Gartner’s 2025 CMO Priorities: What the Data Is Telling You

Gartner’s 2025 marketing priorities research lands in a familiar place: CMOs are being asked to do more with less, prove more with imperfect data, and grow businesses that often have no appetite for the kind of investment growth actually requires. The priorities Gartner surfaces are real. But reading them without commercial context turns a useful signal into a checklist nobody finishes.

This article breaks down what Gartner’s 2025 findings mean in practice, where the real tensions sit, and what separates CMOs who move the needle from those who spend the year managing expectations downward.

What Gartner’s 2025 Research Actually Shows

Gartner’s annual CMO Spend and Strategy Survey is one of the more useful benchmarks in the industry, not because it tells you what to do, but because it tells you what your peers are wrestling with. The 2025 edition points to several consistent themes: AI integration moving from experimentation to execution, marketing budgets remaining under pressure relative to pre-2022 levels, growing scrutiny on marketing’s contribution to revenue, and a widening gap between what CMOs are responsible for and what they control.

None of this is surprising if you have spent any time inside a large marketing function. What is interesting is the specific combination of pressures arriving simultaneously. CMOs are being asked to cut waste, invest in AI, prove ROI, build brand, and grow the pipeline, all at the same time, often with flat or declining budgets. That is not a strategy problem. That is a prioritisation problem dressed up as a strategy problem.

If you are thinking through how these pressures connect to broader questions of career sustainability and organisational influence, the Career and Leadership in Marketing hub covers the structural dynamics that sit behind the annual survey data.

The AI Integration Priority: Real Capability or Expensive Theatre?

Gartner consistently flags AI as a top CMO priority, and in 2025 the framing has shifted from “should we be doing this?” to “how do we scale what we have started?” That is a meaningful shift. But it masks a significant execution gap that most organisations are not being honest about internally.

I have seen this pattern before, not with AI specifically, but with every major technology wave that has moved through marketing over the past two decades. The sequence is always the same: early adopters get real results, the majority rush in, vendors overstate capability, and organisations end up with expensive tools sitting on top of data foundations that cannot support them. The technology is not the problem. The infrastructure underneath it is.

AI-driven personalisation, which sits at the centre of many 2025 priorities, requires clean, connected, consented first-party data. Most organisations do not have it. They have fragmented CRM records, siloed analytics platforms, and attribution models that were built for a third-party cookie world that no longer exists. Deploying AI on top of that does not fix the problem. It amplifies it.

The CMOs making genuine progress with AI in 2025 are not the ones with the most sophisticated tools. They are the ones who spent the previous 18 months doing the unglamorous work of data consolidation. That is not a headline priority, but it is what separates real capability from expensive theatre. Forrester’s analysis of the sales and marketing technology landscape captures some of this complexity well, noting that more options do not automatically produce better outcomes when the underlying processes are not in order.

The Budget Pressure Problem and the Lower-Funnel Trap

Gartner’s budget data tells a consistent story. Marketing’s share of company revenue has not recovered to pre-2020 levels for most organisations, and CMOs are operating in an environment where every line of spend is scrutinised more aggressively than it was five years ago. The rational response to that pressure is to concentrate investment where results are most measurable. And the most measurable results are almost always at the bottom of the funnel.

This is where I have a strong view, shaped by watching the same dynamic play out across dozens of clients over two decades. Earlier in my career I overvalued lower-funnel performance. It felt efficient. The numbers were clean. You could show exactly where the conversions came from. The problem is that a significant proportion of what performance marketing gets credited for was going to happen anyway. You are often capturing intent that already existed, not creating new demand.

When budgets tighten and CMOs retreat further into performance channels, they protect this quarter’s numbers while quietly eroding the brand equity that makes next year’s performance possible. The pipeline looks fine until it does not. By the time the problem is visible in the data, the CMO is often already being asked to explain a growth shortfall that was baked in two years earlier.

The organisations that handle budget pressure well are the ones that treat brand and performance as connected, not competing. They maintain some level of upper-funnel investment even when it is uncomfortable, because they understand that reaching new audiences is what creates the demand that performance channels then convert. The clothes shop analogy is useful here: someone who tries something on is far more likely to buy than someone who has never been in the store. Performance marketing is very good at serving the people already in the store. Brand is what fills the store in the first place.

Proving Marketing’s Commercial Impact: The Measurement Tension

Demonstrating marketing’s contribution to business outcomes is a perennial priority in Gartner’s research, and 2025 is no different. But the nature of the challenge has changed. It is no longer enough to show impressions, reach, or even leads. CFOs and CEOs want to understand marketing’s contribution to revenue, margin, and customer lifetime value. And they want it in a framework that connects to how the rest of the business measures itself.

This is harder than it sounds, and not just because attribution is technically complex. The deeper problem is that marketing and finance often speak different languages about what value means and over what time horizon it should be measured. I have sat in enough board-level conversations to know that when a CMO presents a marketing dashboard and a CFO presents a P&L, they are frequently describing the same reality in ways that do not connect. The CMO looks effective. The business looks like it is not growing. Both can be true simultaneously, and that gap is where CMO tenure goes to die.

The organisations solving this in 2025 are building shared measurement frameworks with finance, not defending marketing’s own metrics in isolation. They are agreeing in advance on what success looks like, what time horizon is reasonable, and how to account for the lag between brand investment and revenue impact. That is a political and organisational challenge as much as a technical one. Building a strong brand foundation is part of this, and the principles behind how brand equity compounds over time are directly relevant to making that case internally.

The CMOs who are winning the measurement conversation in 2025 are not the ones with the most sophisticated attribution models. They are the ones who have accepted that perfect measurement does not exist and built honest approximations that their CFO trusts. That trust is built through transparency about uncertainty, not by overstating precision.

The Expanding Remit and the Credibility Question

One of the structural tensions Gartner surfaces consistently is the expanding scope of the CMO role. In many organisations, CMOs are now responsible for customer experience, digital transformation, data strategy, and revenue operations, on top of the traditional brand and demand generation remit. The logic is understandable. Marketing touches the customer at every stage of the experience. But the practical effect is a function that is responsible for everything and accountable for outcomes it does not fully control.

I grew an agency from 20 to 100 people over several years. One of the hardest lessons from that period was that expanding scope without expanding capability is a credibility risk, not an opportunity. When you are responsible for things you cannot deliver well, you lose the trust that gives you influence over the things you can. The CMOs I have seen struggle most in the past few years are not the ones with the narrowest remit. They are the ones who accepted every expansion without the resources or organisational authority to execute.

The 2025 priority, in practice, is not about acquiring more responsibility. It is about being ruthlessly clear about where marketing can create genuine commercial value and building the evidence base to defend that position. That requires saying no to things that dilute focus, which is politically difficult but commercially necessary.

Channel Mix and the Efficiency Illusion

Gartner’s research consistently shows CMOs under pressure to optimise channel mix for efficiency. In 2025, this conversation is playing out against a backdrop of rising media costs in paid search and social, continued fragmentation of attention across platforms, and growing interest in owned and earned channels as alternatives to paid.

The efficiency framing is seductive but often misleading. Efficiency measures how well you convert existing opportunity. It does not measure whether you are accessing enough opportunity to begin with. A brand that is highly efficient at converting a small, shrinking audience is not a healthy brand. It is a brand in managed decline with good analytics.

The channel mix question that matters in 2025 is not “which channels have the best CPA?” It is “which channels are reaching audiences we are not currently converting, and what is the long-term value of those audiences?” That is a harder question to answer, and it requires a longer time horizon than most budget cycles allow. But it is the question that separates channel optimisation from actual growth strategy.

Understanding how different channel types perform against different objectives matters here. The distinction between formats designed to interrupt versus formats designed to fit contextually into the user experience, for example, has real implications for both efficiency and brand perception. Research on how native and display formats compare in practice is useful context for these channel allocation conversations.

Organisational Alignment: The Priority Nobody Wants to Prioritise

Every Gartner CMO survey surfaces some version of the alignment challenge: marketing and sales not sharing a view of the customer, marketing and finance not agreeing on what success looks like, marketing and technology not able to move at the same pace. In 2025, the specific friction point is the relationship between marketing and the broader revenue function, particularly as more organisations adopt revenue operations models that cut across traditional department boundaries.

Alignment is not a soft priority. It is a commercial one. I spent years managing client relationships where the marketing team and the sales team were effectively working against each other, not deliberately, but structurally. Marketing was optimising for leads. Sales was optimising for deals. Neither metric was wrong, but the gap between them was where budget went to disappear without producing growth. The fix was not a better CRM or a new attribution model. It was agreeing on a shared definition of a qualified opportunity and building the workflow around that definition.

CMOs who are making progress on alignment in 2025 are doing it through shared commercial goals, not through better communication. The difference matters. Communication is about information flow. Shared goals are about incentive structure. You can communicate perfectly and still be misaligned if the two functions are measured on different outcomes.

What the 2025 Priorities Mean for How CMOs Should Spend Their Time

Reading Gartner’s priorities as a list of things to do is the wrong approach. Reading them as a map of where the pressure is concentrated is more useful. In 2025, the pressure is concentrated in three places: demonstrating commercial value, making AI investment productive rather than performative, and maintaining brand investment under budget pressure that is pushing toward short-term efficiency.

The CMOs who will look back on 2025 as a good year are not the ones who ticked every box on the priority list. They are the ones who picked two or three areas where they could build genuine evidence of impact and did the work to make that evidence legible to the people who control their budgets and their tenure.

Early in my career, when I wanted budget for a new website and was told no, I taught myself to code and built it myself. That was not stubbornness. It was a recognition that waiting for the right conditions is a luxury most marketing functions do not have. The conditions in 2025 are not ideal for CMOs. The budget is constrained, the expectations are expanding, and the measurement environment is genuinely difficult. But the CMOs who make progress will be the ones who work with the conditions they have, not the ones they wish they had.

For more on the structural challenges shaping marketing leadership right now, including how to build credibility with boards, manage expanding remits, and think about long-term career sustainability, the Career and Leadership in Marketing section covers the territory in depth.

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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