Marketing Was Never a Thinking Thing, Only Ever a Dreaming One

The Take: 4 in 5 marketing leaders can't justify their spend to their own CFO, and the fix isn't a smarter dashboard. It's learning to count in a language finance already speaks. Businesses that close the gap grow 20 to 40% faster than the ones who don't.

Marketing was never a thinking thing. It was a dreaming thing. You'd dream up one big idea, splash it across three or four channels and call it done. It worked when there were three channels. It doesn't work when there are thirty.

Only 21% of CMOs are fully aligned with their CFO on budgets and metrics. That number should worry anyone running a marketing team. It means four out of five marketing leaders are spending money they can't justify to the person who controls the budget. The gap is getting worse too. The proportion of marketing leaders who work regularly with finance dropped from 42% to 35% in the last year.

The result is predictable. Marketing budgets have flatlined at 7.7% of revenue for two years running. Half of CMOs report budgets of 6% or less. CFOs aren't cutting marketing because they hate marketing. They're cutting it because too few people in the room can explain what the money does.

Only 21% of CMOs are fully aligned with their CFO on budgets and metrics, and just 22% of marketers say they have enough data to prove their own value. The gap is a language problem, not a data problem.

Marketing has always had a rigour problem. Not a tools problem. Not a data problem. A thinking problem.

Twenty years ago, the excuse was fair. The tools didn't exist. Measuring the impact of a billboard or a TV spot was genuinely difficult. It was like having a car on your phone forty years ago. The technology wasn't there.

That excuse died a long time ago. Every platform now gives you dashboards, conversion tracking, attribution windows and audience insights. But the skill and the thinking hasn't caught up. The tools are everywhere. The ability to use them is not.

So marketing became a doing thing instead of a thinking thing. More channels, more campaigns, more content. You're running campaigns across seven or eight platforms. They're probably all targeting the same type of person. The platforms will all tell you they're doing a great job because they're incentivised to say that. So how do you actually know what's working?

A lot of the time, people don't know. A lot of the time, they're too scared to find out. To find out what a channel is actually worth, you might have to go dark for a month and just see what happens. Turn it off. Watch the numbers. If revenue drops, now you know something. That channel was earning its keep. If nothing changes, the question is simple: why are you spending money there?

Both outcomes save you money or make you money. But most teams will never run that test. They're too scared to have a bad month on the dashboard, so they stop looking instead.

Here's where the problem compounds. Marketers who can't count can't talk to CFOs. Marketers who can't talk to CFOs don't get budget. Marketers who don't get budget can't invest in the measurement that would let them count. It's a trap that feeds itself.

Only 22% of marketers feel they have enough data to justify their value to the CFO. That's not a data problem. The data exists. It's a language problem. A marketer walks into a budget meeting talking about impressions, engagement rates and brand lift. The CFO wants to know what the money produced. Volume, margin or regulatory compliance. If it doesn't do one of those three things, a commercially sound CFO is right to ask why it exists.

The irony is that companies where marketing and finance actually talk to each other see 20 to 40% more financial growth. The upside is massive. But the avoidance is stronger than the incentive.

Compare a tradie to an enterprise marketing team. A plumber knows exactly what it costs to send a truck to a job, what the margin is on a hot water install and whether the Google Ads are producing calls. Cost in, work done, cash out. Enterprise organisations built complex attribution models that obscure the real numbers, not clarify them. The complexity became the hiding place.

We measure this across the Australian market, and the methodology backs up the anecdote. Across the businesses we've scored, Data and Tracking averages 57 out of 100, the weakest of the six dimensions we measure. Businesses that can't measure can't report. Businesses that can't report can't justify spend. The loop is obvious and most are stuck in it. See how we score businesses.

The instinct from here is to buy another tool. Another platform, another reporting suite, another layer of attribution. That's not the fix.

The fix is curiosity. It sounds soft. It's not.

You need to educate your finance partners so they can engage with what marketing actually does. If they're not on the journey with you, you're working against each other. When you run that test and turn off a channel for a month and revenue drops, that's a positive. It solidifies the requirement for investment. If you take it out and nothing changes, the question is simple: why are we spending money there? Both outcomes are useful. But you have to frame it that way. You have to build the business case, not the pitch.

We're both paddling the same way. We both wanna win.

Stop treating the CFO as the enemy. They're not. The problem isn't a hostile finance team. It's a marketing team that never learned to speak money. The more you avoid the conversation, the worse it gets. Sitting in silence has never benefited anybody when it comes to business performance.

If you're not good at numbers, open yourself up to somebody who is. Whether that's the data team or the finance team, both can help. Stop avoiding them. The avoidance is the problem, not the relationship.

Warning: If your marketing team can't explain what happened to last quarter's spend in terms a CFO would accept, you don't have a budget problem. You have a capability problem.

Belief in long-term brand building dropped from 80% to 69% among CEOs and CFOs. That's not because brand doesn't work. It's because the case was never made in language finance understands. Instead, marketers pulled brand spend for a short-term lift. The numbers looked better for a quarter. Then the pipeline dried up.

The businesses that figure this out will pull away. Companies where marketing and finance are aligned grow 20 to 40% faster. Not because they have better tools or bigger budgets. Because they have marketers who can count, who aren't scared to test and who know how to walk into a room with a CFO and say "here's what the money did, here's what we learned and here's what we're doing next."

That's not a dreaming thing. That's a thinking thing.

If you want to see where your business sits on the dimensions that actually matter, start with a Lens scorecard. It takes fifteen minutes and it'll give you the numbers to have that conversation.

Why don't marketing and finance teams get along?

Not because finance is hostile. It's because marketing teams often can't translate impressions and engagement into volume, margin or compliance, the three things a CFO is trained to ask about. The fix is a shared language, not a truce.

How much faster do aligned businesses grow?

Companies where marketing and finance genuinely work together grow 20 to 40% faster than those that don't, according to Think with Google research. The upside is real. Most businesses still avoid the conversation that would get them there.

What's the fastest way to start closing the gap?

Run the uncomfortable test. Turn a channel off for a month and watch what happens to revenue. A drop proves the channel earned its keep. No change answers the question most teams have been avoiding: why is the money going there at all?