From cost to capital: How marketing and agencies can win the value conversation
Opinion
The boardroom battle is not about whether marketing creates value. It’s about whether or not you can prove it alongside every other investment competing for capital, writes The Kite Factory’s managing partner.
Marketing is comfortable talking about brand, creativity and cultural impact. But in the boardroom, the conversation is far more direct: what did we spend, what did we get back, and would we do it again?
In today’s environment of geopolitical volatility, constrained growth, persistent inflation and heightened scrutiny on capital allocation, that question matters more than ever. Every investment is compared. Every pound is interrogated. And increasingly, marketing is finding itself on the wrong side of that comparison.
The uncomfortable truth is this: marketing still struggles to articulate its value in the language boards use to make decisions.
Too often, we default to proxies. Awareness. Engagement. Consideration. Even “brand love”. These are useful signals within the discipline, but they rarely translate cleanly into the metrics that matter at the executive level – cash flow, margin expansion, payback periods, and return on invested capital.
From a CFO’s perspective, this creates a credibility gap.
When one function talks in probabilities and soft metrics, and the other talks in hard financial outcomes, the latter will almost always win the argument, particularly when the environment demands certainty.
This is why marketing is so often framed as a cost centre. Not because it doesn’t create value, but because it fails to evidence that value in a way that stands up to financial scrutiny.
The consequence is predictable
When pressure builds, marketing investment is among the first to be cut. Not necessarily because it is the least effective, but because it is the least defensible.
To change this dynamic, marketing leaders need to reframe how they position their function. The starting point is simple: stop talking about marketing as an activity and start talking about it as capital allocation.
Every campaign, every channel decision, every test-and-learn cycle is an investment decision. And like any investment, it should be assessed based on expected return, risk, and time horizon.
This is where media agencies have a critical and often under-leveraged role to play.
At their best, agencies sit at the intersection of data, investment and execution. They are uniquely positioned to translate marketing activity into business outcomes and frame marketing as an investment engine, not a discretionary cost.
The opportunity is to step into a more commercially accountable role, acting not just as planners and buyers, but as partners in capital allocation.
This requires a shift in both mindset and capability, on both sides of the relationship.
First, CMOs would do well to anchor their strategies in commercial outcomes rather than communications outputs.
Agencies should help define and quantify those outcomes upfront. That means aligning media plans to revenue growth, customer lifetime value, pricing power and margin, not just reach curves or CPM efficiencies. It also means making trade-offs explicit. If budget shifts along the funnel, or between channels, what is the expected financial implication?
Second, agencies can play a pivotal role in building credible payback narratives. One of the reasons performance marketing gained such traction over the past decade is that it offered a clear, near-term line of sight to return.
Brand investment, by contrast, operates on a longer time horizon and is therefore harder to defend, despite being the engine of long-term growth. This is often framed as a binary trade-off, but for those grounded in effectiveness, the two are not mutually exclusive.
Agencies increasingly have access to econometric models, incrementality testing frameworks and cross-channel attribution tools. The value lies in translating those outputs into boardroom-ready language. What is the expected return curve, over what period, and with what degree of confidence?
Done well, this reframes brand spend from a leap of faith into a structured investment case.
Third, agencies can help manage risk perception, one of the most overlooked dynamics in organisational decision-making.
In uncertain environments, boards prioritise predictability
Investments that feel volatile or opaque are discounted, regardless of their potential upside. Marketing has historically leaned into creativity and experimentation, and rightly so. But without a parallel narrative around control and governance, this can be interpreted as risk.
Agencies can counter this by demonstrating how diversified media mixes reduce volatility, how consistent investment stabilises demand, and how data improves forecasting accuracy over time. In effect, they position media not as a gamble, but as a managed system of growth.
There is also a broader role for agencies in bridging the gap between marketing and finance.
By reframing marketing outputs into commercial language like incremental revenue, marginal ROI, and cost of acquisition relative to lifetime value, they can elevate the conversation internally and strengthen marketing’s credibility.
Language matters
When marketing teams talk about “driving awareness”, finance teams hear cost. When agencies translate that into “driving incremental revenue at an acceptable cost of capital”, they hear investment. The activity may be identical, but the framing changes the decision.
It also changes accountability. If agencies want to be seen as strategic partners, they need to share in this accountability. That means committing to clearer measurement frameworks, being transparent on what is and isn’t working, and actively shaping investment decisions, not just responding to briefs.
None of this diminishes the importance of creativity. In fact, it elevates it.
In a world where capital is constrained, the premium on effective ideas increases. Creativity becomes not just a differentiator, but a multiplier of return. It’s in the DNA of what we do and is part of our discipline, we must foster and defend.
The boardroom battle is not about whether marketing creates value. It does. The question is whether marketing, supported by its agency partners, can prove it in terms that withstand scrutiny alongside every other investment competing for capital.
Those that can will secure their seat at the table, not as a discretionary spend, but as a core driver of growth.
Those who cannot will continue to fight the same battle, quarter after quarter, budget after budget.
And in an era of capital scarcity, that is a battle few can afford to lose.
Anthony Abou-Zeid is the managing partner at The Kite Factory