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 revenue, 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 deliver 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.
Some of this, apparently, is 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 any budget information. So “can’t calculate it” often has more to do with circumstance than understanding math.
But those 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.”
So let’s try to solve this. 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 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, awards, and viral moments. 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.
Marketing ROI doesn't have to be a dollar amount — and frankly, demanding that it be one is probably asking marketing to take credit for outcomes that require sales, product, and pricing to also do their jobs. Marketing's return on investment is building brand awareness among the right audience and generating qualified leads for sales. Attribution models that subsequently credit marketing with a percentage of revenue are fine as a bonus, but they're not the foundation. The real return is whether your marketing reached the right audience and made them want to know more. Revenue is what happens when everyone else does their job too.
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.
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