decisions.

The Performance Killer: Poor data quality, accessibility, and flow between systems and processes that prevents intelligent coordination.

How It Destroys Value: Data friction manifests when inconsistent customer identifiers across systems make unified optimisation impossible. Performance measurement becomes fragmented, preventing holistic views while manual reporting processes lag behind AI insight generation. Poor training data quality leads to flawed predictions, while insights remain isolated from activation systems, eliminating the possibility of real-time optimisation that gives AI its competitive advantage. Information silos prevent intelligent coordination, forcing AI agents to make decisions based on incomplete or contradictory data sets.

The Performance Killer: Wrong capabilities, structures, and culture that prevent effective orchestration across your marketing ecosystem.

How It Destroys Value: Organisational friction emerges when siloed teams manage conflicting systems without coordination, creating internal competition rather than collaboration. Matrix reporting structures leave unclear decision rights over systems, while specialised AI expertise becomes isolated from broader strategic context. Different functions develop competing performance metrics, and poor human-AI workflow integration means sophisticated technology operates in organisational chaos. Cultural resistance to coordination and AI-human collaboration models creates additional barriers to effective orchestration.

The Performance Killer: Disconnected ecosystem relationships and poor integration with external partners that fragment your marketing execution.

How It Destroys Value: Partner friction creates devastating gaps in your marketing ecosystem when disconnected agency partners use incompatible AI and technology systems with no coordination mechanisms. Customer experience breaks down at every internal-external handoff point as conflicting optimisation objectives between internal workflows and agency work create fragmented brand experiences. Technology integration failures prevent ecosystem coordination, while unclear collaboration protocols and competing optimisation objectives ensure partners work against each other rather than toward unified outcomes.

The Performance Killer: Poor governance, slow decision-making, and workflow conflicts between AI agents and human processes that throttle orchestration speed.

How It Destroys Value: Process friction emerges when linear workflows designed for human decision-making speed can't adapt to AI-driven insights and recommendations. Approval bottlenecks delay AI-optimised campaigns while duplicate effort occurs between automated systems and manual processes. Teams develop incompatible methodologies between AI agents and human workflows, creating constant conflicts where AI decisions clash with established processes that weren't designed for algorithmic speed. Governance requiring multiple approvals for AI agent modifications creates additional delays that kill market responsiveness.

The Performance Killer: AI agents and technologies competing instead of collaborating, creating intelligent chaos that degrades system-wide performance.

This is the most dangerous new friction because it represents the failure of intelligence itself. When sophisticated AI agents work against each other, they create complexity that overwhelms the benefits of automation.

How It Destroys Value: Agentic friction manifests when AI agents optimise for conflicting objectives without coordination protocols, creating intelligent chaos where technology systems cannot coordinate decisions effectively. Automated workflows interfere with each other while intelligent systems generate more complexity than value. Regular conflicts between personalisation, optimisation, and budget AI agents create customer experience chaos, leading to system-wide performance degradation despite individual AI sophistication.

Teams that master friction reduction through comprehensive orchestration across their entire marketing ecosystem will create sustainable competitive advantage. Those that don't will watch their expensive AI investments and premium agency partnerships turn into performance anchors that create more chaos than value.

The path forward requires acknowledging we're no longer just managing marketing technology or coordinating with a few partners, we’re conducting intelligent swarms of increasingly autonomous agents across extended partner ecosystems. Success depends not on individual tool sophistication or partnership quality, but on the harmony we create when everything works together without friction.

The winners won't be those with the most sophisticated AI tools or the most premium agency partnerships, they’ll be those who've eliminated all six frictions from their marketing flywheel, allowing orchestrated systems throughout their entire ecosystem to deliver unprecedented speed, precision, and performance.

Roll up your sleeves and be a plumber.

Brandflow is written by Justin Billingsley, who has spent his career on all three sides of the industry's table: senior client, global agency leader, technology founder. First published 3 September 2025 in the Brandflow newsletter on LinkedIn.