Only 22% of marketers feel sure they can justify spend to the CFO

Twenty-two percent. That is the share of senior marketers who strongly feel they have the data to justify marketing's value to their CFO, according to a survey from Perion and Advertiser Perceptions that Marketing Dive's Sara Karlovitch reported in November 2025. The rest did not feel that strongly about it.

The report, titled Bridging the Divide: Solving Fragmentation Between Marketing and Finance, is now about ten months old. It is still one of the few public figures that puts a number on the marketing-finance confidence gap, and for a marketing operations lead who has to walk a media plan into a finance review, it is a useful reference point: most peers are not confident either.

Perion's own framing of the research is that marketers have made gains and still struggle. Erin McCallion, Perion's global CMO, told Marketing Dive that expectations from the C-suite keep rising and that the company wanted to pin down where the tension between the two roles sits and what keeps them aligned.

Who answered, and how much they control

The sample is small but senior. Marketing Dive reported 167 respondents in the U.S. and Canada, surveyed between Aug. 28 and Sept. 10, 2025, all of them senior decision makers at organizations spending at least $1 million a year on advertising. The majority were U.S.-based and 46% held a vice president title or higher.

Half made spending decisions with input from staff or management, 36% were sole decision makers and 14% decided as part of a committee or group, per Marketing Dive. So the 22% figure does not describe junior analysts guessing at what finance wants. It describes the people who sign, or shape, the media budget.

That matters for how the number gets used. A marketing team that measures itself on reach, impressions and campaign-level return has a population to compare against here, and the comparison is about confidence in front of finance, a different test than performance inside the ad platform.

Two definitions of growth in one budget meeting

The report's diagnosis is about vocabulary before it is about money. Both roles say they are focused on growth, Marketing Dive reported, but CMOs tend to mean revenue driven by strategic spending while CFOs tend to mean profitability and cost control. Same word, two ledgers.

McKinsey described the same split in a November 2013 article by Jean-Hugues Monier, Jonathan Gordon and Phil Ogren. Marketers arrive with brand awareness, TV impressions and share of voice, McKinsey wrote, while CFOs want capital investment estimates, net present values and a clear statement of trade-offs. The consultancy's second recommendation was to track marketing against measures that move shareholder value: cash flow, cost of capital, return on capital and operating margin.

McKinsey also flagged a problem inside marketing itself. CMOs often could not say what total spend was by product, market or strategic intent, or how much went to creative versus enabling technology, partly because regions filed the same expense under different categories; trade-fair spend might sit in short-term budget in one market and long-term brand budget in another. A CFO who asks for spend by market and gets three answers from three regions has not learned that marketing wastes money. She has learned that marketing has not yet agreed with itself.

Just 36% of CMOs had quantitatively proven the short-term impact of marketing spend, according to the 2013 CMO Survey as cited by McKinsey, and that figure dropped to 32% for long-term impact. McKinsey also noted that the previous year's survey showed 63% of projects did not use analytics to inform marketing decisions. Those questions are worded differently from the Perion survey, so the figures are not directly comparable, but they show the same shape of problem a dozen years apart.

What alignment has been worth, by consultancy estimate

There is a dollar case attached to fixing this, though it comes from advisory work rather than audited results. BCG, in a December 2020 article by Neal Rich, David Ratajczak, Ray Yu, Wei Han and Thomas Recchione, cited 2019 research with Facebook finding that strong CMO-CFO relationships can produce financial improvements of 20% to 40%.

McKinsey's 2013 estimate was that companies adopting an analytics-driven marketing ROI approach can free 10% to 20% of the marketing budget, either to reinvest or to return as profit. The examples it gave were plainer than the modeling implies. One marketing department cut 20% simply by benchmarking what it paid external agencies, according to McKinsey. A consumer packaged goods company that finally analyzed its costs found it was spending three times the industry benchmark on coupons, 50% more than benchmark on research, and using more than 50 different market research firms for similar tasks.

Neither figure comes with a breakdown of how the gains were produced, and the sources do not rule out that companies already run well also tend to have executives who get along. The safer reading is that these are the outer bounds of what a measurement project can plausibly claim, and that the agency benchmarking example is the cheapest first step in any of these documents. According to McKinsey, one marketing department saved 20% after simply benchmarking what it spent on external agencies. It required a comparison, not a model.

Fewer Fortune 500 CMOs, and a growth argument for keeping the seat

The stakes for the person on the marketing side are not abstract. Fortune's Sheryl Estrada reported in June 2025, citing Spencer Stuart, that the share of Fortune 500 companies with a CMO fell from 71% in 2023 to 66% in 2024.

Set against that is a McKinsey analysis, also reported by Fortune, of Fortune 500 executive teams using publicly available data: companies with a single customer- or growth-focused executive such as a CMO grew up to 2.3 times faster than companies that spread those responsibilities across several roles. McKinsey's recommendation was to put the CMO back at the center and align that person with the CFO. When everyone in the C-suite owns growth, Fortune summarized, often no one does.

The 2.3 figure is a correlation drawn from public data, and Fortune's summary does not address whether faster-growing companies are simply more likely to fund a dedicated growth executive. It is still a number a CMO can carry into a conversation about whether the seat should exist. Fortune pointed to Ulta Beauty CFO Paula Oyibo, who described the retailer's partnership with Beyoncé's Cécred hair care line as a natural fit, as an example of how marketing and partnerships can drive growth. Fortune also noted that e.l.f. Beauty CFO Mandy Fields believes in the power of collaboration.

The committee structure BCG keeps finding

BCG's prescription is organizational. The companies that resolve the gap, it wrote, manage marketing the way a private equity or venture manager runs a portfolio, with clear governance over who decides, transparency about the rules for approval, agreed funding standards and a consistent set of KPIs tied to business objectives, some sales-focused and some brand-centric, some short-term and some long.

In practice that means a marketing investment committee in which marketing, finance and other stakeholders review performance on a set cadence and decide future spend together, according to BCG. Both sides accept that not every bet pays off but the portfolio should return a net positive. Long-term investments are allowed, provided they also show near-term movement in a business KPI. And there is a standard procedure for starting small and scaling what works.

BCG's sharpest observation is about who checks the math. Finance typically has no role in assessing whether marketing's metrics are valid, it wrote, even though marketing's response models are often more advanced than the analytics used elsewhere in the company. The metrics are usually sound; the problem is that nobody outside marketing can see how they were derived, which gives everyone else a reason to doubt them. BCG described a consumer products company that had allocated budgets by historic precedent across categories, brands, markets and channels, ignoring its own analytics, until it moved to an agile cross-functional structure that put finance inside marketing execution and jointly defined campaign objectives and measurement methods. Marketing ROI improved significantly after that, per BCG.

For a marketing organization where finance sees the numbers once a year at budget time, the committee cadence is the one structural change these sources agree on. For an organization where finance already sits in the monthly review, the more useful test is BCG's: whether anyone outside marketing has signed off on how the metrics are built.

McKinsey published its five actions for CMO-CFO partnership in November 2013. Perion and Advertiser Perceptions fielded their survey in late summer 2025, almost twelve years later, and found fewer than one in four senior marketers strongly confident in the data they bring to finance. The question a CFO can put on the table at the next review is not how much marketing wants. It is who, outside marketing, agreed on how the results get counted.