Making the business case: talking to the CFO

A marketing plan competes for money with every other investment the business could make. The finance director asks the same questions of each: what will it return, when, how sure are we, and what happens if we do less? A business case answers those questions in finance's terms, without overstating what marketing can prove.

• The gap is real. A WFA and Ebiquity study found that only 14% of major marketers said marketing and finance agree on what "effectiveness" means¹⁶.
• The evidence exists. Les Binet and Peter Field's Marketing in the Era of Accountability (IPA, 2007) found that the intermediate measures most sensitive to marketing are poor predictors of business success^1, 2; The Long and the Short of It (IPA, 2013) set out the tension between short-term response and long-term brand building³.
• ROI is not one number. Revenue ratios, profit returns and incremental profit answer different questions, and reducing marketing to a single "silver metric" misleads⁷.
• Brands are assets, though accounting rules keep internally built brands off the balance sheet¹¹; valuation firms publish their methods^9, 10.
• Honesty is a strategy. Field experiments show how wide the uncertainty around advertising returns can be⁸; saying so builds credibility.

Budgets frame the conversation. Gartner's 2025 CMO Spend Survey of 402 CMOs and marketing leaders put average marketing budgets at 7.7% of company revenue for a second year, and 59% of CMOs said their budget was insufficient to execute their strategy¹³; Campaign noted that half reported budgets of 6% of revenue or less¹⁴. At that scale, the finance director will expect marketing to show its returns the way other functions do.

The relationship has long been uneven. In a 2007 ANA survey of 128 senior marketers, run with the MMA, 39% said they were cooperating fully with finance on ROI metrics, and only 55% said their marketing ROI goals were closely aligned with corporate goals²⁰. The WFA's 2023 report Creating a Global Culture of Marketing Effectiveness, produced with Ebiquity and the IPA from a survey of more than 300 marketers, named collaboration between marketing and finance as one of the areas where teamwork on effectiveness falls short¹⁵. The IPA's Building Bridges with Finance, based on interviews with leading marketers, argues that a stronger relationship with finance is a condition for evidence-based decisions¹⁷. See the role hub for the CMO.

Binet and Field's 2007 study of the IPA's databank of effectiveness cases was published by WARC with the IPA; WARC describes it as drawing on 880 campaigns². Its central warning was that intermediate measures, the ones most sensitive to marketing activity, are very poor predictors of business success, and that marketers often choose the wrong business metrics; it recommended several key performance indicators, clearly prioritised^1, 2. Their 2013 report The Long and the Short of It described a growing tension between short-term response activity and long-term brand building³. The authors later said it was largely ignored at first, before its ideas became influential⁴. Their later work, from Media in Focus (2017) to Effectiveness in Context (2018), is collected by the IPA⁵; Media in Focus challenged the industry to rethink how it measures efficiency and return on marketing investment⁶.

For a business case, the lesson is to show both horizons: what activation returns within the year, and what brand building is expected to return over several, with the balance that suits your category (see budgeting for IMC and the brand and activation split calculator).

The terms are used loosely, so define them in the case. ROAS (return on ad spend) is a platform metric. ROMI, return on marketing investment, can be computed on revenue or, more usefully, on profit. ROI in finance means profit returned per unit invested (see ROI). Two cautions matter most. Only incremental results count: what happened because of marketing, not what happened alongside it (see incrementality). And a ratio can mislead: maximising the ratio often means spending less, because the first money spent usually works hardest, while the business may earn more total profit by spending more at a lower ratio.

Tim Ambler and John Roberts of London Business School warned against the search for a single "silver metric" for marketing, whether ROI or a discounted cash flow measure such as customer lifetime value, because one index denies the multidimensional nature of the market; they also cautioned against judging past activity by forecasts of uncertain future rewards⁷.

An illustrative calculation, with invented round numbers: a campaign costs 100,000; a holdout test shows 300,000 of incremental revenue; the gross margin is 40%. Incremental gross profit is 120,000, so profit ROMI is (120,000 − 100,000) ÷ 100,000 = 20%, and incremental profit is 20,000. The same campaign could show a platform ROAS of 5 if the platform credited it with 500,000 of revenue that included sales that would have happened anyway. Both numbers are "true"; only one answers the CFO's question.

Accounting and valuation treat brands differently. Under IAS 38, internally generated brands, mastheads, publishing titles and customer lists are not recognised as intangible assets, because their cost cannot be told apart from the cost of developing the business as a whole¹¹; acquired brands can be recognised. Most of the value marketing builds is therefore invisible in the accounts, which is one reason finance discounts it.

Valuation firms publish their methods. Brand Finance uses royalty relief, one of the methods set out in ISO 10668: it estimates the royalty a business would pay to license its brand if it did not own it, uses a 0–100 Brand Strength Index to set the rate within a sector range, and discounts the resulting stream to a present value⁹. Interbrand's method combines financial analysis (the brand's economic profit), the role of the brand in purchase decisions, and brand strength assessed on ten factors¹⁰. The Marketing Accountability Standards Board's Brand Investment and Valuation project, formed in 2010, works towards an empirically proven model for valuing brands and guiding investment decisions¹².

Use valuations with care. Different methods give different numbers for the same brand, so present a valuation as a direction and a conversation starter, not a precise figure, and pair it with the measures that drive it, such as penetration, price premium and brand equity tracking.

Agree scenarios before the year starts, not when the cut arrives. Gartner reported in 2023 that 81% of marketing leaders had contingency plans for disruptions, but only 21% followed them¹⁹.

Peter Field's lessons from past recessions, published by the IPA, warn that cutting budgets relative to competitors exposes a brand to lost market share and a slower recovery, and point to keeping share of voice from falling below share of market as the measure to watch¹⁸ (see excess share of voice and the ESOV calculator). Put this in the downside scenario before anyone needs it: the cost of going dark belongs in the plan as a line, not in the crisis as an argument.

Advertising effects are small next to the noise in sales, which makes them hard to measure precisely. Randall Lewis and Justin Rao analysed 25 large field experiments with US retailers and brokerages, covering 2.8 million dollars of digital ad spend, and found that the median confidence interval on return on investment was more than 100 percentage points wide; they also found selection bias a crippling problem for the observational methods widely used instead⁸. If well-controlled tests are that uncertain, a single-point ROI from attribution deserves even less confidence.

What honest presentation looks like:

• Ranges, not points, with the method and the confidence stated.
• Incremental, not attributed, wherever a test or a calibrated model exists (see holdout test and MMM).
• Two horizons: in-year returns and longer-term brand effects, labelled separately.
• The counterfactual, stated: what would have happened without the activity.
• What you do not know, and the test that will find out next.

In the WFA and Ebiquity study, none of the companies surveyed claimed best-in-class measurement, while 75% expected more than half of their budget allocation decisions to be measurement-led within three years¹⁶. Build the measurement framework before the money is spent, and see measuring effectiveness.

A one-page business case, in this order:

1. The business problem, in finance's words: revenue, margin, share, cash or risk.
2. The objective and the chain from activity to value, with prioritised measures (see objectives and KPIs).
3. The investment, split between brand and activation, with the reason for the balance.
4. The expected return as a range, over two horizons, with the evidence rung for each figure.
5. The alternatives: what spending less, or nothing, would cost.
6. Scenarios and triggers, agreed with finance in advance.
7. The measurement plan: baseline, tests, model, and when results will be reported.
8. What you will learn, and how the next budget will change because of it.

• Binet and Field's Marketing in the Era of Accountability^1, 2 and The Long and the Short of It³, and the IPA's collection of their work⁵.
• Ambler and Roberts on the silver metric⁷; Lewis and Rao on measuring returns⁸.
• Brand Finance's⁹ and Interbrand's¹⁰ methods, IAS 38¹¹ and MASB's brand investment and valuation work¹².
• The WFA on effectiveness culture¹⁵ and the IPA on working with finance¹⁷.
• On IMC Report: budgeting for IMC, measuring effectiveness and marketing operations and governance.