CMOs are contending with a widening gap between what they are expected to deliver and what they are actually funded to do. Growth targets, market share gains, and brand awareness goals continue to climb, while Marketing budgets have flatlined at around 7.7% of company revenue, 18% lower than the mean just four years ago. Yet, CEO, CFO, and board expectations keep rising. It is no surprise that CMOs report their budget is insufficient to execute their strategy.
Marketing benchmark data offers a genuine way to close that gap.
Used well, and in partnership with Marketing Procurement, it becomes one of the most valuable tools available to a CMO, not only for controlling costs, but for proving impact and building the business case for the investment that growth actually requires.
The Budget Reality Facing CMOs
The numbers tell a clear story. CMOs are expected to drive growth, defend and grow market share, build brand awareness, and generate pipeline, all while working with a shrinking share of revenue to do it.
It is very much a case of doing more with less, as 71% of CMOs believe their budgets are not enough to deliver on their strategies. There is an art to finding the balance that CMOs are looking to find between getting more from their agencies while leaving room for creativity, experimentation, and growth. They need all of this, whilst leaving room in the budget, to find new ways of capturing customer attention, exploring new markets and opportunities.
Data earns its place as a core CMO tool. Rather than treating budget constraints as a reason to cut spend indiscriminately, benchmarking data allows CMOs to see precisely where investment is driving growth, where agency fees are overweight, and where staffing plans are out of sync with the work itself. Decisions can be made with confidence rather than assumption. Data also gives CMOs the evidence needed to make the case for additional investment where there is genuine opportunity.
Proving Financial Impact in the Language of the Board
Budget pressure is only part of the picture. 64% of CMOs cite demonstrating Marketing’s financial impact as their single biggest challenge, and that number has been climbing for years. The underlying problem is a lack of the right measurement tools and, importantly, the right presentation of the data.
Many CMOs report performance in terms of campaign metrics such as impressions, click-through rates, and engagement. But the C-suite is thinking of revenue, market share, and return on investment.
The mismatch matters enormously. When Marketing communicates in its own language rather than the language of the business, it becomes very difficult for the rest of the leadership team to see how spend translates into growth.
Marketing Procurement data helps close this gap, connecting Marketing spend to business outcomes that finance and the board understand and trust. CMOs can use benchmarking data to demonstrate cost efficiency against market norms and the direct link between spend and revenue growth.
The data identifies the agency partnerships that are delivering value, and those that are falling short, allowing the CMO to pivot and allocate budget, not just to the channels that are delivering the best results, but also to the agencies that are producing the work.
It is not simply a reporting exercise. They need to collaborate with their Procurement colleagues to successfully translate their results in ways that engage the business.
The Shrinking CMO Seat
The consequences of this translation gap are already visible. In 2025, less than 49% of Fortune 500 Marketing heads held the CMO title, down from 55% a year earlier (Fortune, The New CMO Playbook). The role itself is being restructured, and in many cases diminished, across some of the largest companies in the world.
The root cause is closely tied to the translation problem. When Marketing consistently reports in Marketing language rather than business language, it trains the C-suite to see Marketing as a cost center rather than a growth driver. This makes fluency in ROI, growth, and market share not just useful for CMOs, but essential.
What Marketing Benchmarking Really Offers CMOs
Marketing benchmarking is often framed in purely financial terms, but its value extends well beyond cost control. When CMOs have access to rich, comparative data across agencies, regions, and markets, they gain a foundation for stronger planning, sharper decision making, and a credible, board-ready account of how Marketing spend drives growth.
Given the volume of data now available, CMOs can use benchmarking platforms to bring together multiple data points over time, building a clearer and more transparent picture of agency performance and business impact. This is not about reducing agency spend for its own sake. Applied well, Marketing benchmarking is about using data to demonstrate value, direct spend toward the initiatives most likely to move the needle, and build a stronger case for the budget Marketing genuinely needs.
Turning Data Into Growth, Market Share, and Brand Awareness
One of the more significant benefits of Marketing Procurement data is that it supports growth rather than constraining it. When a CMO has clear visibility into how each part of a campaign is performing against expectations, and against the market, it becomes far easier to identify where budget could be redirected toward the initiatives most likely to drive growth, defend market share, or build brand awareness.
Rather than treating benchmarking purely as a cost control exercise, effective CMOs use it to build the case for reinvestment. If a particular channel or market is underperforming relative to spend, that budget can be redirected toward areas that are delivering results, or toward considered experimentation that might not otherwise have been possible. Benchmarking data gives CMOs a defensible, board-ready basis for these decisions, because the reasoning can be shown, measured, and tracked over time.
The approach becomes particularly valuable when campaigns run across multiple regions or countries. Understanding the realistic cost of running a campaign in a new market, and what a fair rate looks like with local agencies, gives CMOs a reliable benchmark for planning expansion with confidence, and for making the growth case to the board in terms it will recognize.
Why Transparency Is the Real Prize
At the heart of Marketing benchmarking is transparency, and this is where the relationship between CMOs and their agencies comes into sharper focus. Many brands still lack full visibility into their total Marketing spend. Research from the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) found that less than half of brands have full visibility into their total Marketing spending, and only 33% address around 80 to 100% of it. The same report found that visibility into high-quality, multi-dimensional spend data is a key enabler for unlocking opportunity, underlining how much this gap can undermine both trust and results.
Budget size is not usually the deciding factor in achieving this transparency. Real value comes down to insight, visibility, and having systems in place to leverage data and identify which agencies are delivering against their mandates, and which are not.
The strongest brand-agency relationships tend to be the ones where transparency is treated as a shared asset rather than a point of tension. When an agency is willing to share detailed, granular data about costs and deliverables, it changes the nature of the relationship. Both sides can move from a conversation about what was spent to a more productive one about what that spend achieved, and how it contributed to growth.
For CMOs, this means expecting a higher standard of data from agency partners, not as a means of scrutiny for its own sake, but as a way of ensuring that spend is genuinely aligned with value, and that this value can be clearly demonstrated to the wider business.
Why Marketing Procurement Is the CMO’s Natural Ally
CMOs need Marketing Procurement to help demonstrate the ROI of Marketing spend, the value it has added, and the growth opportunities that can still be funded through smarter budget allocation. Marketing Procurement teams bring rigor, market knowledge, and negotiation expertise that complement the strategic and growth priorities of the CMO, and they are well positioned to help translate agency spend into the financial language the board expects.
CMOs get the best results when they view Marketing Procurement not as a function focused solely on cost reduction, but as a collaborative strategic partner that can apply benchmarking data effectively, both to control cost and to build the evidence base for growth. Marketing Procurement teams typically have the deepest understanding of agency remuneration, staffing models, and market norms across regions. Involving them in conversations early, rather than after decisions have already been made, helps budget work even harder and smarter.
A strong CMO and Marketing Procurement partnership tends to focus on a few key areas.
Agreeing on what a deliverable actually means. Ambiguity is often where budgets quietly erode. When CMOs and Marketing Procurement work together to define deliverables clearly, including quantities, types, and specifications, everyone involved, including the agency, works from the same understanding. This simple step prevents a significant amount of scope creep before it begins, and preserves budget that can instead fund growth initiatives.
Reviewing staffing and resourcing against value. Marketing Procurement teams are well placed to benchmark agency staffing plans against market norms, verifying that seniority levels and team composition genuinely reflect the value being delivered. CMOs benefit from asking questions about staffing allocation, not out of suspicion, but out of a legitimate interest in understanding who is doing the work, why, and how it connects to business outcomes.
Tracking performance against agreed goals. Benchmarking is not a one time exercise. The most effective CMO and Marketing Procurement partnerships establish a regular cadence of agency evaluations, reviewing agency hours, deliverables, and outcomes against the KPIs agreed at the outset, including growth, market share, and brand awareness targets, not just campaign metrics. When discrepancies arise, open communication keeps the relationship constructive and focused on solutions.
Building Stronger Agency Relationships Through Data
The CMOs who extract the most value from Marketing Procurement benchmark data tend to be the ones who use it to build stronger, more collaborative agency relationships. When data informs honest, well grounded conversations, agencies welcome the clarity. It reduces guesswork, eases friction around budget discussions, and establishes a shared understanding of what good performance looks like.
Paired with a genuine partnership with Marketing Procurement, benchmarking data becomes far more than a reporting tool. It becomes the evidence base CMOs need to defend their budgets and protect their seat at the table, positioning their teams, agencies, and businesses to do their best work.
Making Benchmarking Part of the Everyday Rhythm
Perhaps the most important shift for CMOs is recognizing that Marketing benchmark data works best as part of an ongoing discipline rather than an occasional audit. Building it into all planning cycles, quarterly reviews, and agency check-ins keeps insights current and allows decisions to be updated proactively, rather than reactively after a budget has already been spent. It also informs the growth story presented to the board in the language they respond to.
Embedded this way, Marketing Procurement becomes part of how the CMO plans campaigns, evaluates agencies, and allocates budget across the year. That kind of sustained collaboration tends to surface opportunities earlier, whether that means consolidating agency spend, renegotiating a rate that has drifted from market norms, or reinvesting savings into the initiatives that matter most.
The brands that gain the most from Marketing benchmark data are the ones with the clearest visibility into how their budget is actually being used, and with the strongest discipline around turning that visibility into data the board can trust.
