Why marketers can't defend their budget to the CFO and Exco.
Picture this:
The boardroom is packed for the Q2 review session. It’s finally marketing’s turn to present and you are confident after preparing with the team for two weeks. The agencies have given their data and reports; the late nights are about to pay off!
You breeze through the polished presentation, feeling like Steve Jobs releasing the latest iPhone. You showcase the campaigns, the creative work, the media spend, the influencer engagement, the performance per channel and the campaign results.
It’s truly amazing what marketing and the agency partners have pulled off in just three months!
The presentation ends with a “Thank you” slide and you wait for the agenda to move to the next business unit, but then from the corner of your eye the CFO shuffles in their seat and says “So, we spent R5m… what did we get?”
You think to yourself… “Were you not listening? I just told you, I showed you all the results, what do you mean?”
The room waits in silence, everyone staring at you. You think through your deck, all the information you have used to prepare, all the dashboards you have, how will you show that you and your team have gone above and beyond to position this business for growth? Which one will be the Excalibur that will finally make the CFO understand what you do every day?
What is the answer? Is there an answer?
Chief marketing officers are drowning in data, yet they cannot tell shareholders one concise, end-to-end business performance story.
Is marketing taking a hard look in the mirror?
I have sat in these rooms countless times. Working with more than 50 leading brands in South Africa and the world, this scenario plays out far more often than we speak about. It is so familiar and yet we act like it cannot be solved.
We say “No one understands marketing, they will never get our craft.”
Marketers in 2026 need to realise that it is not that business doesn’t get marketing, it is marketing that does not speak concisely to business. It’s time we look at ourselves and start answering the CFO and CEO with confidence and numbers… and the good news is that you are halfway there already.
How to speak the language of the business in marketing:
Charlie Munger's favourite mental model, borrowed from the mathematician Carl Jacobi, was simple:
“Invert… Always invert.”
This line is the mantra of Redwood Analytics.
Marketers need to start with business objectives and then plan their activities to produce marketing data that tells the true story of business performance.
As an industry we need to produce Objective Based Reporting (OBR) because the marketing channels we use do not report on business objectives, they report on themselves and how they performed in isolation.
We need to stop planning campaigns and budget by channels. Instead, understand the objectives marketing must achieve for the business, then plan and measure against those objectives.
Objective based planning means you are channel agnostic: budget follows objectives. Not channel allocation.
- You do not buy YouTube, Television or Out of Home by media channel, you buy them on “awareness”.
- You do not buy Meta Ads, TikTok Ads and Influencer marketing by “social channel”, you buy them on “engagement”.
- You do not buy Google Search ads, Meta Lead generation ads or PMAX by media channel, you buy them on “intent/ leads”.
The shift is subtle, but we have found that this frames the different jobs to be done for the business and the different roles of media and advertising and how they impact wider marketing. It also aligns expectations of the business and starts the education that not all objectives are measured the same way.
Objective based reporting changes budget planning and creates honest reports
From: What did we spend on Facebook and what did we get?
To: How did we achieve the objectives across our channels?
“This article is not a direct leads and sales strategy for Redwood Analytics, its primary purpose is awareness, that is what it should and will be measured on.”
If you really want to ask the hard questions in the mirror, start with these three:
- Can we classify all our marketing channels and partners by objective?
- Can we say how much we have spent by each objective… not by channel?
- Can we ladder our objective based spend to this year’s business objectives?
If your team can't answer all three, you don’t have a capability gap, you have a reporting model gap. Redwood Analytics runs marketing planning and reporting audits and implements Objective Based Reporting so that next quarter, in that same boardroom, you answer the CFO's question before it's asked.
Remember: “Invert…. Always Invert”
