Someone said to me recently that the CFO should own performance marketing, leaving marketing to focus on brand.
It made me pause. If the CFO’s bonus depended on winning customers, would the marketing budget look different? Would one Head of Marketing still be expected to operate as an entire department?
I see plenty of tongue-in-cheek LinkedIn posts about impossible targets and shrinking budgets. The frustration is understandable. Some businesses expect one person to deliver the work of six.
The opportunity is to build a stronger working relationship between marketing and finance, before frustration becomes the default conversation.
That relationship should start long before budget season. Marketing needs to understand cash, margins and risk. Finance needs to understand how demand develops, what converts it and which capabilities growth requires.
That is how you establish the art of the possible.
First, though, let’s unpack “marketing can focus on brand”.
Brand is what people understand, expect and feel about your business, shaped by its promises and their experience of it.
It reaches into every corner of the organisation: product, pricing, sales, service, recruitment and leadership behaviour. It influences customer confidence, employee experience, retention and growth.
Marketing can guide it. Everyone helps deliver it. Splitting brand from performance overlooks how closely the two interact.
There are precedents for CFOs taking broader marketing responsibility. Twitter put CFO Anthony Noto in charge of marketing in 2015. At Anaconda, the company behind a widely used platform for data science and AI, the VP of Marketing was reported in 2023 to report to the CFO. Neither example proves that separating performance marketing from brand improves results.[1][2][3]
But let’s take the idea further. Imagine the CFO owns customer acquisition, with a meaningful part of their reward tied to profitable growth.
Would channel investment become more flexible when the evidence justified it? Would the people, data and systems needed to deliver become easier to fund?
Perhaps. But a bonus tied only to this quarter’s return could also damage future demand. Moving the reporting line alone would solve very little.
Whatever the structure, here are four things I believe every business must do to accelerate progress.
1. Agree what success means. Marketing, finance and sales need shared commercial outcomes, clear responsibilities and realistic timeframes. Measure customer quality, margin and retention alongside acquisition. Agree how today’s activity supports future demand.
2. Match ambition with resources. Build the plan together. Spell out the people, skills, systems and investment required, what existing resources can deliver and what must stop if priorities change. Make the trade-offs explicit.
3. Set rules for investment. Agree what evidence will justify testing, increasing or stopping spend, within the business’s cash constraints. Give longer-term brand investment an appropriate evaluation period. Review what creates additional business, not simply what claims credit for it.
4. Make collaboration a habit. Hold a monthly growth review with marketing, finance and sales. Share customer insight as well as the numbers. Surface problems early, agree decisions and assign owners. Build trust between budget meetings.
A strong CFO relationship will not create money the business does not have. It can create a better plan and faster, better-informed decisions.
Whoever owns performance marketing, agree the outcomes, fund the capabilities and take responsibility for making the plan work together.