60% of Big-Spend Companies Can't Align Marketing and Finance on Measurement

A recent survey of marketing and finance professionals found that only 10.9% of marketers say they are very aligned with their company's finance team on measurement, while nearly 60% of senior leaders at companies spending more than $50 million annually on paid media reported poor alignment. The core tension is format: most marketers still report results as single point estimates with no uncertainty range, which clashes with how finance teams think about risk.

Recast cofounder Michael Kaminsky argued that marketing leaders do themselves a disservice by offering false precision when they don't actually know, and warned against leaning on LLMs for measurement support because the technology tends to construct the story it thinks the user wants to see. On the tools side, roughly 30% of respondents use open-source MMMs like Meta's Robyn or Google's Meridian, 28% use a third-party vendor, and about 21% don't use any marketing-mix model at all.

The survey's most telling finding may be that the biggest blocker to experimentation isn't budget or technical complexity, it's organizational willingness, cited by 62% of respondents. Meanwhile, 74% of teams that did run incrementality or lift tests reported positive budget outcomes, including avoiding cuts or securing additional spend.

Full story: Performance Marketing Insider