This reduces the productivity of digital marketers drastically.
What are your thoughts on this?
Teamwork and participation in a group is all about service, not slavery. The developer acts in service to the marketer, who needs assistance with things like funnel tweaks, event wiring, analytics add one, and more. The digital marketer is in service to the developer, as they can add fresh users to a platform, which can provide insights and illuminate opportunities for improvement.
If we keep looking throughout an organization, all roles manifest themselves this way. Whether it be finance, support, operations, design, product, or legal. If we position our perspective from that as an adversarial one (a la slavery), the perspective does look like one where productivity is reduced drastically because we are blocked on one another. If we view it positively (a la in service of one another), and act accordingly, we find that whatever slowdowns we perceive at a micro level are made up for in major macro improvements.
So, to answer your original question, no. Marketers are not slaves to developers.
What you should have in place is:
1) A department solely dedicated to product design, development and management
2) A department dedicated to offline and online marketing. This includes people who are able to create marketing assets including web developers, content designers and even video editors (e.g. for creating content for TV or YouTube)
Because what you mean with "slave" is that the people running your marketing department currently seem dependent on the people working on your product who have ZERO time to put into marketing efforts because their schedules are filled to the brink with product work, which is not really strange
What is strange however is that you created this dependency which seems to completely destroy your ability to do digital marketing.
So hire yourself a small team to help your marketing department out with all things they are incapable to do. Right now I'm thinking about the following roles: a designer (which hopefully can double as a frontend developer), a front developer (in case the forementioned designer only can design -- yes they still exist), a developer with knowledge of the CMS system you are using and someone who is able to keep your marketing related systems up and running (this could also be the forementioned developer). Let them report to your head of marketing, let them work solely on marketing related taks and your problem is solved.
End of the day, marketers still need developers to do their day-to-day jobs.
To that extent they are no more a slave to the developer than a person dining at a restaurant is a slave to their wait staff. Sure the water could take extra long to deliver the food but that does not mean they are in control.
To be a slave the other person needs to be exercising control over you.
As a developer, ever try to tell marketing that they can't do something for technical reasons, scheduling, or because it is just a bad idea? Extreme example, the way I have seen it work mostly:
1. Marketing wants to make all advertisement autoplay audio
2. Development says: we are busy until next week working on a major deadline, and even if we did have the time autoplaying audio ads is a terrible idea because it has been shows repeatedly to turn off people from your brand
3. Marketing talks to the CEO
4. The ad are autoplaying audio that night and now the developers have to work extra hours because the deadline they were working on still needs to be done.
If anything it is the other way around... devs are a slave to marketing. Marketing says "jump" the devs have to say "how high?" regardless of what else they were working on.
You say:
> This reduces the productivity of digital marketers drastically.
But in reality unless marketing has it's own developers you are in fact decreasing developers productivity and costing the company a lot of time, potentially money, and in many cases decreasing the work-life balance of the developers.
Think about what those developers needed to stop working on to do your task. I doubt they were sitting on their hands.
Edit: with that said, there doesn't mean it's not a problem that needs to be fixed. But put yourself in the developers shoe's for a minute. They don't like the arrangement any more than marketing does.
And it doesn't help when marketing shows no respect for the developers time. Real world example: a marketing team at one of our clients has been working on a TV ad campaign for months. They finished the TV campaign and now they need a landing page for it... they just told us about this landing page Wednesday. The ad campaign "absolutely has to start Friday"... the amount of disrespect you need to have for developers to do something like that is incredible. They new about the need for a landing page for months and gave dev 3 days when they got months to make their 30 second video...
On a slightly lighter note, are you a developer?
For the record I think marketing is a vital job and marketing should be given the attention, respect, and help they need to succeed.
The question just hit a nerve because there are a certain segment of marketers who don't show any respect for developers. They think because the thing they need done isn't done immediately that the developer must be either doing something wrong or deliberately ignoring their request. Usually it is neither of those things, they are just really busy and last minute requests throw off their whole day.
There are cases where developers may be required (e.g. building a custom tool for some campaign) but that work can often be outsourced.
It is fine to have an engineer do both jobs, but my stance is that time spent on non-product engineering needs to be accounted under the proper accounting bucket, in order to avoid diffusion of responsibilities.
Check out www.leanplum.com