This is the bit too many marketers still dodge, Hakan. If leadership cannot see how the work changes revenue, risk, cost or customer behaviour, they will treat it like overhead no matter how busy the team looks. The uncomfortable part is that marketing helped create this problem by reporting activity as if it were proof. Campaigns shipped, posts published, dashboards built, MQLs passed around like casino chips. Then AI arrives and exposes the work that was really just motion with a nicer invoice. Senior marketing has to get closer to the money, the customer and the trade offs. Otherwise it becomes the first line item someone cuts when the room gets nervous.
What gets me is the dodge came from fear more than laziness, deep down a lot of marketers knew if they tied their work straight to revenue and it came up short, that was the end of their job too, so the vague stuff felt safer to report.
Yes, and that fear made sense in the short term. Activity is safer to defend than revenue because nobody can easily disprove “awareness”, “engagement” or “momentum” in the meeting. But it becomes a debt. The longer marketing hides behind soft measures, the easier it is for finance to see the whole function as optional. I do not think every piece of marketing can or should be tied to a neat revenue line, because buyer behaviour is messier than that. But senior marketers need to be able to explain the commercial logic: what risk this reduces, what demand this creates, what sales friction this removes, what customer belief this changes. If they cannot do that, the work starts to look like decoration when the business gets nervous.
This is the bit too many marketers still dodge, Hakan. If leadership cannot see how the work changes revenue, risk, cost or customer behaviour, they will treat it like overhead no matter how busy the team looks. The uncomfortable part is that marketing helped create this problem by reporting activity as if it were proof. Campaigns shipped, posts published, dashboards built, MQLs passed around like casino chips. Then AI arrives and exposes the work that was really just motion with a nicer invoice. Senior marketing has to get closer to the money, the customer and the trade offs. Otherwise it becomes the first line item someone cuts when the room gets nervous.
What gets me is the dodge came from fear more than laziness, deep down a lot of marketers knew if they tied their work straight to revenue and it came up short, that was the end of their job too, so the vague stuff felt safer to report.
Yes, and that fear made sense in the short term. Activity is safer to defend than revenue because nobody can easily disprove “awareness”, “engagement” or “momentum” in the meeting. But it becomes a debt. The longer marketing hides behind soft measures, the easier it is for finance to see the whole function as optional. I do not think every piece of marketing can or should be tied to a neat revenue line, because buyer behaviour is messier than that. But senior marketers need to be able to explain the commercial logic: what risk this reduces, what demand this creates, what sales friction this removes, what customer belief this changes. If they cannot do that, the work starts to look like decoration when the business gets nervous.