There's a conversation that happens in companies all the time. Marketing says it wants to be taken more seriously, have a seat at the table, and be treated as a strategic partner instead of an internal vendor.
The business agrees! Yes, we'd like marketing to be more integrated. Yes, we want you in the room. Just show us the numbers, connect your work to business objectives, and help us understand what we're getting for what we're spending.
And then marketing says: but did you see that cool campaign we did?
Marketing continues to ask for trust it hasn’t earned, assuming it can equate visibility with value.
At first I thought maybe this aversion to proving our value was just marketers being divas — demanding we be appreciated for our artistry and our creativity and our passion above all else — but the data didn’t back that up.
The reality is actually even more embarrassing. We don’t know how.
Marketing, as a discipline, is genuinely ill-equipped to show if we’re delivering what the business is asking for, and I’m not sure we even realize it.
A 2021 report from Allocadia (now Uptempo) found that “47% of surveyed marketing leaders say they aren’t able to calculate ROI.” Nearly all companies (96%) use ROI to assess the effectiveness of marketing, yet half of marketers can’t calculate it.
There was also a minor snafu with the 2026 Cannes Lions after the institution implemented some stricter “proof of impact” requirements. Submissions went from nearly 27,000 the year before down to just over 20,000.
Part of why we’re unable to calculate ROI is apparently due to more operational factors: lack of confidence in the data, information being managed across multiple spreadsheets, the PO process being complicated and confusing, and some marketers not having access to relevant information. So “can’t calculate it” or an inability to submit proof of impact often has more to do with internal circumstance rather than understanding basic math.
But those operational issues all seem like hurdles that can be cleared, right?
The more concerning detail was later in the report — and is more aligned with my lived experience — that “43% of marketing leaders report that they don’t have alignment with finance and sales on ROI.” Put another way, “return on investment” means different things to different departments.
A 2025 McKinsey study similarly found that “only 30 percent of CMOs believe there is a clearly defined view on what constitutes marketing ROI.” I would say there also isn’t a clearly defined view within the marketing discipline of the unique value we bring to an organization, let alone our ability to measure it.
So what, specifically, is the company getting in return for its marketing investment? If marketing’s answer is social media impressions, viral moments, and creative awards, that’s a pretty lousy return; it’s not clear how, or if, any of that is connected to revenue. Yet marketers offer these as key performance indicators, and the business remains skeptical of the discipline’s value, and marketers continue to tell themselves that no one understands what marketing does.
Fortunately, this is also a hurdle that can be cleared; it just requires that marketing get alignment with finance, sales, and whomever else about how marketing uniquely supports actual business outcomes.
What does that process look like in practice? Norm de Greve, when he was GM’s chief marketing officer (he’s now the chief growth officer), had a lot of success after taking the reins in 2023. In 2025, he did an interview with McKinsey where he laid out much of his approach and reasons for success, including building a close partnership with the head of finance. The whole thing is worth reading, but here are some highlights:
“The ideal is a set of marketing activities that both build the brand and drive demand.“
“The marketer’s job is to drive growth. Creativity is a powerful lever for that, but on its own, it’s not enough. Marketers must align creative expression with business outcomes.“
“Another essential part of a growth mindset is separating tactics from strategy. When marketers jump straight into activations without a clear rationale, it often leads to fragmented execution and weak returns … For us, every brand has clear equity goals tied to growth. Those inform the tactics, not the other way around.”
“At the highest level, marketing should be measured by one thing: did it drive sales? Too often, that gets confused with return on ad spend, which is an efficiency metric, not a growth metric.”
What's absent from the whole interview is discussion of impressions, broad reach, and accolades. None of what he discusses is radical; it's disciplined. And it's the story of a marketing department that learned to speak the same language as the rest of the business — not one that talks about how the rest of the business doesn’t understand them or what they do.
Marketing ROI doesn't have to be a dollar amount — and frankly, demanding it be one is probably asking marketing to take credit for outcomes that require sales, product, finance, and operations to also do their jobs. Marketing's return on investment is increased brand awareness among an organization’s current and potential customers, delivering more demand and more qualified demand, and driving sales opportunities through qualified leads. It’s reaching the right audience, getting them to want the thing you’re offering, and then directing them to take action. I will concede those can be harder and/or more expensive metrics to measure (like having to pay for brand surveys) but it’s possible.
If your company’s attribution models also credit marketing with a percentage of revenue, that’s a great cherry on top but that’s not the foundation. Revenue is what happens when everyone does their job right, not just marketing.
Marketing’s seat at the proverbial table is available, and it has been for a while. The business isn't withholding it out of spite or institutional bias against marketing; it's withholding it because our answers haven’t been good enough.
This really resonated with me. Across marketing teams of different sizes and industries, I've consistently seen the challenge of tying marketing ROI to dollars. AI is only increasing the pressure to prove measurable impact.
I don’t know that I would consider it “basic math.” Companies under invest in the data architecture, infrastructure, and bench strength that is needed to engineer and operate the distributed cloud native, event-driven ecosystems that function as the bedrock of these metrics. Siloed orgs and splinter teams are also at odds with the non-linear, stochastic way in which the most valuable data (required to calculate these metrics) flows across an organization.
It’s not that Marketing doesn’t understand ROI or how to calculate it. It’s that the proximity to revenue makes it easier for Sales to “prove” their value.
I’ve increasingly lost faith in these pursuits after witnessing expensive multi-quarter projects get blown up by seemingly small design decisions on entirely different teams.