Data from February and March of this year shows that even with stabilized marketing budgets, actual marketing spending has mired at a level that is insufficient to execute planned marketing strategies for 2025. With a looming recession and potential resulting budget cuts, this is not good news for CMOs. 

Additional findings from The Gartner 2025 CMO Spend Survey include:

• Nearly 60% of CMOs surveyed said their budget to achieve their 2025 strategies was insufficient.
• CMOs are striving to do more with less, including using AI and other technology.
  • CMOs said that genAI has helped improve time efficiency (49%) and bring down costs (40%) and has increased their capability to produce more content and take on more business (27%).
  • GenAI has allowed organizations to keep more creative and strategy building work inhouse.
  • 39% of CMOs said that productivity gains with genAI will lead to their saving money by cutting the work force.
• 30.6% of marketing budgets is going to paid media, but with media price inflation, the effectiveness of those efforts is less.