The Rockstar CMO Studio: Budget Research Hits

This week, our host, Ian Truscott, and Principal Analyst at Cleantech Insiders, Jeff Clark, return to the topic of budget benchmarking, sharing six hits from six industry reports. 

Yes, SIX, completely ignoring the editorial policy of 5 f’in’ things. 

The six highlights they discuss:

1. Marketing budgets are in decline (or are they?)

2. Comparing apples with apples

3. Expectations management

4. Martech is down, paid media up

5. Data & analytics is marketing’s biggest challenge

6. The mandatory mention of AI

As always, we welcome your feedback. If you have a suggestion for a topic that's hot for you that we should discuss, please get in touch using the links below.

Enjoy!

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The Links

The people:

• Ian Truscott on LinkedIn and Bluesky

• Jeff Clark on LinkedIn

Mentioned this week:

• Gartner: Marketing Budgets: How Much Should Your Team Spend in 2024 | Gartner 

• The CMO Survey: Spring 2025 - The CMO Survey with Deloitte, Duke Fuqua School of Business, AMA

• Insight Partners: Insight's SaaS Marketing Spend Benchmarks 

• Norwest: B2B Sales & Marketing Benchmark Report

• LinkedIn - 2024 - The B2B Marketing Organization of Tomorrow (page 29 discusses budget) 

• Forrester blog post referring to their 2025 budget planning guide. European Leaders: Align Budget Planning To Accelerate Performance In 2025

• Jeff’s firm - Cleantech Insiders

• Ian’s new firm - Velocity B

Rockstar CMO:

• The Beat Newsletter that we send every Monday

• Rockstar CMO on the web, Twitter, and LinkedIn

• Previous episodes and all the show notes: Rockstar CMO FM.

Track List:

• Stienski & Mass Media - We'll be right back

• Cyndi Lauper - Money Changes Everything (1983)

You can listen to this on all good podcast platforms, like Apple, Amazon, and Spotify.

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