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For many CFOs, marketing remains one of the largest line items they’re expected to fund—and one of the hardest to understand. AI can help provide clarity, but if used poorly, it risks simply making marketing cheaper without making the business stronger.
How do finance and marketing leaders avoid that potential trap? In our recent research with the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), we found that companies that excel across execution, brand, and profitability delivered 79% higher total shareholder return than peers.
Finance functions face a critical choice. AI can simply improve efficiency in the near term, allowing organizations to reduce spending while maintaining output, or it can help fuel a shift toward long-term value creation, using evidence-based marketing to generate growth, strengthen the P&L, and build enterprise value. For CFOs, the question is how to help leverage AI to amplify value and how to collaborate with CMOs to position marketing as a stronger lever for sustained growth.
This isn’t just a technology decision. While efficiency-first approaches may deliver near-term margin relief, value-first strategies use AI to help strengthen brands, boost profits, and increase enterprise value—creating a fundamentally different growth trajectory.
Avoid assumptions and use evidence to evaluate marketing’s contribution to enterprise value
Inconsistent metrics, broad claims, and opaque attribution models have long been issues for CFOs who want to compare marketing to other capital investments. Our research with ANA shows that three interconnected elements—execution excellence, brand strength, and the marketing profit multiplier—form a value-creation flywheel.
When all three elements work together, returns can compound. For example, modest improvements in creative effectiveness can cascade through stronger pricing power, lower customer acquisition costs, and higher lifetime value, amplifying returns beyond the initial marketing investment. Execution helps build brand, brand strengthens margins and pricing power, and margin improvements translate into enterprise value.
All this provides CFOs with a more rigorous basis for financial stewardship. Marketing becomes measurable in financial terms, enabling direct connections between outcomes and revenue, margin, and total shareholder return.
This helps shift conversations from defending spend to boosting investment. It offers a more transparent, standardized framework for evaluating marketing performance within the broader capital allocation portfolio. It also provides the foundation for a different type of dialogue between finance and marketing—one centered on enterprise value, not just activity.
Build a C-suite alliance that aligns marketing investment with business growth
Even with strong evidence, many organizations struggle to translate marketing into financial impact. This isn’t because the data is lacking, but because ownership of growth is often fragmented. When finance, marketing, and strategy operate with different metrics and time horizons, marketing investments are evaluated as spend, not as sources of enterprise value.
As stewards of enterprise performance, CFOs are uniquely positioned to act as co-owners of growth economics, bringing discipline, transparency, and long-term perspective to how marketing investments are evaluated and scaled. In practice, this means treating marketing not as a functional expense to be aligned but as a governed portfolio of growth investments.
- Align on a “business growth algorithm,” a clear, unified formula that defines how growth happens, whether it’s through customer acquisition, retention, frequency of purchases, pricing power, product innovation, or market expansion. Marketing’s role should be explicit within that formula.
- Establish a portfolio of “golden metrics,” each tied to a lever in the growth algorithm. These should be intuitive, limited in number, and consistently communicated across the C-suite. They also should balance short- and long-term indicators and link directly to enterprise KPIs such as revenue growth, market share, and margin expansion.
- Embed marketing investment into capital allocation processes, which can help CFOs evaluate marketing with the same rigor as any other investment—supported by scenario planning and risk-adjusted returns.
When CFOs actively team with CMOs, they can strengthen the discipline, transparency, and trust needed for smarter decisions. This governance lens is essential for safeguarding long-term value drivers, such as brand and creative quality, that rarely survive short-term cost scrutiny but can materially influence shareholder value.
Treat AI as a growth catalyst, not just an efficiency play
Used effectively, AI can streamline production, accelerate insights, automate reporting, and reduce the resources required to create and deploy content. In our experience and research, these efficiency gains can range from 20% to 50%. But stopping at efficiency is a strategic risk. Organizations that use AI primarily to extract cost from marketing may temporarily boost margins while quietly eroding future demand.
Early cost savings may improve near-term margins, but if those savings permanently reduce marketing’s ability to create demand, build brand equity, or drive profitable growth, the long-term P&L impact could be negative. Several executives we interviewed in our research echoed the same caution: AI can enhance whatever it’s applied to. If marketing is underpowered and fragmented, AI may only amplify those weaknesses.
CFOs can help an organization unlock more value by reframing AI’s purpose and focusing on effectiveness. Opportunities include scaling creative quality and generating breakthrough ideas, predicting cultural and market shifts to inform strategy, and personalizing customer journeys in real time. There’s also potential to increase precision in targeting and measurement and to help identify new product opportunities or go-to-market pathways.
When AI-driven efficiency gains are reinvested into effectiveness—rather than used for short-term margin improvement—our analysis shows organizations can achieve more than twice the profitability of efficiency-only strategies.
Three moves CFOs can make to turn AI-driven marketing into enterprise value
Here’s how finance leaders can shift AI-enabled marketing from a cost-control exercise to a governed, evidence-based engine of growth.
In the AI era, the question is no longer whether marketing can be measured. It’s whether finance and marketing are willing to treat growth itself as a discipline—one powered by intelligence, governed by evidence, and owned by the C-suite.
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