Founders hire creators when they need builders. The mistake is not obvious for about eight months, which is roughly how long it takes for a marketing function to produce work that looks excellent and a pipeline that is empty.
The instinct is understandable. A founder evaluating marketers looks at a portfolio, because a portfolio is the only artifact available. Portfolios are made of output. Beautiful sites, sharp campaigns, a brand refresh that got attention. So the founder hires whoever impressed them most, and then discovers output was never the constraint.
Creative work gets cheaper every quarter. Systems thinking does not, because it cannot be commoditized yet.
Look at what has actually changed in two years. First draft copy, campaign variants, landing page iterations, competitive research, list segmentation, social assets. All faster and cheaper than they were, and all still getting cheaper. Now look at what has not changed. Deciding which segment to attack, designing the funnel, instrumenting it so you can tell whether it worked, and building the operating cadence that keeps the whole thing honest. Those still require judgment applied to your specific situation, which is the definition of work that does not commoditize.
A builder is not a person who codes. It is a person whose first instinct on arrival is to ask how the data is structured rather than to show you a moodboard. It is the person who wants to see your closed won reasons before they want to talk about the homepage. That instinct is the whole thing.
There is a reliable interview tell, and it is the order of operations. Weak candidates open with what they would make. Strong candidates open with what they would need to know, and they get specific fast, because they have been burned at a company where nobody could answer those questions. Hire the person who asks the most questions about your data before they show you anything.
None of this means creative does not matter. It matters enormously and at some point you will need someone excellent at it. Just not first. First you need the person who decides what gets made, and why, and how you will know whether it worked.