Marketing now faces P&L-level accountability

Has your operating model caught up?

ISG helps CMOs reduce marketing costs and improve commercial performance through market benchmarks, operating model clarity, technology and provider leverage, plus disciplined value governance.

Talk to an ISG Advisor

Marketing must show up on the revenue growth ledger

Every CEO, CFO and board today expects marketing to demonstrate its direct contribution to revenue, profitability and growth. Brand, customer engagement and demand generation remain on the marketing agenda, but the CMOs role is consequently evolving to a growth architect where marketing investment must translate to commercial outcomes and business growth.

At the same time, AI, martech, agency ecosystems, talent and service providers are creating a more complex marketing estate. Investment has grown faster than the governance needed to connect activity to outcomes. AI can increase speed and capacity but without changes to the core operating model, that capacity is often absorbed into more activity rather than converted into business value.

Where marketing value is lost:

Investment
Spending without defined and measured business outcomes.
Business Value
Marketing's direct impact is not visible on the enterprise revenue ledger.
AI & Operating Model
Operating models must change amidst AI disruption.

Martech & Agencies
New ecosystems are required on performance metrics vs tactics.
Value Governance
Outcomes must be governed to achieve value.

ISG Marketing Advisory helps CMOs turn pressure into action. We benchmark marketing investment and performance, redesign operating models, optimize costs across the martech and supplier ecosystem and establish governance that sustains efficiency gains and translates them into measurable growth and ROI.

JUMP TO ISG MARKETING ADVISORY

ISG CMO AI VALUE STUDY

AI ambition is moving faster than marketing's ability to capture value

AI is creating more capacity across marketing, but that capacity is not yet translating into the growth, savings and profit leaders expect.

The opportunity now is to redesign the work, align suppliers and hold teams accountable for turning AI-enabled performance into measurable ROI.

Source: ISG AI Value Study, 2026

ISG Marketing Advisory

Marketing leaders need financial accountability across every investment, from how it is deployed and performs to the business value it delivers.

This requires more than a martech assessment or agency review. It demands an enterprise approach that connects financial accountability, AI-enabled work design, ecosystem choices and disciplined value governance.

ISG brings independent, data-led advisory to the marketing function. We help leaders reset the baseline, design the operating model, optimize the ecosystem and assure value.

Reset

Marketing Growth Ledger

Benchmark spend and performance against the market. Establish a defensible baseline and link investment to outcomes and revenue.

Design

AI-Enabled Operating Model

Redesign ways of working. Orchestrate human and AI workflows. Assess talent, controls and the operating model.

Optimize

Martech & Provider Ecosystem

Rationalize the stack and roster to remove duplicate spend. Renegotiate rates, statements of work and service levels against market price benchmarks. Shift measures from tactics to performance.

Assure

Value Realization & Governance

Create executive scorecards and KPIs. Track benefits and risk. Govern reinvestment decisions.

Client Story

Delivering marketing cost savings for a global beauty powerhouse

45%

Reduction in the cost of delivering marketing services for a global cosmetics and beauty leader.

As part of a broader enterprise transformation, ISG restructured the company’s global provider environment, strengthened commercial terms and accountability and established performance governance across the marketing estate.

The work lowered the cost of delivering marketing services and released capacity that could be redirected toward higher-value growth priorities. The governance layer is what keeps the savings in place after the transition ends.

Client Story

Managing Billions in Retail Sales & Marketing Support Program Spend for a Global Automotive Leader

For more than 15 years, ISG has helped a leading global automotive manufacturer improve performance across its marketing, retail sales and loyalty operations. ISG managed billions of dollars in program spend and thousands of commercial agreements, strengthening governance, reducing risk and maximizing investment value.

From strategy through execution, ISG supported complex initiatives including martech implementations, CRM and loyalty migrations, product recalls and enterprise transformations. In addition to delivering high-volume, high-quality video, learning and live-broadcast content, ISG’s deep marketing expertise and scalable delivery capabilities continue to help the client navigate change, move faster, and bring critical initiatives to market successfully.

Why Choose ISG

Independent

ISG does not deliver marketing execution or sell platforms. Our recommendations are provider agnostic and built around the enterprise outcome.

Market Backed

ISG brings more than 10 million data points and 285,000 contracts to benchmark sourcing and provider decisions.

Enterprise Scale

ISG has proven experience across 75 of the Fortune 100 and influences $200B in technology decisions every year.

THE NEXT STEP

Marketing Value Assessment

Learn how ISG’s Marketing Value Assessment benchmarks your marketing spend and performance against the market, identifies gaps and quantifies savings opportunities.

In four to six weeks, you will receive a tailored, actionable roadmap for capturing measurable value.

Featured Insights

ARTICLE

The AI Productivity Trap: Why Faster Marketing Does Not Guarantee Value

READ THE ARTICLE

VIDEO

The CMO as Growth Architect: Scaling AI Value, Responsibly

WATCH THE VIDEO

Meet Our Team

Kaveri Camire

Partner, ISG Marketing Advisory

Robert Stapleton

Partner

Karen Collyer

Global Lead

Himanshu Saini

Consulting Manager

Vishal Ravibhai

Consultant

Make Every Marketing Dollar Work Harder

Talk to an ISG advisor about where your marketing investment is going, how it compares to the market, and what it would take to connect it to business outcomes.

TALK TO AN ISG ADVISOR

Frequently Asked Questions

How do you prove marketing’s contribution to revenue and profit?

Start by separating what marketing spends from what that spend produces, then hold both in the same measurement frame. That means a baseline of marketing investment and cost to serve, a peer comparison that shows whether the spend is high or low for the scale of the work, and a defined set of financial and operational measures agreed with finance before the work starts. Governance is what makes it stick, because a measurement framework without review cadence and named accountability stops being maintained within two quarters.

Why hasn’t AI reduced marketing costs?

Because time saved is not the same as money saved, and most marketing organizations have no mechanism to convert capacity into output. Just because the work is now done faster does not mean it has generated added value for the business. More than a third of marketing leaders say time saved through AI has not translated into savings or value for the enterprise, and profit growth sits 24 points below expectations, the widest gap of any measure marketing tracks. Capacity freed by automation gets reabsorbed into more activity unless the operating model, the provider contracts and the headcount plan are redesigned to release it.

How can CMOs rationalize a complex martech stack for AI?

AI makes martech complexity more urgent. Many marketing teams are managing overlapping platforms, fragmented data and supplier relationships that were not designed to work together. Adding more tools can deepen the problem. CMOs should rationalize the stack around the capabilities and outcomes that matter most by identifying duplicate or underused technology, improving data flows across core platforms and ensuring each supplier has a clear role in delivering value. ISG helps marketing leaders assess the martech and supplier ecosystem, strengthen vendor terms and build a simpler, more connected stack that supports AI, better decisions and measurable ROI.

How do you decide what marketing work to keep in-house and what to outsource?

Classify each activity by the judgment it demands and how repeatable it is, then match it to a delivery structure. Strategic direction and differentiating IP stay with the enterprise. Planning and design work is co-designed with partners. Repeatable delivery moves to managed services governed by service levels. Scarce niche capability, such as media buying or regulatory expertise, goes to specialists. Decomposing marketing this way gives every activity an ownership recommendation you can defend to the business rather than one based on how the team happens to be organized today.

How is marketing advisory different from a marketing agency or consultancy?

A marketing advisory assesses how marketing investment, work and providers perform. An agency delivers marketing execution, which means it has a commercial interest in the scope of work it is being asked to assess. ISG is independent of the providers under review and does not deliver marketing execution, so the recommendation carries no self-benefit. The work also draws on contract and performance data across the provider market rather than on experience with a single roster.

How much can enterprises save on marketing operations?

Savings depend on where the inefficiency sits, and the largest reductions usually come from the provider and agency estate. In one recent engagement, a global cosmetics and beauty leader reduced the cost of delivering marketing services by 45% as part of a broader enterprise transformation, through restructuring the global provider environment, strengthening commercial terms and accountability, and establishing performance governance. A benchmark against peers is what sizes the opportunity before any commitment is made.

What is ISG Marketing Advisory?

ISG Marketing Advisory is an advisory service for enterprise marketing leaders that connects marketing investment to business outcomes. It brings ISG's benchmarking, operating model transformation, sourcing, provider strategy and governance capability to the marketing function, covering how marketing spend compares to peers, how the operating model is structured around how work that gets done, workflows, talent, overall strategy, how the technology and agency ecosystem performs focused on outcome-based metrics vs tactics, and how value is measured and sustained.

Sourcing & Advisory

Industries

Platforms

Governance

Events