By Mark Ogne ,
More budget won't fix a marketing model that no longer fits how buyers discover, evaluate, and decide. CMOs need to rethink where they invest.
Many of the assumptions that have guided B2B marketing planning for the past decade are becoming less reliable.
Buyers were increasingly visible, engagement signals helped indicate interest, channels were manageable, and buying journeys could be observed, influenced, and measured.
Today, buyers are harder to observe, AI is reshaping discovery and evaluation, traditional measurement signals are weakening, buying networks continue to expand, and volatility is a permanent feature of the operating environment.
The assumptions behind marketing planning no longer match how buyers discover, evaluate, and decide. Forrester described this shift at this year’s B2B Summit as the B2B go-to-market singularity.
For CMOs, that makes the planning challenge bigger than deciding where to allocate the budget.
More budget won’t fix an outdated planning model
This creates a different CMO problem. The question isn’t how to allocate next year’s budget across technology, talent, and programs. It’s whether the marketing organization can adapt faster than the market changes.
CMOs will enter 2027 with a favorable investment outlook. In Forrester’s Budget Planning Guide research, nearly nine in 10 B2B marketing decision-makers expected marketing investment to increase over the next 12 months, with increases expected across technology, personnel, and programs. More budget sounds like welcome news. But it won’t automatically create more impact if it flows into a marketing model built for yesterday’s buying environment.
The comfortable response to uncertainty is more: more budget, more AI pilots, more programs, more channels, more content, more campaigns, more activity. Each creates the appearance of progress and gives a CMO another way to show motion. But more of the same won’t fix a model designed for a market that no longer exists.
Worse, more of the same can make the problem harder to see. More activity can create the appearance of momentum while making the organization less adaptive. More AI pilots can signal innovation while scaling unclear decision rights, weak governance, and disconnected workflows. More programs can expand coverage while fragmenting attention. More budget can make legacy assumptions more expensive to maintain.
Optimization can preserve the wrong system
This is where many planning conversations go wrong. Most marketing leaders have spent their careers learning how to optimize: improve conversion rates, campaign performance, channel efficiency, attribution, and productivity. Optimization feels disciplined because it asks every part of the system to get better.
But optimization assumes that the underlying system is still fundamentally sound. When buyers become less visible, AI reshapes discovery, signals weaken, and markets shift faster than annual plans can absorb. Optimization can preserve the complexity that prevents adaptation. It can make an organization better at operating a system that is losing fit with the market.
For CMOs, that is the uncomfortable part. The habits that once signaled strong leadership may not be enough for what comes next. A rigorous planning cycle, a broader program mix, a longer list of AI experiments, and a better-optimized campaign engine can leave the organization exposed when those efforts reinforce assumptions that no longer reflect how buyers behave.
Focus creates the capacity to adapt
The harder leadership move is focus. A focus mindset starts with a different set of questions:
- Where can value compound?
- Which audiences, segments, capabilities, and market positions deserve disproportionate investment?
- Which activities continue because they’re familiar, measurable, or politically difficult to stop?
- Which AI experiments are ready to scale, and which are simply automating ambiguity?
- Which programs create business impact, and which only create motion?
Focus is the discipline that makes adaptation possible. The logic is straightforward but difficult to execute.
- Focus creates the basis for divestment.
- Divestment creates capacity.
- Capacity enables concentration.
- Concentration supports adaptation.
- Adaptation builds resilience.
- Resilience sustains growth.
Resilience doesn’t come from spreading resources more evenly. It comes from concentrating them where the organization can shift, learn, and respond faster than conditions change.
The harder part of planning is deciding what to stop
It’s easier to optimize the existing portfolio than to decide what no longer deserves the time and money. Those choices can leave marketing organizations less adaptable when adaptability matters most.
CMOs must invest where new sources of strength are emerging, and those investments only matter if leaders are also willing to stop funding decisions made in the past. Not every segment deserves to remain a priority. Not every familiar program deserves another year of investment.
The planning challenge for 2027 is deciding which assumptions still deserve investment. That requires questioning long-standing priorities, challenging familiar success metrics, and acknowledging that some activities are optimized for conditions that no longer exist.
2027 planning needs to build adaptability
Broken assumptions require deliberate choices. CMOs need to focus on where value can compound, divest from work that no longer deserves capacity, concentrate resources where adaptation is possible, and reallocate faster than the market changes. That requires treating adaptability as a planning discipline, rather than an outcome of having more budget or more AI initiatives.
For 2027, the central planning question is whether your organization can adapt as quickly as the market changes. Resilience is the mechanism that allows growth to continue as the assumptions behind growth change.
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2027 Marketing Budgets: Why New Categories Beat Bigger AI Line Items
CMOs are budgeting for 2027 with channel buckets built for a customer journey that's disappearing. I'd rebuild around five functions instead.
Almost a year ago, I recommended that chief marketing officers should “hire an economist or chief economist” to weather a perfect storm of challenges that included changing consumer behavior, rapid technological advancements, and economic uncertainty.
Earlier this month, nearly 200 economists and tech leaders signed a letter to policymakers warning that AI “could bring risks, including large-scale job displacement.” Basically, the letter called for policymakers to do more to understand and respond to potential disruptions from artificial intelligence.
Very few CMOs have hired an economist or chief economist. And I’m skeptical that policymakers are going to move as quickly as artificial intelligence, which is transforming the economy faster than any previous technology. So, as most managers, directors, and executives plan their marketing budgets for 2027 sometime after Labor Day, they may want to recall what the poet June Jordan wrote back in 1978, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” What should they do?
They should start by using an audience research tool to find out who their target customers are, what they are doing, and why they are doing it.
Then, they should craft a prompt like this one:
“Based on original reporting, research, data analysis, or evaluation from authoritative and trustworthy sources with industry experience and expertise, should I consider shifting my budget into some entirely new categories? Yes, I know this could trigger the dreaded reorg or agency review. But now is the time to analyze what’s working and what isn’t without fear or favor. How should I proceed over the next six weeks before I need to submit my budget for 2027?”
Next, they should enter this prompt into Google to compare what the AI Overview and AI Mode recommend. They should also enter this same prompt into ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini to evaluate what all three recommend. In addition, they should fact-check, ground truth, and look for the receipt of whatever recommendations search and AI tools make.
Finally, they should adopt David Ogilvy’s old-school practice of “going for a long walk, or taking a hot bath, or drinking half a pint of claret,” which he recommended in his classic book, Ogilvy on Advertising.
I did most of this last week, although I updated Ogilvy’s suggestions. Instead, I came up with some critical data, market trends, strategic insights, and tactical advice.
The legacy channel buckets on most 2026 budget templates are measuring a version of the customer journey that is disappearing. Ewan McIntyre, the Gartner analyst who runs the firm’s CMO Spend Survey, put numbers on how fast. CMOs are now allocating 15.3% of marketing budgets to AI initiatives, yet only 30% say their organizations are actually ready to scale that investment. At the same time, awareness and conversion now claim 62.6% of total media spend, a jump of more than 10% since 2024, while spending on loyalty and retention has fallen 29% to less than 15% of the total. McIntyre’s data found one exception to that shift. The most AI-mature organizations hold onto a larger share of loyalty and retention spend rather than chasing acquisition, which suggests less mature organizations are over-indexing on whatever AI can measure and automate most easily. That is not a contradiction. It is a reallocation already underway, and most budget templates have not caught up to it.
Christine Moorman, who directs The CMO Survey out of Duke’s Fuqua School of Business, found something that points in the same direction from an entirely different source. The 35th edition of her survey, fielded in January among 308 marketing leaders, found that generative engine optimization (GEO) is already in use at four in 10 companies, a category that did not exist in her survey until recently. At the same time, she found no marketing technology activity scoring above a 5 on a 7-point performance scale. That gap is exactly where a budget reorganized by function, not by legacy channel, earns its keep.
So instead of asking which channel gets more money, I think CMOs should build their 2027 budgets around five functional categories.
AI visibility and citation management. This replaces a chunk of the SEO line, but not all of it. The job is no longer only ranking a page. It is earning inclusion in the answer itself, tracked through something closer to what I’ve been calling Citation Share of Voice than through keyword rank.
Trust verification. I wrote mid-July that only 28% of Americans trust AI search results. That gap is a budget line now, not a footnote. Brands that fund the work of getting their facts, credentials, and reviews structured so an AI model can verify them are the ones who close that trust gap before a competitor does.
Distribution engineering. This is where the DIRHAM 2.0 framework I taught in Dubai this spring actually earns its keep. Content built once and pushed through owned, earned, and AI-crawled surfaces at the same time, instead of funded channel by channel, is a budgeting decision as much as a production one.
Human judgment and editorial oversight. Gartner’s own data argues for this line item indirectly. Labor rose from a mean 21.9% of marketing budgets to 24.5% this year, even as 43% of CMOs told Gartner they expected to cut labor spending. The CMOs winning that argument internally are the ones who can show what a trained editor or strategist catches that a model does not.
Measurement rebuild. Last click attribution cannot see a customer who asked ChatGPT for a recommendation and never clicked anything. On May 20, 2026, AMEC (the International Association for the Measurement and Evaluation of Communication) launched its GEO Principles. These and a genuine Citation Share of Voice metric are a more honest place to put next year’s measurement dollars.
None of this means SEO, paid media, content marketing, social media marketing, or digital marketing go away. It means the org chart for your budget stops mirroring the outdated PESO media model (paid, earned, shared, and owned media), which did real work to sort budgets and assign campaigns to channels. But that framework was answering a distribution question, not the one marketers actually face now. Knowing where to place content doesn’t tell you whether it gets seen, and visibility today is decided by algorithms, not people scrolling a feed.
Your 2027 Budget Reorg: 3 Steps Before You Submit
Step 1. Re-tag last year’s spend against the five functions, not the old channels. Pull 12 months of budget data and sort every dollar into AI visibility, trust verification, distribution engineering, human oversight, or measurement rebuild instead of SEO, paid social, email, and display. This alone usually surfaces work you’re already funding that has no name on your budget template yet.
Step 2. Run your audience data against each function, not each channel. Use SparkToro or GWI to check where your customers are actually spending attention right now. Fund the function where the gap between spend and attention is widest first, not the channel that’s loudest in the planning meeting.
Step 3. Walk into the CFO conversation with one number that isn’t last click. Bring your Citation Share of Voice, or an equivalent GEO metric, as the evidence for the reorg. A CFO who hears “AI is changing things” will push back. A CFO who sees a citation trend line next to last year’s flat organic traffic will ask what’s next.
I’ll conclude this column by saying the part Gartner’s press releases won’t. A CMO who submits a 2027 budget organized around outdated channels, in an environment where AI is already reallocating attention faster than any technology I’ve covered in 20 years, is not being prudent. They’re being unprepared.
https://tinyurl.com/2sup8w7t
