Eimear Colleran.
Eimear Colleran, Head of Marketing, Prophet
No, we're not all wearing RM Williams boots and North Face vests. But if you've noticed your last few marketing meetings sounding suspiciously like finance meetings, you're not imagining it…
Somewhere along the way, the job changed. Five years ago, the question every CMO prepared for was, "Did the campaign work?" Today it's, "Should we spend this money at all?" And that’s not a marketing question. It's a finance question.
There was a time when marketing meetings were about campaign ideas, customer insights and whether the logo should be 12% bigger or a tinge more red. Now they're about investment scenarios, commercial risk and whether we're confident enough to commit another $1.45 million.
Somewhere, a CFO is reading this thinking, "finnnnnaaalllllllyyyyyyyyy!!!"
For years, marketing was judged on its ability to explain what had already happened. We launched campaigns, waited for the dashboards, reviewed attribution reports, commissioned Marketing Mix Models and told the business which channels had worked.
Or, if we're honest, built a 47-slide deck explaining why the campaign definitely wasn't really our fault.
The budget had already been spent. The decisions had already been made. Our job was to explain the past. Today, that's no longer enough.
Marketing has quietly become one of the largest discretionary investments in many organisations. Tens, sometimes hundreds, of millions of dollars are committed every year, often in an environment where consumer confidence shifts overnight, competitors change strategy without warning and AI is reshaping how people discover brands and buy products.
The board isn't asking you for another report. It isn't asking for another dashboard with a slightly different shade of green. It's asking you for confidence.
The CFO doesn't really care whether Meta outperformed Search last quarter. They want to know what happens if consumer confidence drops. If inflation rises. If a competitor doubles its share of voice. If the business shifts another $1.7 million into retail media, or drops its price by 8.5%.
Those aren't reporting questions. They're investment questions. And that's the biggest shift happening in marketing right now.
We've spent years trying to earn a seat at the executive table. Now we’ve got it. It just turns out nobody wants to spend the meeting debating the Christmas campaign anymore. It's about capital allocation.
The irony is that almost every other function already rehearses its biggest decisions. Finance models investment scenarios before spending money. Operations forecasts demand before expanding capacity. Supply chains simulate disruption before it happens.
Gary in Operations isn’t saying, "Let's build the warehouse first and see how it goes." Nor is Tina in HR saying “Let’s hire 30 people and then we can see if we need them.”
Marketing is one of the few functions that's been expected to spend first and learn later.
We spend the money. Launch the campaign. Cross our fingers. Then spend the next quarter trying to explain why the numbers don't quite match the forecast.
That made sense when measurement was slow and media was relatively predictable. It makes much less sense when marketing budgets rival major business investments. Especially when the customer journey has never been harder to predict.
Consumers don't move neatly from awareness to consideration to purchase anymore. They bounce between TikTok, Reddit, ChatGPT, Search, retail media and conversations with friends.
Sometimes the most influential touchpoint isn't a campaign at all. It's a Reddit thread from two years ago or the group chat where someone asks, "Does this fake tan make you orange?"
Economic conditions shape demand and competitors influence outcomes. Channels amplify one another in ways no dashboard can fully explain. Yet our instinct is still to ask for another report explaining yesterday. Or worse, another dashboard to explain the last dashboard.
Yesterday isn't the problem. Tomorrow is.
The marketers becoming most valuable inside organisations aren't necessarily the best storytellers or the most creative people in the room. They're the ones who help reduce uncertainty before a decision gets made. They're becoming commercial advisers. Not because creativity matters less, but because commercial confidence matters more.
Marketing hasn't become finance. You still don't need to know what EBITDA stands for, own a Patagonia or North Face vest or suddenly develop strong opinions on interest rates.
But you do need to think a little more like an investor than a reporter. That's a profound shift. And it might just be the biggest change our industry has seen in years.