Op-eds aren’t something we do often but as an ADHD marketer myself I felt this was something that might be of interest to others, it was of interest to me. This op-ed is (c) to Roxana Tascu, and the opinion therein are hers. I am grateful for the chance to put this up here and hope others find it useful or maybe see things they recognise. ADHD is quite prevalent in marketing and piece like this can only help to educate.
“Why marketing so often rewards the ADHD brain and quietly exhausts it”
By Roxana Tascu
Some of the best marketers I work with can read a brief in under a minute and see the campaign before anyone else in the room has fully defined the problem. They can spot the emotional lever in a customer insight deck, connect a cultural shift to a brand moment, and instinctively know which idea will travel before the data has caught up. They are fast where other people are methodical, able to hold multiple audiences, channels, risks and possibilities in their head at once and still find the line that makes the whole strategy click.
For years, the industry has called this instinct. In my work as a business psychologist and ADHD coach, I would describe it more precisely. In many cases, it is the ADHD brain operating in one of the few professional environments that naturally matches how it activates.
Marketing is structurally rich in the exact conditions the ADHD brain needs in order to perform at its best. There is constant novelty through changing briefs, product launches, platform shifts and audience behaviour. There is challenge in the form of commercial pressure, market competition and compressed timelines. There is urgency through launch dates, reporting cycles, campaign windows and stakeholder expectations. There is emotional salience because the work itself is fundamentally about people, behaviour and influence.
This matters because the ADHD brain is rarely driven by importance alone, it responds far more powerfully to work that feels fresh, high-stakes, emotionally resonant or intellectually gripping. Marketing often provides these activation cues simultaneously, which is one reason so many neurodivergent professionals thrive in the field.
The rapid ideation, the ability to synthesise weak signals into a compelling strategic narrative, the comfort with ambiguity and the speed of creative association are not incidental strengths. They are often direct expressions of how the brain is wired. This becomes especially visible in modern marketing roles, where the volume of inputs is high and the pace of change is relentless. A marketer may move from campaign performance to customer psychology, then from brand risk to creative review, then into stakeholder management and crisis response before lunch. For many people, this fragmentation is exhausting, but for an ADHD brain, it can be unusually energising because the environment keeps refreshing the activation conditions that sustain performance.
What is discussed far less often is the hidden cost of this fit. The same nervous system that thrives on campaign urgency can become dependent on it. The same brain that produces extraordinary strategic clarity under deadline pressure can struggle to begin the long horizon work that matters just as much. Team structures, reporting cycles and launch calendars can quietly become the external system regulating attention, prioritisation and execution. Many marketers misread this and conclude they are simply “good under pressure”. They build an identity around being the person who always pulls the campaign together in the final stretch, and often the output is genuinely exceptional.
The problem is that this creates an invisible dependency on urgency as the primary activation system. The thought leadership series that never gets scoped because nobody has attached urgency to it yet. The strategic repositioning project that stays in draft because it matters intellectually but not yet in the nervous system. The internal capability work, mentoring and longer-term market development thinking that would change the trajectory of a career repeatedly lose to whatever feels most immediate. This is not a discipline issue, it is an activation issue. The environment has been doing far more of the performance work than most people realise.
I see this most clearly when marketers move into more senior roles. The work shifts from visible delivery into systems, leadership and long-term influence. Instead of campaigns, there are functions. Instead of launch deadlines, there are strategic priorities. Instead of urgency arriving externally, they are now expected to create momentum for the team and for themselves. This is often the point where exceptional marketers begin to quietly question whether they are still as capable as they once were.
The ideas are still there and the strategic instincts remain sharp. The challenge is that the role now requires self-generated activation around work that does not arrive with built-in novelty or immediacy. Leadership demands consistency, sequencing and decision-making in environments where the pressure is less visible but the consequences are larger. What looks like a personal productivity issue is often something much more precise. The marketing environment that once made excellence easy to access is no longer supplying the same neurological fuel.
This is why I believe the industry needs a more honest conversation about ADHD. Not a conversation rooted in extremes, where neurodivergence is either romanticised as a creative gift or reduced to a list of deficits. The reality in marketing is far more interesting and far more commercially relevant than either of those narratives allows. The strengths are real, and so is the hidden cost. Rapid ideation, pattern recognition, audience intuition, campaign hyperfocus and fast contextual thinking can all make ADHD professionals exceptional marketers. The challenge is that these same strengths often rely on conditions the industry happens to provide by default.
When those conditions begin to disappear, through seniority, leadership complexity, burnout or the move from campaign execution to strategic influence, performance can start to feel disproportionately expensive. That is the point where the conversation has to move away from effort and towards design. The real question is no longer whether someone is talented enough for the role, it is whether the way the work is structured still matches the way their brain activates.
This is the work I do with marketers and creative professionals who are performing brilliantly on the outside while privately paying a hidden cost. The opportunity is not simply to support neurodivergent marketers better, it is to recognise that some of the strongest strategic and creative thinking in the industry may already be coming from brains that are exceptional because the environment accidentally fits. The future challenge for ethical and sustainable marketing leadership is making that fit deliberate, so that exceptional thinking no longer depends on invisible exhaustion.
Roxana Tascuis a business psychologist and ADHD coach who works with marketing and creative professionals. Discover more of Roxana’s work at www.adhd-advantage.com, or connect with her on Instagram @RoxanaTascu
