Gartner CMO Spend Survey: What the Numbers Mean

The Gartner CMO Spend Survey is the closest thing marketing leadership has to an annual health check. It tracks how much CMOs are spending, where budgets are shifting, and what pressures are shaping decisions at the top of the function. If you lead a marketing team or run an agency, it is worth reading carefully, not just for the headlines, but for what sits underneath them.

The consistent story across recent editions is one of constraint. Budgets have been squeezed, the proportion of revenue allocated to marketing has declined from its post-pandemic peak, and CMOs are being asked to do more with less while simultaneously proving their value to a CFO audience that has never been more sceptical. That tension is not new, but it has sharpened considerably.

What the Gartner CMO Spend Survey Actually Measures

Before reading too much into the numbers, it helps to understand what the survey captures. Gartner surveys a large sample of CMOs and senior marketing leaders, predominantly from North America and Europe, across a range of industries and company sizes. It asks how budgets are allocated, what priorities are shifting, and what obstacles are getting in the way of performance.

The data is directionally useful. It tells you what the average CMO is thinking and doing. But averages obscure a lot. When I was running an agency and managing significant ad spend across 30-plus industries, the variation between clients in the same sector was often greater than the variation between sectors. One retail CMO would be doubling down on brand; the next would be pulling everything into performance. The Gartner survey captures the mean, not the distribution, and the distribution is where the real story lives.

That said, the trends are real and worth paying attention to. The survey has tracked a meaningful shift in how marketing budgets are composed, where confidence sits, and what keeps CMOs awake at night. If you lead a marketing function, it is a useful calibration tool, provided you read it critically rather than as a prescription.

For a broader view of how marketing leadership is evolving, the Career and Leadership in Marketing hub covers the strategic and commercial pressures facing senior marketers in more depth.

The Budget Compression Story Is Real, But Incomplete

The headline finding from recent Gartner surveys is that marketing budgets, measured as a percentage of company revenue, have fallen from the elevated levels seen in 2021 and 2022. The post-pandemic spending surge has unwound, and CMOs are operating in a more constrained environment than they were two or three years ago.

This is being framed by many in the industry as a crisis. I am less convinced it is quite that. Some of the 2021 and 2022 spending was anomalous, a product of cheap capital, inflated growth expectations, and the particular dynamics of a market emerging from lockdown. The correction was predictable. What is more concerning is not the level of the budget but how that budget is being allocated under pressure.

When money gets tight, most organisations cut in the same direction. Brand investment, which is harder to attribute and slower to show returns, gets trimmed first. Performance channels, which generate trackable numbers even when those numbers are telling an incomplete story, get protected or even increased. I have watched this happen repeatedly across client portfolios. The short-term metrics look fine. The medium-term growth trajectory quietly deteriorates.

The Gartner data reflects this pattern. CMOs report high confidence in digital and performance channels, and lower confidence in brand and traditional media, despite the evidence base suggesting the relationship between brand investment and long-term revenue growth is strong. The confidence gap is not tracking the effectiveness gap. It is tracking the measurability gap, and those are very different things.

The Performance Marketing Trap Inside the Survey Data

One of the more revealing tensions in the Gartner survey is the gap between where money goes and where CMOs say they lack confidence. A disproportionate share of budget flows to paid search, paid social, and programmatic display. These are channels where attribution is visible and reporting is instantaneous. They are also channels where a significant portion of what looks like marketing-driven conversion would have happened anyway.

I spent years overvaluing lower-funnel performance. When I look back at some of the campaigns I was most proud of, the ones with the best cost-per-acquisition numbers, I am not certain we were creating demand so much as capturing it efficiently. The person who had already decided to buy, who was going to search for the product regardless, converted through our paid search ad and got logged as a marketing win. The incrementality question, whether the spend actually caused the conversion, was rarely asked seriously.

This matters at a budget allocation level because it means CMOs may be systematically over-investing in channels that harvest existing intent while under-investing in channels that build new intent. The Gartner survey shows that digital channels consume the largest share of budget and that CMOs are simultaneously worried about whether their overall spend is working. Those two facts are connected.

The challenge is structural. CFOs can see the performance numbers. They cannot easily see what would have happened without the spend. Proving the counterfactual is hard, and in a budget conversation, hard-to-prove arguments lose to easy-to-read dashboards. So the allocation bias persists, survey after survey, year after year.

Writing that converts at the bottom of the funnel is genuinely important, and resources like this piece on conversion copywriting from Unbounce are worth reading. But conversion copy only works when there is sufficient demand to convert. Building that demand is the harder, less measurable, and chronically underfunded part of the equation.

Technology Spend Is Consuming Budget Without Delivering Clarity

Another consistent finding in the Gartner CMO Spend Survey is the proportion of marketing budget absorbed by technology. Martech investment has grown substantially over the past decade, and it now represents a meaningful share of total marketing spend for many organisations.

The problem is that technology spending and technology effectiveness are not the same thing. Gartner’s own data has shown that CMOs report using only a fraction of the capability they are paying for. The gap between what is licensed and what is used is, in many organisations, embarrassingly wide.

I have seen this from both sides. Running an agency, we would sometimes inherit a client’s martech stack and find tools that had been bought, partially implemented, and then effectively abandoned while the licence fees kept running. Running a business through a period of rapid growth, the temptation to buy capability ahead of the team’s ability to use it was real. Technology can feel like progress even when it is just cost.

The survey data suggests CMOs are aware of this problem but are not solving it quickly. There is an organisational inertia around martech: contracts are multi-year, switching costs are high, and the people who championed a particular platform are often still in the business. So the stack grows, the utilisation rate stays low, and the budget that could be funding media or content or talent gets absorbed by software that is underperforming against its promise.

Experimentation platforms are one area where the ROI case can be made clearly, because the output is a direct comparison of what works and what does not. Tools like Optimizely’s experimentation suite make that case. But even there, the value is only realised if the organisation has the discipline to run tests properly and act on the results. The tool is not the answer. The capability to use it is.

What CMO Confidence Levels Are Really Telling You

The Gartner survey includes data on CMO confidence: confidence in achieving growth targets, confidence in the effectiveness of current spend, confidence in the team’s capabilities. These numbers are worth reading carefully because they reveal something about the psychological state of marketing leadership, not just the operational reality.

When confidence in effectiveness is low, it usually means one of three things. Either the measurement framework is inadequate and CMOs genuinely cannot tell whether their spend is working. Or the measurement framework is adequate and it is showing that things are not working as well as they should. Or there is a mismatch between what marketing is being asked to deliver and the resources it has been given to deliver it.

All three of these are present in the Gartner data to varying degrees. The measurement problem is persistent and well-documented. The effectiveness problem is real, particularly in the context of the performance marketing over-investment discussed above. And the resource-expectation mismatch is, if anything, getting worse as budgets compress and growth targets do not.

There is also a political dimension to confidence data that is worth acknowledging. CMOs who report low confidence in their own function’s effectiveness are implicitly acknowledging a problem that their CEO and CFO are also watching. There is a selection effect in survey responses: people tend not to publicly undermine their own position. When confidence numbers are still materially below where they should be despite that pressure, the underlying reality is probably worse than the reported figure suggests.

For anyone building a career in marketing leadership, understanding how to read and respond to this kind of data is a core competency. The marketing leadership resources on this site go deeper on the commercial and strategic skills that separate good operators from average ones.

The Talent Question the Survey Keeps Raising

Alongside technology, talent is consistently flagged in the Gartner survey as both a major cost and a major constraint. CMOs report difficulty finding people with the right combination of technical, creative, and commercial skills. They report high turnover. They report that building internal capability is taking longer than expected.

This is a real problem, and it is one I encountered repeatedly when growing an agency from 20 to 100 people. The profile of person you need at 20 people is different from the profile you need at 50, and different again at 100. The skills that made someone excellent in a scrappy, generalist environment sometimes became a constraint in a more structured one. Managing that transition, holding onto the people who could grow with the business while being honest about those who could not, was one of the harder leadership challenges of that period.

The talent challenge in marketing has also been complicated by the pace of channel change. Someone who was an expert in paid social five years ago may be operating with an outdated mental model today. The platforms have changed, the algorithms have changed, the creative requirements have changed. Continuous learning is not optional in this industry, but building a culture where it actually happens, rather than just being aspirational language in a job description, takes deliberate effort.

A useful framework for thinking about editorial workflow and team structure, particularly for content-heavy marketing functions, is available in this Buffer piece on LinkedIn content workflows. The specifics are channel-focused, but the underlying logic about process, accountability, and output quality applies more broadly.

How to Use the Gartner Survey Without Being Captured by It

The risk with any benchmarking survey is that it becomes a substitute for thinking rather than a prompt for it. I have sat in budget conversations where the Gartner data was used to justify a decision that had already been made, rather than to genuinely interrogate whether the decision was right. The survey becomes a comfort blanket: if everyone else is doing it, it must be correct.

That is precisely the wrong way to use it. The survey tells you what the average CMO is doing. It does not tell you what the right CMO should be doing in your specific context, with your specific competitive position, your specific customer base, and your specific growth challenges. Average is a reference point, not a target.

The more productive use of the Gartner data is as a diagnostic. If your budget allocation looks materially different from the survey benchmarks, that is worth understanding. Maybe you have a good reason for the difference, a structural advantage in a particular channel, a customer profile that skews away from digital, a brand position that requires heavier investment in certain areas. Or maybe the difference reflects an inherited allocation that nobody has seriously challenged in three years. The survey helps you ask the question. It cannot answer it for you.

The same logic applies to the confidence data. If your confidence in effectiveness is lower than the survey average, that is a signal worth investigating. If it is higher, that is also worth interrogating. Overconfidence in marketing effectiveness is at least as dangerous as underconfidence, and considerably more common.

I judged the Effie Awards for a period, which gave me an unusual vantage point on effectiveness claims. The entries that impressed most were not the ones with the biggest numbers. They were the ones where the team had clearly thought hard about what they were trying to achieve, designed the campaign around that objective, and then measured honestly against it. That discipline is rarer than it should be, and the Gartner survey data, read carefully, reflects that gap.

Honest writing about what works in marketing, rather than what sounds impressive, is something Copyblogger has long advocated for in content strategy. The principle extends well beyond content: it applies to how you evaluate your whole marketing programme.

The CFO Relationship the Survey Data Points Toward

One of the clearest implications of the Gartner CMO Spend Survey is that the relationship between the CMO and the CFO has never mattered more. Budget allocation decisions are increasingly being made or heavily influenced by finance, and CMOs who cannot make a commercially coherent case for their spend are losing the argument before it starts.

This requires a different kind of conversation than most marketing leaders are comfortable with. The CFO does not care about impressions, reach, or engagement rate. They care about revenue, margin, and return on capital. Translating between those two languages, without losing the nuance of what marketing actually does and how it works over time, is one of the defining skills of effective marketing leadership right now.

The CMOs who handle budget pressure best are not necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets or the most sophisticated measurement frameworks. They are the ones who have built credibility with the finance function over time, who have been honest about what they know and what they do not, and who have consistently connected their work to outcomes that the business cares about. That credibility is built slowly and lost quickly, which is why the confidence data in the Gartner survey matters beyond its face value. It reflects how well the marketing function is trusted, not just how well it is performing.

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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