This is the first of three articles based on interviews with senior marketers who took part in Creative Effectiveness Decoded: The Global CMO Survey.
There is a long-standing myth in marketing that Chief Financial Officers don’t value creative work. But the reality is far more nuanced: CFOs care deeply about business growth, while marketers often bring “art” metrics to a “finance” meeting.
According to Gain Theory’s Creative Effectiveness Decoded: The Global CMO Survey, 49% of senior marketing leaders admit they lack confidence when defending creative budgets to their CFO. In other words, almost half of marketing decision-makers cannot prove the commercial value of the most important driver of advertising effectiveness.
This disconnect isn’t necessarily a failure of leadership on either side. Finance teams naturally view investments through a rational, commercial lens, while marketing typically operates at the intersection of art and science. When marketers rely on subjective appeal or soft metrics to defend creative work, CFOs struggle to see its direct line to business growth.
According to the CMO of a global education organization: “[CFOs] need to understand how creative is a critical part for the development of any marketing program.”
But putting the burden on finance to do all the work isn’t realistic. Marketers need to bring data-informed evidence to help bridge the gap and prevent creative budget discussions from stalling at the outset.
Why and how to link creative to business outcomes
The CMO of a global technology company shares a clear example of what can happen when marketers fail to do this. He recalls a meeting where his marketing team pitched a creative budget increase to expand into a new market segment. When the CFO questioned the need to expand when core revenues were stable, the marketing team relied heavily on qualitative audience insights to support their case. Because they lacked predictive modeling to prove how the new creative strategy would drive incremental revenue, the pitch stalled.
“Fundamentally,” the Tech CMO says, “CMOs and CFOs are approaching the same problem through different lenses.” When marketers ground creative investment in financial metrics, however, the nature of the conversation shifts.
“Marketing leaders should frame creative investment in financial terms by linking it to a measurable outcome such as revenue, customer acquisition, lifetime value, or market share, rather than subjective creative quality,” explains the CMO of a global retail brand. “I focus on a small set of business metrics that the CFO cares about – ROI, CAC, revenue growth, customer lifetime value, and payback period – and clearly show how creative investment influences those outcomes.”
To do this, the retailer measures creative effectiveness using what the CMO calls “a balanced scorecard” with different metrics for brand and performance campaigns. Test and control is an approach that has worked particularly well, according to the CMO. But he noted that “attribution is never perfect” and “isolating creative’s true impact can be challenging.”
Demonstrating creative effectiveness has never been more crucial
The ability to prove commercial impact is essential for protecting existing spend in today’s economic climate. The Gain Theory survey revealed that 25% of marketers have already seen their creative budgets reduced in the last 12 to 24 months due to an inability to provide data-informed evidence of its effectiveness.
“Creative budgets are under increasing scrutiny,” confirms the Retail CMO. “With leadership expecting every investment to demonstrate measurable business value, better creative effectiveness data would strengthen the case for maintaining or increasing budgets by proving which creative investments drive incremental growth.”
The Tech CMO agreed: “Going forward, there will be substantial pressure on creative budgets and to reuse existing creatives or messaging. Under such circumstances, it will be critical for CMOs to have more creative effectiveness data which can act as their eyes and ears when deciding what to go into market with.”
Read the next article in our series
Speaking the CFO’s financial language is vital, but to make it happen organizations must establish a single, agreed-upon definition of creative effectiveness and foster a culture where creative, media, and analytics teams collaborate to track it. In Part 2 of our series, we explore how leading marketers are defining creative effectiveness, overcoming internal silos, and convincing creative teams to embrace analytical rigor.
Click here to read Alignment, Culture, and Collaboration: How to Build a Creative Effectiveness Engine.