Why Marketing Feels Expensive in 2026 (And Why Most Boards Are Solving the Wrong Problem)
Marketing only becomes a problem when revenue stalls.
When growth is strong, spend gets tolerated. When it slows, marketing becomes the first line under scrutiny, because it's one of the largest discretionary costs a board can actually control.
The frustration isn't emotional. It's structural. This frustration isn't new. It's part of a broader pattern of why marketing is failing boards as we move into 2026. Modern marketing is funded, governed and measured in ways that make it feel expensive, even when it's doing the right things.
Why marketing feels expensive now
Marketing budgets are increasingly concentrated into paid ecosystems dominated by a handful of platforms. Google and Meta control around 50% of global digital ad spend. In the UK, that figure is 61% of the total £42.6 billion ad market.
This isn't diversification. This is dependency.
Boards look at these numbers and see wealth transfer, not asset building. Every pound spent on paid media flows into platforms you don't control. Some assets can compound. Creative learnings, audience insight, first party data, landing pages and a repeatable funnel. But the attention itself is rented. Stop paying and the distribution stops.
The discomfort isn't irrational. It's a rational response to structural dependency on ecosystems that extract value without creating lasting internal assets.
Paid media now accounts for over 72% of worldwide ad investment. Search advertising alone is forecast to reach $248.6 billion in 2025, with Google capturing the majority. CFO surveys show 46% expressing pessimism about economic conditions, with antitrust scrutiny on these monopolies doing little to ease concerns.
The economics have shifted. Marketing used to build equity. Now it rents attention. That fundamental change drives the perception that marketing feels expensive, even when it's working.
The hidden cost of underfunded strategies
Most marketing strategies aren't failing because they're bad. They're failing because they're funded at 50% of what they need to work.
Nielsen research shows that half of all media plans are underinvested by a median of 50%. The same research shows that proper funding improves ROI by 50%. The inefficiency isn't in the strategy. It's in how marketing ROI is undermined by underfunding.
Boards approve a plan. Marketing proposes £200k to execute it properly. Finance approves £100k. The campaign underperforms. Marketing gets blamed for inefficiency.
This is self sabotage dressed up as prudence.
Underfunding is the most expensive way to do marketing, because it produces inconclusive results that justify the next round of cuts.
Marketing budgets have flatlined at 7.7% of company revenue. Digital channels account for 61% of that. But spreading thin across multiple channels without sufficient weight in any of them produces predictably poor results. Channel overload hurts full funnel effectiveness. Fragmentation creates the illusion of activity while diluting impact.
The companies that succeed aren't the ones testing everything. They're the ones doubling down on fewer channels with sufficient budget to make them work. Focus beats dispersion. Consistency beats experimentation when underfunded.
Underfunding doesn't just reduce results. It creates a cycle where poor results justify further cuts, which produce worse results, which justify even deeper skepticism.
Too many cooks, slower results
Marketing execution suffers from approval friction. Too many stakeholders. Too many layers. Too many opinions replacing customer insight with internal consensus.
High performing mid sized companies implement decisions 40% faster than their competitors. Speed matters. But most marketing functions are structurally incapable of it because every decision requires sign off from people who aren't accountable for the outcome. Speed only improves when decision making authority is clearly defined and owned.
Research shows that 70% of executives attribute decision delays to internal politics. Nearly half of companies have stagnant decision styles that obscure results and slow momentum. The cost isn't just time. It's performance.
Creative quality drives 56% of sales lift in digital advertising. But creative gets diluted when it passes through multiple approval layers, each adding input that weakens the original idea. What starts as a focused concept becomes a committee compromise that offends nobody and persuades nobody.
The contrast is stark. Founder led companies generate 31% more patents and deliver higher returns than consensus driven businesses. Why? Because founders trust systems, make decisions faster and take accountability for outcomes.
Boards that demand oversight on every decision aren't protecting performance. They're killing it. The fix isn't less governance. It's clearer governance. Approve the system. Trust the team to execute it. Measure outcomes, not activity.
Awareness is not revenue and never was
One of the most persistent sources of tension between boards and marketing is the expectation that awareness campaigns should generate immediate revenue.
They don't. They never have. What awareness does do is make future conversion cheaper, but only if the funnel beneath it is built to catch demand.
Awareness builds over quarters. Conversion happens over weeks. Judging top of funnel activity with bottom of funnel KPIs creates a measurement problem that breaks trust on both sides. Marketing optimises for engagement. Finance demands pipeline contribution. Neither is wrong, but the misalignment makes both look incompetent.
Only around one third of companies use revenue based metrics to measure marketing performance. The rest rely on proxies that don't answer the question boards care about. What revenue did this generate?
Conversion focused strategies outperform awareness heavy approaches when measured on short term ROI. The average cost per acquisition globally sits at $49, but optimisation can reduce this significantly through retargeting and funnel efficiency. These are the mechanics that boards understand because they tie directly to revenue.
The problem isn't that awareness doesn't work. The problem is expecting it to work like conversion. Brand campaigns build trust that makes conversion cheaper over time. Performance campaigns drive revenue now. Both matter. But they require different timelines, different metrics and different expectations.
Boards fund outcomes. If marketing can't connect spend to revenue signals, even directionally, the budget becomes discretionary. The fix is clarity. If the board understands what each stage of the funnel delivers and marketing ties activity to measurable signals wherever possible, the tension reduces.
Agencies, in house teams and the competence problem
Marketing fails when the wrong people are solving the wrong problems with the wrong briefs.
This happens in agencies. It happens in house. The structure matters less than the competence and alignment of the people doing the work.
64% of companies prefer agencies for specialised skills. But agency models often create misaligned incentives where billable hours matter more than outcomes. Media buying has become a race to the bottom, with outdated tactics persisting because they're easier to execute than modern programmatic strategies.
In house teams offer depth and control but often lack the specialist expertise required for channels like paid search, programmatic or performance creative. The result is suboptimal execution dressed up as strategic marketing.
The real issue is leadership. Most organisations haven't located where competence actually sits. They assume agencies bring it. Or they assume hiring in house solves it. Neither assumption is reliable without deliberate vetting.
The board thinks they're buying marketing. In reality, they're buying competence under constraint. Targeting, creative, measurement and iteration speed.
Hybrid models are emerging as the answer. In house teams lead strategy and own data. Agencies provide execution expertise in specific channels. But this only works when leadership understands what competence looks like and where to place it. This is exactly why the fractional CMO vs agency vs consultant debate exists in the first place.
The question isn't agency versus in house. The question is whether the people doing the work actually know how to do it well. Most boards can't answer that question because they're not equipped to assess marketing talent the way they assess finance or operations talent.
AI is widening the gap. Good teams get faster, bad teams get louder
AI adoption in marketing is widespread. 78% of organisations now use AI in at least one function. But adoption doesn't equal effectiveness.
AI accelerates what already exists. Good teams use it to move faster, test smarter and optimise better. Bad teams use it to produce more noise at higher volume. The performance gap is widening, not closing.
Companies at the leading edge of AI integration are seeing productivity gains of 4x in AI linked tasks. But most organisations are still in early stage experimentation, using AI for content generation without the strategic judgment required to make that content effective.
The risk isn't that AI replaces marketers. The risk is brand dilution. GenAI makes it easy to flood channels with content that looks professional but lacks differentiation. Audiences can tell. Engagement is declining in AI heavy channels because volume has outpaced quality.
AI improves teams. It doesn't replace them. The judgment required to decide what to create, where to deploy it and how to measure it still sits with humans. Companies that treat AI as a replacement for marketing leadership will produce more content and worse results.
The winners in 2026 are using AI to accelerate decision making, personalise at scale and optimise faster. They're not using it to avoid hiring competent marketers or making strategic choices.
Organic is no longer enough
Organic reach has collapsed. LinkedIn organic reach is down 64% from its peak. Attention spans have shrunk to around eight seconds. The platforms have structurally shifted distribution away from free content toward paid amplification.
Organic content still matters. It builds trust. It fosters conversation. It creates the foundation that makes paid effective. But volume requires payment. Organic still wins where trust matters most. Founders, communities, partnerships and high consideration sales.
Brands relying entirely on organic strategies are invisible to most of their audience. The economics of relevance have changed. Distribution is no longer free. Paid is not optional for scale. It's prerequisite.
The companies winning in 2026 are integrating both. Organic builds the message. Paid amplifies it. Organic creates authenticity. Paid creates reach. Neither works alone. Together, they compound.
The mistake is treating paid as a failure of organic. Paid doesn't replace organic. It enables it. Consistent paid amplification increases visibility, which drives organic engagement, which improves paid performance. The loop works when both are funded properly.
Boards that view paid spend as wasteful are operating with an outdated mental model. Paid isn't a tax on poor content. It's the cost of relevance in attention starved markets.
What boards should demand instead
Before adding budget or changing teams, boards should demand clarity on four things.
A single view of funnel performance, not channel dashboards. One owner for growth outcomes. A clear keep, kill, scale rhythm every 14 to 30 days. And a split between optimisation budget and experimentation budget.
These aren't marketing requests. They're governance essentials.
The leadership fix
Marketing doesn't need more budget. It needs better judgment.
Fund fewer things properly. Most organisations spread budget across too many channels, campaigns and experiments. The result is nothing works well enough to prove itself. Strip back. Focus resources on what's already showing signs of working. Kill what isn't.
Separate optimisation budget from experimentation budget. Optimisation funds proven channels with clear ROI. Experimentation tests new approaches with capped downside. Don't blur the two. Most companies spend optimisation budget on experiments and wonder why results are inconsistent.
Decide faster. Real time data exists. Use it. Approving a strategy and then taking two weeks to review performance reports means two weeks of lost momentum. High performers implement 40% faster than competitors. Speed is a competitive advantage when paired with clear accountability.
Trust the system you approve. If the board signs off on a marketing plan, let the team execute it without constant interference. Measure outcomes. Hold people accountable. But don't dilute the strategy with input from people who aren't responsible for the result.
Balance brand and performance. Not as a philosophical debate but as an operational discipline. Allocate budget across both. Measure both. Fund both. Brand builds trust that makes conversion cheaper. Performance drives revenue that funds brand. They reinforce each other when governed properly.
Measure revenue signals, not vanity proxies. Impressions, engagement and awareness scores matter for diagnosis. But boards fund outcomes. If marketing can't tie spend to pipeline contribution, customer acquisition cost or lifetime value, the budget becomes discretionary. What boards are really missing is on-demand marketing leadership that connects strategy, execution and revenue accountability.
The companies accelerating in 2026 aren't outspending competitors. They're outthinking them. They're funding deliberately. Deciding faster. Trusting approved systems. Using AI as leverage, not replacement. And treating marketing as a growth engine that requires the same rigour applied to product, sales and operations.
Marketing feels expensive when it's treated like a series of activities. It becomes profitable when it's treated like a system.
Need help implementing these strategies?
With 15 years scaling global sports and entertainment properties, I now work as a fractional CMO UK helping brands turn marketing into measurable commercial results. Whether you need diagnostic strategy, urgent launch leadership or ongoing fractional CMO support, I embed with your team to deliver results.
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