Thought Leadership
Marketing is more than the sum of its parts, but its functions and budgets are too often siloed, stifling growth and leaving marketers in the perpetual cost center hot seat in the process.
Creative, Media, and Brand teams each optimize for their own goals and KPIs, some focused on short-term wins while others strive for durable brand building that can evolve the business. Meanwhile, Finance has a fragmented and incoherent view of what’s actually moving the business.
In the fallout, last leg levers are given outsized attention while nuance is lost. The why of marketing success or failure is far more contextual than a single metric managed by a single silo. It’s time for CMOs to change that, to break free from narrow — and often defensive — performance narratives and take ownership, both of their overall impact and of how it is perceived.
For instance, why are marketers being graded on ROAS? It’s time to consider impact more holistically with return on marketing investment (ROMI).
ROAS frames marketing as a cost center. ROMI proves marketing as an investment engine.
ROMI in Motion
ROMI is shorthand for return on marketing investment, and the word that does the work is investment. ROAS asks a transactional question: what did you get back for what you spend on media? ROMI asks a strategic one: what did you build, and what is it worth?
This isn’t theoretical. The MMA Global has declared an incremental return on marketing objective as the measurement framework it expects marketing organizations to grow into. The buy-side is moving in the same direction. As the MMA puts it, the question marketers should be asking isn’t “what was my ROAS?” but “what was the incremental business value generated?”
The shift matters because marketing has to prove — to the rest of the business — that it’s actually driving results. Right now, that proof isn’t landing. . MMA Global research found that only 24% of companies say their marketing teams are “very aligned” with finance on measurement, and 46% of marketers admit the single capability they most need is better linkage between brand metrics and sales.
The disconnect is a credibility gap with the people who decide what marketing gets to invest in next. ROAS doesn’t bridge that gap. ROMI is designed to.
Levers Beyond Linear
Here's the math problem with ROAS as your dominant metric: ad spend is a last-mile lever, and it works in a straight line.
With some exceptions, adjustments in media budget produce a roughly linear effect on return. Spend a little more, get a little more back. Useful, predictable, bounded. And underneath that linearity is the bigger constraint — the elephant in the conference room — which is that budgets don't actually shift all that often.
The CFO doesn’t approve a fresh 20% bump every quarter, so marketers are left optimizing the lever they have, in the budget envelope they’ve been given, with diminishing returns at the margin.
ROMI shifts the focus to the levers that aren't bounded that way.
Invest into your creative production system — so your team can produce three times the variants in a quarter — and you've changed the return profile of every dollar you spend after that. Invest it into your brand DNA infrastructure, so a hundred ad variants stay on-voice without a single review meeting, and you've removed the bottleneck that was throttling personalization. Invest it into your measurement loop, so last week's signal becomes this week's creative decision, and you've turned the entire team into a learning system.
These are the levers that can provide exponential impact.
This is the pattern hiding in the research. MMA Global's State of Personalization report found that 52% of marketers still manually customize creative assets, and even among the most advanced marketers, 60% still adjust targeting by hand. Average personalization lift hovers around 24% — but that lift comes from investing in the system, not from buying more impressions. BCG and MMA Global put it directly in From Campaigns to Business Value: the compounders aren't channels, they're systems.
A New Mode of Operating
If ROMI is the frame, how does the operating model shift?
Four shifts matter. The first is from attribution to incrementality. Attribution gives credit for what was already going to happen. Incrementality asks the harder question: what wouldn't have happened without this investment? IAB's State of Data 2026 found that 75% of the buy-side believes today's leading measurement approaches underperform on rigor, timeliness, and trust. Marketers triangulating across incrementality, attribution, and marketing mix modeling are the exception — only 39% use all three together, even though 67–76% use at least one. ROMI assumes the triangle. ROAS lets you settle for one corner.
The second shift is from channel-by-channel to holistic. MMA Global's research draws a sharp line between Brand Accountable marketers and Brand Vulnerable ones. Brand Accountable marketers use controlled experiments at nearly twice the rate of their peers (58% vs. 35%) and model marketing impact at the individual or household level (65% vs. 27%). They've stopped buying line items and started building infrastructure.
The third shift is from vendor-supplied numbers to marketer-owned signal. When the platforms running the ads also grade them, the report cards drift toward the platforms' preferred channels. Marketing mix modeling users say gaming is underrepresented in their models in 77% of cases, commerce media in 50%, creator and influencer in 48% — channels driving incremental value but resisting clean platform attribution.
The fourth shift is from snapshot to continuous. ROMI is fed by ongoing signal — a live loop, not a quarterly chart. MMA Global's Navigating the GenAI Landscape names the underlying change directly: marketers are moving from KPIs as Key Performance Indicators to KPIs as Key Performance Inputs — the asset-level data, brand consistency, and creative variety that determine whether every future campaign performs.
Pick any one of these shifts and you'll see ROMI starting to take shape. Pick all four and you're operating in it.
Meaning for Marketers
So what does this actually mean for the people doing the work?
It means the team you have today is more capable than ROAS has ever let you prove. Every quarter, your creative production gets faster, your brand voice stays more consistent at scale, and your measurement loop catches more signal earlier — and ROAS has no field for any of that. ROMI does.
It means the CMO-CFO conversation gets better. Finance can underwrite a compounding investment with returns spread across quarters. They can't underwrite a one-quarter ratio that may or may not repeat. The Brand Accountable marketers earning Finance alignment are 2.6 times more likely than their peers to be on the same page with the CFO — not because they're better lobbyists, but because they're showing up with the right vocabulary.
It means the gains stick. ROAS resets every quarter — every campaign graded on its own ratio, every budget cycle starting from zero. ROMI compounds, because the systems you build don't expire. The creative production capability you invested in last year is still paying off next year, even when your media mix shifts. Teams operating in ROMI mode pull ahead season over season because their foundation keeps getting stronger.
And it means marketing finally gets graded the way every other strategic function in the business is graded: on what you built, what compounds, and what creates durable value over time.
Don’t allow marketing to be graded on a fraction of its value or its weakest lever. Push for a holistic view of its impact — and for systems that support the full picture.
