Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2025: What the Budget Numbers Mean

The Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2025 shows marketing budgets holding at around 7.7% of company revenue on average, down from the highs of 9-11% seen in the early 2020s. The headline number gets plenty of coverage. What gets less attention is what sits underneath it: where budgets are being cut, where they are quietly growing, and what the distribution tells you about how marketing leaders are actually prioritising their work right now.

If you have been in this industry long enough, you learn to read these surveys with a degree of scepticism. Averages flatten everything. A 7.7% average across hundreds of companies in different sectors, at different stages of growth, with completely different competitive dynamics, tells you almost nothing useful on its own. What matters is the direction of travel and the structural shifts happening within the numbers.

What the Gartner CMO Spend Survey Actually Measures

Gartner surveys CMOs and senior marketing leaders annually, asking them to report on their total marketing budgets as a percentage of company revenue, how that budget is allocated across channels and functions, and how confident they are in their ability to execute with the resources they have. The 2025 edition draws on responses from marketing leaders across North America, Europe, and Asia-Pacific, spanning a range of company sizes and sectors.

It is one of the most widely cited pieces of marketing research published each year. It is also one of the most frequently misread. The survey captures self-reported data from CMOs, which means it reflects how marketing leaders perceive their budgets and priorities, not necessarily how those budgets are actually being deployed or what outcomes they are generating. That distinction matters more than most commentary acknowledges.

For context on how budget decisions interact with broader marketing strategy and operational planning, the Marketing Operations hub at The Marketing Juice covers the structural and commercial dimensions that sit behind the headline figures.

Where Marketing Budgets Are Being Cut in 2025

The compression in overall budget as a percentage of revenue is real. But the more interesting story is in the composition of cuts. Offline channels, including print, broadcast, and out-of-home, have continued to decline as a share of total marketing spend. That is not new. What is newer is the pressure on certain digital channels that were considered untouchable a few years ago.

Paid social, in particular, is facing harder scrutiny. Not because CMOs have stopped believing in it, but because the cost of customer acquisition through paid social has risen significantly across most categories while the measurability of its contribution to revenue has remained murky. When you are under pressure to justify every pound or dollar, channels where attribution is contested tend to get squeezed first.

I spent several years managing large paid media budgets across multiple markets, and the pattern I saw repeatedly was this: channels that could not tell a clear story about their contribution to commercial outcomes got cut during downturns, regardless of whether they were actually working. The problem was rarely the channel. It was the measurement framework. Teams that had invested in understanding how their channels contributed to the full customer experience held their budgets. Teams that relied on last-click attribution and hoped no one would ask hard questions did not.

Agency and outsourced spend is also under pressure. The Gartner data has shown a multi-year trend toward bringing more marketing capability in-house, and 2025 continues that pattern. Outsourcing marketing operations still makes sense in specific contexts, but the default assumption that agencies should handle execution while internal teams focus on strategy is being questioned in both directions.

Where Budgets Are Quietly Growing

Not everything is being cut. A few areas are seeing budget growth, or at least holding their ground better than the overall trend would suggest.

Owned channels are having a moment. Email, content, SEO, and CRM-driven marketing are all benefiting from the flight toward efficiency. When paid media costs rise and attribution gets harder, owned channels become more attractive because the economics are more controllable. Building sustainable marketing processes around owned channels is not glamorous, but it is increasingly where the commercial argument is being made.

Marketing technology is a more complicated picture. Overall martech spending has plateaued or declined for many organisations, but that is partly because the problem has shifted. Most marketing teams are not short of technology. They are short of the capability to use what they already have. The Gartner data has consistently shown that martech utilisation rates are low, often well below 50% of available functionality. Buying more tools is not the answer to that problem.

Analytics and measurement investment is also holding up better than other areas. That reflects the broader pressure CMOs are under to demonstrate commercial contribution. When the CFO is asking harder questions about marketing ROI, investing in the capability to answer those questions is a reasonable defensive move. How marketing budgets are structured and justified has become as important as the budget itself.

The Gap Between Expectation and Resource

One of the most consistent findings in the Gartner CMO Spend Survey over recent years is the gap between what marketing leaders are expected to deliver and the resources they have to deliver it. The 2025 data continues that pattern. CMOs are being asked to drive growth, improve customer experience, lead digital transformation, and demonstrate commercial accountability, all while managing budgets that have compressed as a share of revenue.

I have been on both sides of that conversation. Running an agency that grew from around 20 people to over 100, I had to make the commercial case for investment in capability repeatedly, to clients and internally. The CMOs I worked with who were most effective at holding their budgets were not the ones who made the best marketing arguments. They were the ones who made the best business arguments. They spoke the language of the CFO and the CEO, not the language of the marketing team.

That sounds obvious when you write it down. But it is remarkable how many budget conversations I have witnessed where the marketing leader walked in with slides full of impressions, reach, and engagement metrics, and walked out having lost 20% of their budget. The CFO does not care about impressions. They care about revenue contribution, customer acquisition cost, and payback period. If you cannot translate your marketing activity into those terms, you will lose the argument even when you are right.

The structure of the marketing organisation also plays into this. Teams that are structured around channels tend to optimise for channel metrics. Teams that are structured around commercial outcomes tend to optimise for revenue. The way you organise the function shapes what it measures, and what it measures shapes what it prioritises.

What the Martech Plateau Means in Practice

The flattening of martech investment is worth dwelling on because it represents a genuine shift in how marketing leaders are thinking about technology. For most of the 2010s, the assumption was that more technology would solve more problems. Marketing stacks grew, budgets for software licences expanded, and the number of tools the average marketing team was running ballooned.

What the Gartner data now shows is that many organisations have hit a ceiling, not because they have run out of problems to solve, but because they have run out of capacity to implement and use what they have already bought. The bottleneck is not access to technology. It is the human capability to deploy it effectively.

I saw this pattern clearly when working with larger marketing organisations. The martech stack would be impressive on paper. The reality was that half the tools were underused, a quarter were barely understood by the people who were supposed to be running them, and the integrations between systems were held together with manual processes and spreadsheets. Buying a new platform rarely solved that. It usually made it worse.

The smarter move, and the one that the 2025 budget data seems to reflect, is consolidation and capability building rather than expansion. That means investing in the people and processes that make existing technology work, rather than adding to the stack. How marketing teams are structured around technology is increasingly a determinant of whether that technology delivers any value at all.

Digital Channels: Where the Allocation Is Shifting

Digital channels continue to account for the majority of marketing spend in most organisations, and that share has continued to grow in 2025. But within digital, the allocation is shifting in ways that reflect the efficiency pressures CMOs are handling.

Search advertising remains the most defensible channel in most budget conversations because the attribution story, while imperfect, is cleaner than most alternatives. When someone searches for your product and clicks your ad and buys, the commercial logic is legible even if the full picture is more complicated. That legibility has real budget protection value.

Programmatic display and video are under more pressure. Not because they do not work, but because the measurement frameworks around them are contested and the fraud and quality issues in the programmatic ecosystem have not gone away. CMOs who have tried to make the commercial case for large programmatic budgets to sceptical CFOs know how difficult that conversation can be when the attribution data is weak.

Content and inbound marketing continues to attract investment from organisations that have the patience to play a longer game. Inbound marketing processes take time to build but create compounding returns that paid channels cannot replicate. The challenge is that the payback period is long and the attribution is even harder than paid. In a budget environment where short-term commercial contribution is being scrutinised, that is a difficult argument to make.

How to Read the Gartner Data for Your Own Organisation

The most common mistake I see people make with the Gartner CMO Spend Survey is treating the average as a benchmark. It is not. A 7.7% of revenue budget is an average across an enormous range of company types, sizes, sectors, and growth stages. A B2B software company at scale has a completely different budget structure than a consumer goods brand in a competitive category. Using the average to justify your budget in either direction is a weak argument.

What the data is more useful for is identifying directional trends. If the overall share of budget going to paid social is declining across the survey population, that is a signal worth paying attention to, even if your own situation is different. It tells you something about where the industry is recalibrating its confidence and where the scrutiny is sharpening.

The more useful exercise is to map your own budget allocation against the categories Gartner uses and ask some honest questions. Are you overinvested in channels where the attribution story is weak? Are you underinvested in owned channels that could reduce your dependence on paid media over time? Are you carrying martech costs for tools that are not being used effectively? These questions are more valuable than any benchmark comparison.

Early in my career, I asked a managing director for budget to build a new website. The answer was no. Rather than accepting that as the end of the conversation, I taught myself to code and built it. That experience shaped how I think about resource constraints: they are a forcing function for prioritisation, not a reason to stop. The same logic applies to marketing budgets. Constraint forces clarity about what actually matters.

If you want to go deeper on how budget decisions connect to broader operational and planning questions, the Marketing Operations section covers the full range of structural and commercial topics that shape how marketing functions perform in practice.

What CMOs Should Be Doing With This Information

The Gartner CMO Spend Survey is most useful as a prompt for honest internal assessment, not as a source of benchmarks to deploy in budget negotiations. The organisations that tend to manage budget pressure most effectively are not the ones that cite industry averages. They are the ones that have built a clear and credible picture of what their marketing spend is contributing to commercial outcomes.

That means investing in measurement capability before you need to defend your budget, not after. It means building the commercial vocabulary to have conversations with CFOs and CEOs in their terms. And it means being willing to make hard choices about where to focus limited resources rather than spreading spend thinly across too many channels and activities.

The industry has a tendency to treat budget surveys as confirmation of whatever argument it already wants to make. If budgets are up, that proves marketing is valued. If budgets are down, that proves organisations are making a mistake. Neither framing is particularly useful. The more honest response is to ask what the data is telling you about where confidence is being placed and where it is being withdrawn, and to use that as a starting point for your own thinking.

Having judged the Effie Awards and seen the work that actually gets recognised for effectiveness, the common thread in the strongest entries is not budget size. It is clarity of commercial objective and discipline in how resources are focused. That is as true for a team working with a constrained budget as it is for one with significant resources. The constraint is rarely the limiting factor. The thinking is.

About the Author

Keith Lacy is a marketing strategist and former agency CEO with 20+ years of experience across agency leadership, performance marketing, and commercial strategy. He writes The Marketing Juice to cut through the noise and share what works.

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