Get More Marketing Budget - Guaranteed. Leading CMOs Explain How.

Don’t believe you’ll get more budget just by asking for it? Who can blame you - but other Chief Marketing Officers are proving you wrong.

‘Marketers blame CFOs for not getting marketing when it’s our fault.’ - Mark Ritson

To seize the potential of fast emerging technologies, experiment freely with channels and approaches, and drive creativity to demand customer attention, CMOs need far more budget than they receive. For too long the power of the purse strings has prevented marketing teams from delivering and demonstrating maximum business value. Forbes’ World Leading CMOs of 2024 reveal how they fought for more budget, and the successful tactics that won their teams £multi millions more to deliver on their ambitious strategies.

The Big Budget Blocker: CFO & CMO Relationships

Whilst every CMO knows many Chief Finance Officers see marketing as a cost centre, draining money and constantly asking for more, the disregard is mutual. More than 1 in 4 senior marketers describe the CMO/CFO relationship as ‘indifferent’. This poor state of affairs may not be surprising, but is much more damaging than most leaders realise. In 2023 the CMO Council and KPMG reported that 4 in 5 CMOs do not collaborate with CFOs, leaving finance and marketing departments fundamentally misaligned on investments, metrics and goals.

If marketing leaders expect to have any impact in the Boardroom in the years ahead, getting finance on side is an urgent priority. Research by the Institute of Management Accountants reveals 72% of Chief Finance Officers and Financial Directors believe that their roles will continue to expand significantly through 2025. Finance leaders are continually transitioning further from mere money trackers to trusted advisors and strategic catalysts of company growth.

Misunderstanding of the value of marketing lies at the heart of the department’s disconnect with finance, and with the rest of the C-Suite. CMOs know the importance of creative experimentation without commitment to tangible results, and that traditional attribution modelling can only provide a limited view of ROI given increasingly complex customer journeys. If your leadership team were on the same page, your budget would match your ambitions. Although CEO trust and confidence in their CMOs is continually declining, the right-hand guidance of a CFO can be harnessed to leverage marketing’s influence on Chief Execs and on the budget and business strategy as a whole.

From Sworn Enemies to Power Couple: How to Win Over Your CFO

Leveraging strategic partnerships, choosing business-critical technology, working to meet revenue and earnings goals: the benefits of CFO/CMO collaboration are invaluable when realised. Donovan Neale-May, Executive Director of the CMO Council, advises, ‘If marketing and finance wish to successfully navigate economic headwinds, they’ll need to redefine their working relationship and align on financially responsible growth strategies that prioritise smart, realisable, innovative investments.’

Of course you can deliver these smart, realisable, innovative investments to your CFO - they just need to understand and have confidence in you. Easier said than done, until you build a dedicated strategy to better connect with your CFO, assuage their fears and biggest problems, and work out how to add major value to their everyday working lives and long-term career. 

CFO misunderstanding of marketing value can be proactively addressed by cementing ROI at the core of conversation. HubSpot evidence that leaders who can demonstrate a return on past investments are 1.6 times more likely to receive more funding; well worth the discomfort and additional effort of asking for more budget. CMOs can put their budget growth plan in motion by anticipating the CFO’s most common objections to marketing investment, and counteracting them effectively to create room for discussion on marketing value.

Increasing Marketing Spend: The 3 Most Common CFO Objections to Budget Expansion

1. Objection: ‘You’re asking for too much.’ 

Solution: Highlight both the best-case scenario and alternatives

With the right approach, marketing leaders can start with a small increase and work their way up to the amount required for ultimate experimentation and delivery. 

Prepare to compromise and show flexibility: as with every negotiation, don’t expect to receive the whole amount you ask for, so strike a balance between ensuring you have room to go lower and still set yourself up to deliver tangible impact. Create a spreadsheet that shows ROI projections based upon three different budget amounts. Compromise on behalf of your own department by presenting activities covered in the previous budget that were unsuccessful, explain why, and eliminate them. Demonstrate that your department is prioritising the efficiency of the budget to treat the spend as carefully as the finance team would treat their own.

2. Objection: ‘Spending on untested channels/activities is too risky.’

Solution: Make an offer they can’t refuse.

You know which elements of your plan are much more likely to deliver a return and which are more about testing out new channels, creative and comms. Present your cautious colleague with a reduced risk profile. Be transparent about how experimental marketing activities will be measured. Discuss a plan to build regular risk identification processes and improvement for underperforming marketing activities and channels. Show your CFO previous success story reports as evidence for your belief in the success of your new experiment.

When asking for more spend, offer to start with the minimum amount required to conduct an effective experiment, and explain what the return would look like and the impact it will have on business goals. Hold yourself accountable for Board reporting on test and learn campaigns and the return delivered, to remove the burden on the CFO to account for this section of the budget at Board meetings. Accept responsibility for the risk and potential failure, state that you won’t expect commitments for future budgets, and make any future requests for more spend on this campaign contingent on early success.

With Single Source data, marketing leaders can see the success - and failures - of competitor experiments across channels. Revealing existing competitor testing results instantly takes your proposal from unknown territory to starting from a position of knowledge, to avoid riskier paths already trodden by competitors and put budget behind areas that have recently proven to interest your audience.

3. Objection: ‘I can’t guarantee a measurable return on investment.’

Solution: Explain how experimentation by nature delivers savings.

In addition to outlining how your team will be tracking marketing performance in terms of advertising campaigns and customer acquisition, explain how testing and learning will improve processes, focus resources and save money. Increased targeting tailored towards the right customer base in the right way will deliver much greater return than less money targeted to more customers who won’t be as valuable to the business.

If you increase investment in new channels or campaigns, your team will quickly discover invaluable insights about what moves potential customers along the pipeline and what doesn’t. The most effective advertising, content and communication can be prioritised, and the least effective can be stopped completely, creating immediate efficiencies and ensuring future campaigns are best optimised to avoid wasting money and time. 

After planning your approach to counteract CFO objections, create your measurement plan to convince your CFO to increase your marketing budget. Here’s how world-leading Chief Marketing Officers are evidencing marketing ROI to obtain unprecedented investment.

Shift from Cost Centre to Revenue Creator: How to Demonstrate Marketing ROI

1. Treat Your CFO as Your Customer

Global brand consultant and Marketing Week legend Mark Ritson expands on his earlier point regarding CFO/CMO misalignment, ‘When we blame the CFO and the other C-suite members, what we are missing is: it’s our job to represent what we do. We are marketers; we are meant to understand how to communicate to our different target audiences. When the CFO doesn’t get the value of branding, doesn’t allow us to propose the budget, it is not the CFO’s fault - it is our fault.’

Understanding your customers through extensive research and creating detailed buyer personas is the foundation of any good marketing strategy. Capture your target audience of one by applying the same concept to found a successful relationship with your CFO and achieve your budget goal.

Much like sales teams with whom marketing also endures a strained relationship, finance departments are under many of the same pressures - doing more for less in a faster time frame, continually adapting to competitor and market changes, driving short-term revenue alongside creating long-term business growth. Appeal to the similarities between your everyday leadership responsibilities and experiences, and discuss your CFO’s challenges to prepare for conversations around how you can support them.

Start your conversations around the most common challenges currently experienced by the average CFO:

1. Strategic Uncertainty - The Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) reports that only 29% of finance professionals said their organisation has a full vision of the function’s three-to-five-year future. Finance teams must fast adapt to emerging technologies, changing economic and geopolitical climates, the ever-evolving workplace and market shifts. CFOs must adapt alongside their other C-Suite members and the organisation as a whole to remain in control of their future development as a function.

2. Proactivity - ACCA projects that corporate finance in 2030 will have shifted from a reactive, backward-looking approach to become truly autonomous: anticipating and taking pre-emptive action against current opportunities and threats, rather than resolving past errors after the fact. Finance leaders can only develop this skill with autonomy over strategic direction and automated technology to deliver predictive capabilities. 

3. Implementing AI - IBM report that 65% of CFOs are under immediate pressure to implement AI despite limited understanding and capability of the emerging technology. Rather than the current data collection and building models, future financial leadership will involve honing existing data to generate three and five-year forecast models, analysing, reason-checking and building analytics reporting and data visualisation.

4. Data Security - Natural risk-aversion means CFOs already recognise the potential costs of cyber attacks and data breaches. An EY study revealed that more than half of finance leaders see risk management as one of their toughest challenges, and that the percentage concerned increases with the size of the organisation. The fast pace of technological advancement and lack of IT knowledge and skill leave finance teams underprepared to meet these looming risks. 

The vast scope of marketing empowers every CMO with first-person insights into the greatest challenges of their CFOs, ideally positioning marketing leaders to best understand and support their finance teams.

Leading CPG multinational P&G benefit from a successful marketing/finance partnership built on close communication and true understanding. Chief Brand Officer Marc Pritchard and CFO Andre Shulten are so well aligned that Shulten champions unprecedented marketing investment. Rather than setting a concrete budget, P&G is now determining the level of marketing investment on spend performance against strategy and value creation, and plan to continue to flexibly expand investment even as economic conditions improve. 

Pritchard and Shulten work together very closely on business strategy, harnessing AI, market data and customer insights with an ROI-driven approach. Shulten explains, ‘We are ROI-driven, and it’s really less defined by, do we get more commodity help or less? Are we within guidance range? The discussion is: is this the right investment to drive the strategy and create sustainable value?’ In its fourth and final quarter ending June 2024, P&G increased marketing investment by 300 basis points compared to the same period last year. 

2. Involve Your Finance Leader in Your Marketing Strategy

Involving the CFO as a real partner from the very beginning of strategy and campaigns both makes them feel that they have choices around allocating the marketing budget and are more in control of mitigating risk and delivering ROI, replacing knee-jerk reactions to budget requests with a dialogue focused on strategic value.

A CFO with better understanding of marketing strategy and of the CMO’s own goals is better able to see the potential benefits of marketing tactics and activities further ahead. Present your marketing strategy to the CFO well before implementation and even before other Board stakeholders, to proactively surface the CFO’s objections and questions and get potential roadblocks out of the way early, to start the year with greater CFO emotional investment in the marketing department. 

Vineet Mehra, former Global CMO and Chief Customer Officer for Walgreens Boots Alliance, shares of CFO involvement in strategy and tactics, ‘Gain buy-in to the concept, but don’t try to get them to believe in every element. Proof experiments can’t be a black box where you show up six months later and say, “Ta-da!” Break every project into weekly and biweekly chunks. Through that granularity comes momentum, so by the time you get to six months, people don’t feel like the experiment just showed up and question how you got there.

‘Engage the stakeholder on the journey and on the proof points along the way. In the short-term, people are like, “OK, I’m seeing some wins and value to the business,” so by the end of the experiment, you’ve got a whole body of proof that’s going to be of massive, measurable impact to the business, because of an experiment that you can now scale.’

This approach has paid off for the Walgreens Boots Alliance marketing team, who secured an increase in marketing budget and investment that continues to deliver ROI. Over the past two years Boots has invested heavily in its brand and price proposition to drive reappraisal, adding 14 brands to its beauty range, and running its largest ever Advantage Card campaign which promoted the loyalty scheme on TV for the first time in its 25-year history. The £3million campaign increased members by 1.1million and generated an ROI of £2 for every £1 spent. Investment in the loyalty campaign saw digital sales rocket by 13.8%. In July 2024 Boots reported a 13th consecutive quarter of market share growth, with comparable retail sales up 6% in the three months to June 2024. 

3. Demonstrate Value & ROI for All Departments, Not Just Marketing

Although every department delivers different activities and outputs, all functions of a company work towards the same goals - the success and growth of the business - and all C-Suite stakeholders should be aligned around these goals. To demonstrate the value of the marketing function and the return that can be delivered, show your CFO how investment in the marketing strategy will drive value for all functions of the business including:

• Decision-Making - Forward-focused data and metrics that harness customer focus groups, research and market trends can only be provided by the marketing department, as all functions work to historic data. Marketing spend that generates this data aids in the accuracy of sales forecasts and helps to predict major market and company challenges to enable better C-Suite collaboration. 

• Collaboration - Better collaboration informs the problem-solving and creative thinking behind innovation. The market insights and customer understanding delivered by optimally funded marketing campaigns enables all departments to better strategise and focus their own resources and spend for maximum effectiveness and efficiency. Leading CFOs believe that their most important stakeholder relationship lies with CTOs, with 72% identifying the Chief Technology Officer as highly important or critical. One focused on financial results and the other on functional and security challenges, if the CFO and CTO better understand each other, they can choose the right infrastructure with benefits for both teams, at lower cost, and implement much more effectively for major organisational benefits. 

• Customer Experience - Close collaboration and integration between sales and marketing teams is one of the greatest challenges in customer understanding and therefore acquisition and retention. Marketing campaigns deliver customer behaviour insights that can’t be found anywhere else, providing a unique view into the customer journey and making visible what sales teams cannot otherwise access. Data-driven marketing and sales collaboration ensures a unified brand experience that acquires new customers, retains existing customers and drives business growth.

The marketing ROI generated by the National Football League (NFL) has delivered unparalleled benefits for the organisation and all stakeholders. NFL EVP Chief Marketing Officer and #9 on Forbes’ Most Influential Marketers of 2024, Tim Ellis created an internal think tank to power the league’s most technologically advanced marketing experiments to date. Building an innovation team with members across departments, Ellis’ experiments are going beyond standard gen AI to replicate and scale content for global audiences by tailoring messaging to their preferences in real-time, and reaching diverse audiences with revolutionary language translation capabilities. 

NFL’s marketing investment is fast delivering ROI:

• Average TV viewership of the NFL regular season grew from 14.6 million to 17.9 million in one year alone

• 2024 is expected to be the most legally wagered-on season in the NFL's seven seasons, with a spike of 30% compared to the $26.7 billion wagered in last year’s season. 

• Ticket sales have  surged by 38% year-on-year across all markets. International purchases are growing at an even faster rate, rising by 41% since 2023.

And powering significant tangible impact across the league’s departments:

• Tech - Advances in AI are driving innovation internally, enabling the IT team to apply learnings to other emerging technologies to enable creativity and efficiencies, and sharing the cost of tech innovation with marketing to deliver further efficiencies.

• Product - Receiving the unique data and technology capabilities created by their own organisation enables the product team to deliver truly unique products that competitors cannot replicate, and deliver unique experiences and real value for consumers. 

• Sales - Unique experiences and unique products create a unique value proposition for an abundance of sales opportunities. Beyond marketing, the NFL is considering vendors including Microsoft and Amazon to scale their AI solutions across platforms, including social media and in-game experiences. 

Ellis says of harnessing customer insights to deliver business-wide benefits, ‘We know a strong marketing machine is integral for a brand to be successful. It has to be one that delivers relevance and relatability. We work hard at this every day and invest in our marketing accordingly.’

‘Anything that will get you closer to your audience you should do. If that’s a data point that tells me more about that customer and their experience with us, or if that’s a strong piece of creativity that will relate to somebody and will be a powerful message to bring them closer to the NFL, then we’re going to do it.’

4. Present Marketing Return Now vs the Future

Help your CFO to move further into the reduced-risk, autonomous headspace by uncovering the uncertainty of the future as much as possible. Show the value of everything you’re doing now, and where you could be in six months, a year and further ahead with varying levels of budget, so that your finance counterpart can picture the monetary value that new budget increases will bring directly. Include an ROI calculator to use precise metrics to assess the forecasted profitability of different investments.

Keith Weed, former Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Unilever shares, ‘I tease our CFO and tell him, “your job is to count where the money’s going but my job is to find out where it’s going to come from”. If I know where the world is going, I can get to the future first. If a marketer can do that, they are incredibly valuable.’ 

Unilever demonstrated specific results across areas of key strategic priority - Power Brands - to show the return of recent and past investment. Proven ROI in key areas enables the marketing team to make the business case for additional budget to experiment elsewhere. Allocating a portion of all marketing budget to innovation, the FMCG leader ensures that their test and learn approach is strictly data-driven, regularly reviewing and reporting back on all experiments and outcomes. In 2024 Unilever chose to allocate an additional €700 million in brand and marketing investment to feed its innovation pipeline. 

Unilever’s balance of investment in what works now and what could work in the future is delivering strong impact across business KPIs. Underlying sales at the group increased by 4.1% in the first half of the year, with volumes rising by 2.6%. Marketing investment into existing areas of ROI delivered further future ROI: Power Brands, which account for 75% of group turnover, saw underlying sales growth of 5.7%, with volumes up 4%.

5. Plan

Give your CFO total visibility of the marketing budget and the ROI it will deliver with a detailed plan that demonstrates the journey from spend to return. Include:

• How existing and increased spend will be allocated to channels, campaigns and activities

• Methodology, where and how the CFO will be involved in discussions and collaborative decisions 

• Projections for each part of the spend - ROAS, revenue, profit and ROI

• Regular reporting process to reinforce that your CFO can rely on you to track investment vs return, and show how the budget is being used to deliver further return

• Comprehensive ROI dashboard with all areas of marketing budget linked back to business revenue goals. Invite your CFO to use this dashboard to demonstrate marketing spend ROI to the Board every month.

Tariq Hassan, McDonald’s Chief Marketing Officer and #2 of Forbes’ World’s Most Influential CMOs of 2024, obtained more marketing budget by outlining his ambitious plans in detail. Hassan assuaged the fears and managed the expectations of his CFO by detailing where funding would come from, where it would be diverted, and how marketing would involve stakeholder groups to achieve the best return. 

McDonalds’ plan involves a radical diversion of spend away from historic channels and further into new and existing digital marketing channels. McDonald’s plans to create a US digital marketing fund, accounting for 1.2% of franchisees’ digital revenues, starting in 2025. Franchisees will pay for the digital marketing fund through existing marketing contributions, and McDonald’s will work with franchisee leadership to incorporate digital marketing costs into the marketing budget. The company estimates that the contribution shifts will also improve a typical store’s cash flow by about $2,600 per year, for ROI all round.

2025 will also see McDonald’s shift funding for its digital marketing tools, including its mobile app and customer relationship management system, into its digital marketing fund. 

Hassan comments, ‘Maintaining our leadership position requires modernising our marketing model to personalise how we reach, serve and connect with our fans. This funding model will help us better understand consumer behaviour and optimise customer lifetime value, all while maintaining systems for data management, network security and data storage’. 

Demonstrate ROI on Your Marketing Budget in Real-Time

Behavioural data monitors the customer journey in real-time, providing CMOs and CFOs with visibility of the journey from spend to return. Marketing teams don’t need to wait until campaigns finish to determine effectiveness, instead understanding what works and what doesn’t, to make in-flight changes to the media mix and maximise engagement and customer acquisition. 

Uncover hidden insights to deliver and demonstrate the ROI that will convince your CFO to increase your budget. Discover the real-time return tracking tools harnessed by leading CMOs.