Marketers strain to juggle media budgets, AI and high expectations from CEOs

Marketing budgets are all but flat, but chief marketing officers are being tasked with juggling investments marked for media, creative and AI on the same departmental balance sheet, according to Gartner.

Advertisers currently spend 7.8% of company revenue on marketing on average, a paltry increase of 0.1% compared with last year, according to the company’s annual CMO Spend Survey of more than 400 marketing leaders in North America, the United Kingdom and Europe.

Ewan McIntyre, vp analyst and chief of research at Gartner, said that single figure percentage budgets were “the new normal” for advertisers following the end of the pandemic-era spending boom.

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Media Buying Briefing: Takeshi Sano is making the rounds for Dentsu — is it enough?

Ending up your first six weeks as global CEO of an agency holding company that’s been struggling with a major retention of a global client is pretty solid. So it has been for Takeshi Sano, who at the end of March took over Dentsu.

On Friday, Heineken announced the winners of its global media, production and creative review, keeping its global media business parked at Dentsu. (Publicis will handle “global secondary production” as well as creative for the Heineken brand itself, while Publicis, WPP, and Stagwell will handle various creative work for its other brands — Amstel, Birra Moretti, Desperados, and Tiger.) 

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