According to a recent CMO survey by Gartner, marketing budgets fell to just 7.7% of overall company revenue in 2024. Spending on labor and agencies dropped, while spending on paid media jumped. In other words, companies are expecting their marketing departments to do more with less, and increasingly throwing money at outputs rather than people to manage them, hoping that AI can come to the rescue to make up the gaps in productivity and ROI.
It's easy to jump to conclusions from this. My high-level, obviously biased reaction is that this trend leads toward less strategy, lower conversion rates and effectiveness, and potential disaster. Case in point: Look at how many companies who have made generative AI the core component of their SEO strategy have been hit hard; many after seeing initial success.
I'd love to see more studies and surveys on the effectiveness of AI-driven campaigns. In our experience, they've been a mixed bag and completely dependent on the product or service, the platform and type of campaign, and the audience. Their lack of transparency (looking at you, PMax) is an endless source of frustration and prevents us from learning and improving them.
But the message to CMOs and anyone in marketing is clear: Communicating your wins internally and making your value known is only becoming more important. How do you plan to get company leadership to know your worth? How do you plan to convince them to prioritize marketing, instead of stripping away budgets without the same reduction in expectations?
Check out the press release on the survey here.
