CMOs are putting more than 15% of their marketing budgets into Al. But 70% say their own marketing processes aren't ready for it.
Where Does Your Next Marketing Dollar Go?
Before you spend your next marketing dollar on Al, look at what Gartner found when it asked 401 CMOs about their budgets this year. They are putting more than 15 percent of the marketing budget into Al, and 70 percent of them say their own processes aren't ready for it
My guest on this episode of The AI Marketing Companion has an explanation for that gap. Marie Bahl is the CMO of Uptempo, whose software helps marketing teams at companies like IBM and IKEA plan and track every dollar they spend. She has marketed enterprise software for 30 years, and she writes for both CMOs and CFOs.
Who Wires Together Every Marketing Dollar?
A quick primer first. A point solution is software built to do one job: send email, run webinars, score leads, report attribution. Marie counts more than 15,000 of them sold to marketers. A large team might run 50, each bought at a different time by a different person, and few of them share numbers. In finance or HR, IT or a consulting firm connects the systems. In marketing, that wiring job landed on the CMO.
Marie's description of the result:
"We've allowed this crazy patchwork quilt of solutions to ineffectively represent us, and what happens in the mix is we lose credibility."
Her one-line summary of the job today: "The CMO job today is mostly defensive. We're playing defense instead of offense."
Marketing Is a Business, So Defend the Marketing Dollar Like One
Marie argues that marketing is a business inside the business. Marketers build the market, and they create a series of products that deliver that market on behalf of what the company sells. Running it that way means trading impressions and clicks for measures a CFO already uses.
She told me the story of IBM seeing its entire marketing budget in one view for the first time. The Kentucky Derby sponsorship couldn't justify itself next to everything else on the page, so IBM walked away from it. Could your biggest line item survive that same view?
Play Along: Keep, Kill, or Hand It Back
I asked Marie to sort five tasks that sit on a typical CMO's desk:
Choosing and wiring the marketing software
Reconciling the budget with finance
Buying AI tools for the team
Cleaning customer data
Building the attribution report for the board
Sort them for your own desk before you listen. Then hear which one Marie still owns herself, and the sentence she thinks every marketing leader should say to their CIO this week.
Her challenge to all of us: "It's time to stop and ask for the underpinning that you need in order to be credible on behalf of your business."
[Listen to the full episode]
Hear Marie out, then decide where your next marketing dollar goes.
