Marketing Leadership
Proving marketing's value to finance is one of the most persistent challenges in the profession — and most marketers approach it with the wrong tools. The answer is not better dashboards or more attribution models. It is speaking the language of business: revenue, profit, market share, and pricing power.
Most marketing teams report marketing metrics to finance: impressions, reach, click-through rates, cost per acquisition, social engagement. Finance does not speak this language and has no framework for evaluating whether these numbers are good or bad relative to the business outcomes they care about. The result is a credibility gap that makes it easy to cut marketing budgets in tough times — not because finance is hostile to marketing, but because marketing has failed to demonstrate its value in terms finance can use.
Tom Roach — VP Brand Strategy at Jellyfish — argues that the solution is simple but requires discipline: stop reporting marketing metrics to finance and start reporting business outcomes. Not reach and impressions. Revenue contribution, market share trajectory, pricing power, and customer acquisition cost over time. These are numbers that finance already cares about. The marketing team's job is to demonstrate its contribution to them.
Grace Kite — founder of Magic Numbers and one of the most respected econometricians working in marketing — has explained on That's What I Call Marketing how econometric modelling (also called Marketing Mix Modelling) is the most rigorous tool available for quantifying marketing's revenue contribution. The approach uses statistical analysis to decompose sales data into the contributions of different factors — media activity, promotions, distribution changes, economic context, seasonality, and underlying brand strength.
The output is a number finance can act on: this marketing investment generated this amount of revenue. Done well, it also shows what happens when investment is cut — the revenue that disappears when brand and media spend are reduced. Grace Kite's practical advice: frame the conversation not as “here is what marketing returned last year” but “here is what you will lose next year if you cut the budget.” That reframe shifts the conversation from justification to risk management.
Econometric modelling has limitations worth acknowledging. It tends to undervalue long-term brand effects because those effects are slow and hard to isolate statistically. And it requires sufficient data quality and analytical resource to produce reliable results. Grace Kite cautions against models that give false precision — a number that looks rigorous but is based on poor data or flawed assumptions is worse than no model at all.
For organisations without the data or resource for econometric modelling, Peter Field's share of voice framework is the most immediately actionable alternative. The principle, drawn from decades of IPA data, is this: brands that maintain a share of advertising voice above their current share of market tend to grow. Brands that fall below tend to decline. The gap between the two — Excess Share of Voice, or ESOV — is a useful predictor of future market share change.
Translating this into a CFO conversation requires one piece of competitive intelligence — your estimated share of voice relative to key competitors — and one internal metric — your current market share. If your share of voice is below your market share, the business is effectively mining the brand equity it has built over time. That is a risk conversation, not a marketing conversation, and finance understands risk.
Thomas Barta — co-author of The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader, whose research covers thousands of senior marketers globally — has found that the most effective CMOs are not necessarily the most analytically rigorous. They are the most commercially credible. Commercial credibility means being seen by finance and the CEO as someone who understands how the business makes money — not someone who is advocating for the marketing budget.
Building that credibility is as much a relationship challenge as an analytical one. Thomas Barta's research consistently shows that CMOs who win influence in the boardroom spend time understanding the P&L, speaking the language of business outcomes, and building trust with their CEO and CFO over time — so that when the evidence for marketing investment is presented, there is already a foundation of credibility to build on.
Paul Dervan — former CMO of the Irish National Lottery and author of Run With Foxes — has written about the same dynamic from the practitioner side. Marketers who are taken seriously in the boardroom are those who demonstrate genuine understanding of how the business makes money. The marketing metrics come second. The commercial fluency comes first.
Matt Herbert — co-founder of Tracksuit, which builds always-on brand tracking at accessible price points — has argued that the reason most organisations cannot prove brand effects is that they never invested in measuring them. Brand tracking that is continuous, affordable, and built into standard business reporting makes brand health metrics as visible as sales metrics. Prompted and unprompted awareness, consideration, preference, and distinctive asset recognition — tracked consistently over time — make it possible to show the direction of travel and connect brand investment to brand outcomes, even when the revenue connection takes longer to materialise.
Go Deeper
Grace Kite, Tom Roach, Thomas Barta, Peter Field, and Matt Herbert have all discussed how to prove marketing value in depth on That's What I Call Marketing.
Grace Kite, Thomas Barta, Tom Roach and more — on That's What I Call Marketing.