The accountability trap.

/ 01Introduction

There is a conversation that happens in businesses everywhere, often in budget season, sometimes after a difficult quarter, occasionally when a new CFO arrives. It goes something like this: “What exactly is the marketing department delivering? Can you show me the return on what we’re spending?”

The frustration behind the question is legitimate. Marketing budgets are significant. The link between marketing activity and commercial outcome is genuinely difficult to trace. And marketing, as a profession, has not always helped itself by speaking in language that finance teams find unconvincing.

But the question itself, “what is marketing delivering?”, is often being asked of the wrong things, by the wrong people, over the wrong time horizon. And the accountability model that frames it is broken in ways that are costing businesses growth.

This paper is not a defence of marketing departments. Marketing should absolutely be accountable, rigorously, commercially, and with clear line of sight to business outcomes. The argument here is that the current model holds marketing accountable for the wrong things while letting the right things go unmeasured. That is not good for marketing. And it is not good for the businesses that need marketing to work.

This is not about lowering the bar. It is about putting the bar in the right place.

/ 02What’s actually wrong

Problem 1: Marketing is held to outcomes it only partially controls

Revenue, sales volume, and profit margin are the most common metrics used to evaluate marketing performance. They are also among the least informative for that purpose, because they are driven by far more than marketing.

A business’s commercial outcomes are the product of multiple functions working (or not working) in concert: the reliability of operations and supply chain, the quality of the sales team, the experience delivered by customer service, the systems and culture within the company, the quality and relevance of the product, the competitiveness of the pricing, the macro-economic conditions affecting category demand, and the behaviour of competitors. Marketing influences some of these things, and directly controls almost none of them.

Mark Ritson argued in Marketing Week "Revenue is a lousy measure of success for most ad campaigns," not because revenue does not matter, but because too many variables affect it that have nothing to do with the quality of the marketing function. Whilst the article was primarily talking about one area within marketing (advertising), the same logic scales up: setting revenue as the marketing function’s primary accountability metric conflates the output of the whole business system with the contribution of one function within it.

Sales can fall while marketing is working well. Sales can rise while marketing is underperforming. Revenue alone cannot tell you which is true, and building accountability structures on it produces decisions that are systematically wrong.

Problem 2: Marketing is confused with advertising

A second structural problem sits underneath the accountability one: in many businesses, “marketing” is treated as a synonym for advertising and communications. The brief that lands with the marketing team is almost always a communications brief. The budget that sits in the marketing line is almost always a media and production budget. And the metrics used to evaluate performance are almost always communications metrics.

This is a profound misunderstanding of what marketing actually is. Marketing, properly understood, is the function responsible for understanding customers deeply, identifying where and how to compete, shaping the conditions for demand, and ensuring the entire organisation is oriented toward the market. It encompasses pricing strategy, product development input, distribution choices, and positioning, not just the creative that goes to market. Distribution is the clearest example of the shrunken remit: marketing owns knowing where category buyers expect to find the product, and the brand strength that earns a listing in the first place — even though sales and operations execute the channel. Peter Drucker put it plainly more than fifty years ago, in Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices: "The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits [them] and sells itself." That is a much bigger mandate than running a campaign.

When businesses treat marketing as a communications department and then evaluate it on communications metrics, they create a double failure. First, they under-use a function that could be informing product, pricing, physical availability and strategy. Second, they hold it accountable for commercial outcomes it was never given the scope to influence. The marketing team is handed a media budget and asked to justify the revenue of the whole business. That is not a fair test and it is not a useful one.

Marketing is not advertising. Advertising is one channel through which marketing creates demand. Confusing the two is like holding the finance department accountable for profit while giving them responsibility only for payroll.

Problem 3: The ROI obsession is a symptom, not a solution

The rise of digital media created an intoxicating proposition: for the first time, you could track exactly what marketing spend produced. Every click, conversion, and cost-per-acquisition could be measured, reported, and optimised in real time. The marketing industry embraced this with enthusiasm, and finance teams found it deeply reassuring.

What happened next was predictable. Budgets shifted toward the most measurable channels. Short-term conversion metrics became the dominant frame for evaluating performance. Brand building, slower, harder to attribute, invisible in a quarterly dashboard, was progressively defunded. Peter Field, whose research with Les Binet underpins much of modern effectiveness thinking, has been explicit about the consequences: businesses’ obsession with ROI and short-termism is undermining growth. The pursuit of maximum ROI, he argues, systematically advantages short-term sales activation over the long-term brand building that actually drives sustained profit growth.

But there is a deeper problem with the ROI obsession that is rarely named. Marketing is the only function in most businesses routinely asked to prove that its existence caused revenue. Finance does not prove it caused profit. Operations does not prove it caused margin. HR does not prove it caused productivity. These functions are evaluated on inputs and process metrics: budget management, efficiency, compliance, capability building. Marketing alone is held to a causal standard applied to a lagging outcome that it only partly controls.

The demand for marketing ROI is not evidence of rigorous business thinking. It is evidence of a broken accountability model, one that has, as a consequence, caused marketing teams to spend a disproportionate amount of their best energy on measurement, justification, and the internal case for their own existence. The irony is self-evident: the obsession with proving marketing works is actively reducing the time available to do marketing that works.

When a function spends more time proving its value than delivering it, the accountability model has failed. The answer is not more measurement of the wrong things, it is clarity about what marketing is actually responsible for.

Problem 4: The function-vs-function framing is itself broken

The natural response to a broken accountability model is to draw cleaner lines: marketing owns this metric, sales owns that one, product owns the other. The appeal is intuitive, if growth is everyone’s responsibility, it becomes no one’s responsibility. Clear ownership forces clarity.

But siloed functional accountability creates its own distortions. It assumes that commercial outcomes can be cleanly attributed to the actions of individual departments, and they cannot. Revenue is generated by the whole system working together: sales team performance, customer service, resourcing, the right culture, the right product priced correctly, distributed effectively, communicated well, and delivered reliably. Isolating any one function’s “contribution” to that outcome is analytically heroic at best, and politically motivated at worst.

There is a deeper structural consequence too. McKinsey’s research found that more than 70% of Fortune 100 CEOs have an operations or finance background, and among Fortune 250 CEOs, only 4% have ever held a CMO-like role. When investment decisions about marketing are made predominantly by leaders without a marketing background, the predictable result is that those decisions are made without full understanding of how marketing creates long-term value. As one CMO quoted in McKinsey’s research puts it, growth strategies become “more financially and analytically driven versus consumer led.” That is not a neutral trade-off. It systematically disadvantages the long-term, brand-building investments that the evidence shows drive sustained profit growth.

The businesses that navigate this most effectively treat growth as a whole-organisation problem, not a marketing department problem. McKinsey’s analysis found that 60% of Fortune 500 outperformers have marketing, customer, or growth roles on the executive committee. As one marketing executive at a global beverage company put it plainly: “Strategy should be multidisciplinary, but when marketing does not have a seat at that table, the whole system has failed.”

McKinsey’s research, published in both a 2023 report and a 2024 Harvard Business Review article, found that companies which put marketing at the core of their growth strategy outperform their peers and are twice as likely to achieve greater than 5% annual growth. The operative word is “core”, not “marketing is solely responsible for growth,” but that marketing’s customer understanding and demand creation capability is embedded in how the whole business makes decisions. That is a fundamentally different model from asking the marketing department to justify its revenue contribution in isolation.

/ 03A better framework

The three zones of marketing accountability

The framework below draws a deliberate distinction between what marketing directly controls, what it influences but does not control, and what falls entirely outside its remit. The purpose is not to reduce marketing’s accountability, it is to make accountability more accurate, more actionable, and more useful for decision-making.

In Zone 1, marketing should be held to a high and specific standard. These are the things it directly controls. In Zone 2, marketing should be accountable for the quality and timeliness of its contribution, but the outcomes are shared with other functions. In Zone 3, marketing has no meaningful accountability. Holding marketing responsible for outcomes driven by these factors does not produce better marketing, it produces defensive marketers, shorter time horizons, and worse decisions.

What marketing should actually be measured on

A properly structured accountability framework for marketing holds it to specific, measurable leading indicators within its direct control, alongside shared accountability for commercial outcomes. The two are complementary, not alternative.

Leading indicators: marketing’s direct accountability

• Brand health trajectory. Unprompted awareness and mental availability over time: how readily the brand comes to mind across the category entry points that trigger buying. These are the outputs of brand-building activity and they are within marketing’s direct control. If they are not moving in the right direction, marketing is responsible. Consideration and preference sit under shared accountability, as multiple functions have input into the outcome.
• Reach and distinctiveness. How many people in the target market are being reached, how often, and with creative that is distinctive enough to register. Are the brand’s distinctive assets defined, applied, recognised and attributed in the right buying situations? Under-reach is one of the most common causes of campaign failure, and it is entirely within marketing’s gift to fix.
• Quality of customer and market insight. How deeply does the organisation understand its customers, their category entry points, and the competitive landscape? This is a marketing output that feeds the entire business strategy. If it is poor, marketing owns it.
• Marketing investment efficiency. How well is the budget allocated across the portfolio of activity? Are brand and activation investments appropriately balanced? Are underperforming channels being reallocated?

Shared commercial accountability

• Revenue and profit growth. Marketing should care about and contribute to these. It should not be solely credited or blamed for them. The accountability conversation should be: “what was marketing’s contribution to this result, alongside operations, finance, CX, pricing, people, product and macro factors?”
• Market share. A more useful commercial metric for marketing than raw revenue, because it controls for category-level effects. A business that grows market share in a declining category has done something right. A business that loses share in a growing category has done something wrong.
• Customer acquisition and retention metrics. Shared with other functions. Marketing helps creates the conditions for acquisition; the rest of the business closes and keeps the customer.

The language of shared accountability

None of this works without a common language across functions, and that requires effort from marketing as much as from anyone else. When CEOs and boards do not understand the value of brand building, it is marketing’s role to educate them and to communicate in language that the business understands.

The language of shared accountability is not the language of brand experience, creative awards, or marketing-specific metrics. It is the language of demand, growth, pricing power, and market share. Marketing must be able to make its case in those terms, not because the commercial metrics are the whole story, but because they are the story the rest of the business is reading.

The IPA’s research on Marketing is an Investment (Whittaker, 2024) found that 80% of investment analysts now examine advertising and promotion expenditure in the companies they follow, up from 6% in 2005. The financial community has moved. Marketing’s internal communication with boards and CEOs and finance teams needs to move with it: grounding brand investment arguments in pricing power, revenue quality, and long-term demand creation, not in awareness scores and campaign metrics.

/ 04Making it work in practice

For CEOs and boards

The most important thing a CEO or board can do for marketing effectiveness is to stop treating marketing as a communications department and start treating it as a market intelligence and demand creation function with a seat at the strategic table.

That means three things in practice. First, define marketing’s remit clearly and broadly including responsibility for customer insight, pricing perception, product input, and distribution strategy, not just campaign output. McKinsey found that in same-company pairs, CEOs and CMOs give different answers about marketing’s primary role half the time. That misalignment is not a communications problem. It is a governance problem, and it sits with the CEO to resolve. Second, set accountability expectations that correspond to what marketing actually controls: leading brand health indicators, reach, and investment quality. Hold it to commercial outcomes as shared accountability, not sole attribution. Third, give marketing the time horizon its work requires. Brand building returns are measured in years, not quarters.

There is also a harder conversation to have about who makes investment decisions. The McKinsey data shows that only 10% of Fortune 250 CEOs have a marketing background, and only 4% have held a CMO-like role. More than 70% of Fortune 100 CEOs have operations or finance backgrounds. When only about half of the leaders making budget decisions about marketing say, by their own admission, that they feel comfortable with modern marketing, those decisions carry a predictable bias: toward what is measurable in the short term, and away from what builds long-term brand value. That is not a CFO problem or a CEO problem. It is a structural literacy gap that boards need to take seriously either by building that literacy or by ensuring marketing has the authority and access it needs at the strategic level.

The structural fix is clear from the data. Fortune 500 companies that have marketing, customer, or growth roles on their executive committees outperform those that do not. The CEO’s role, in McKinsey’s framing, is to be the “growth coach”, setting strategy, building conviction in modern marketing, and ensuring the CMO has both the resources and the authority to execute. Not reviewing campaign creative. Not approving media schedules. Understanding the strategic contribution and holding the function accountable for it.

For finance leadership

The CFO’s instinct to scrutinise marketing spend is correct. Marketing budgets are significant, and the link to commercial outcome is not always obvious. The question is whether the scrutiny is being applied well, and whether the right people are making the investment call.

On the scrutiny question: evaluating marketing solely on short-term revenue contribution misunderstands how marketing works. Brand building creates pricing power, which is the single biggest driver of long-term profit growth (Binet and Field). A business that consistently underinvests in brand to hit short-term margin targets is borrowing from the future to report a better present. The IPA survey of 203 investment analysts found that 89% believed marketing spend should be capitalised, treated like R&D investment, not operating cost, at least some of the time.

On the investment decision question: finance functions that set marketing budgets without deep marketing literacy are making high-stakes decisions with incomplete information. McKinsey’s research found that CEOs feel marketing metrics clearly tie to business impact less than 60% of the time, and that is the CEO. The risk is that budget decisions default to what finance knows how to measure (short-term, digital, attributable) at the expense of what builds long-term commercial value (brand, mental availability, reach). That is not financial rigour. It is financial myopia applied to a domain that requires a different lens.

The most useful contribution finance can make to marketing accountability is to partner with marketing to build a shared measurement model, one that both functions agree on, that connects marketing activity to business outcomes, and that is honest about what can and cannot be attributed. Market mix modelling, properly constructed, does exactly this. It separates marketing’s revenue contribution from macro conditions, pricing effects, and competitor behaviour. It is the closest thing to an independent audit of marketing’s commercial impact, and it serves the CFO’s interests as much as the CMO’s. As Chipotle’s CMO put it: “I don’t think people spend enough time to align on the right metrics.”

For marketing leadership

The accountability problem is partly structural and partly self-inflicted. Marketers have sometimes made it worse by retreating into metrics that are meaningful to marketers but unconvincing to the rest of the business, awareness scores, engagement rates, creative awards. These are real measures of real things, but they are not the language of commercial decision-making.

The obligation on marketing leadership is to build the commercial case in commercial language. That means connecting brand health metrics to revenue trajectory. It means demonstrating the relationship between share of voice and market share growth. It means quantifying pricing power, the ability to sustain or grow margin while competitors discount. These arguments exist in the evidence base. The job of the marketing leader is to bring that evidence into the room and speak it in a language the CEO will actually hear.

And it means pushing back, clearly and commercially, when held accountable for things outside the function’s control. Not defensively, but with the same precision a finance director would bring to a budget conversation. “Marketing was responsible for this. These other factors drove that. Here’s what the data shows about our contribution.” That is not special pleading. It is analytical honesty, and it is what the business needs to make good decisions.

Marketing’s job is not to be left alone. It is to be accountable for the right things, and to have the evidence, the language, and the confidence to make that case clearly, based on the data your business has available. It is also important to be clear about what can and what cannot be measured (but that is for another article!).

One more thing: the cost of the accountability theatre

There is a final consequence of the broken model that deserves naming directly, because it is the most insidious and the least discussed.

When accountability is structured badly, when marketing is asked to justify revenue it does not fully control, on time horizons that do not match how brand works, using metrics provided by platforms with a conflict of interest, it does not produce better marketing. It produces marketing teams that are permanently on the defensive. Teams that spend disproportionate time on measurement, reporting, and the internal case for their own existence. Teams that default to short-term, easily attributable activity because it produces defensible numbers, even when they know longer-term brand investment would serve the business better.

The accountability theatre, the dashboards, the attribution reports, the ROI calculations that all parties privately know are imprecise, consumes resources, distorts strategy, and gradually hollows out the ambition of the marketing function. Brilliant people spend their careers justifying their presence rather than doing the work that justifies it.

This is not a marketing problem. It is a business problem. And solving it requires the business, the CEO, the board and marketing together, to agree on a more honest, more rigorous, and more useful model for accountability. One where marketing is held to a high standard for the things it controls. One where commercial outcomes are shared accountability, not sole attribution. And one where the goal of measurement is better decisions, not a tighter grip on a function that the business has not yet decided to trust.

/ 05Conclusion

The accountability model for marketing is broken at both ends. Marketing is held to outcomes it only partially controls, over time horizons that do not match how brand investment works, using metrics provided by parties with a commercial interest in a particular answer. Meanwhile, the things it does directly control, brand health, reach, mental availability, quality of insight, are often left unmeasured or dismissed as soft.

The fix is not less accountability. It is better accountability. A framework that holds marketing responsible for what it directly controls, recognises its contribution to shared outcomes, and is honest about what can actually be measured and what falls outside its remit entirely. This is not a lower bar. In some respects it is a higher one, because there is nowhere to hide when accountability is specific and accurate.

The businesses that get this right share a common characteristic: they treat growth as a whole-organisation problem, not a marketing department problem. Marketing owns its zone. Finance owns its zone. Product, ops, and CX own theirs. And they are all accountable, together, for the commercial outcomes that result. That is harder to manage than assigning blame to one function. It is also the only model that actually reflects how business works.

Marketing’s frustration with the current model is legitimate. So is the CFO’s demand for clarity. Both are symptoms of the same structural failure. The way forward is not to resolve the tension by increasing pressure on one side or reducing it on the other. It is to rebuild the model so that the pressure is applied to the right things, precisely, commercially, and in a language everyone in the room can understand.

The question is not “did marketing cause revenue?” It is “what did marketing control, what did it influence, and what drove the rest?” That question, asked honestly and answered with evidence, produces better decisions than any attribution model ever built.

/ 06Key sources & further reading

• Binet, L. & Field, P. (2013). The Long and the Short of It. IPA.
• Whittaker, I. (2024). Marketing is an Investment. IPA EffWorks.
• Ritson, M. (2019). Revenue is a lousy measure of success for most ad campaigns. Marketing Week.
• Marketing Week (2020). Mark Ritson: Marketers blame CFOs for not getting marketing when it’s our fault.
• Hickman, A. (2017). ‘Marketers’ obsession with ROI and short-termism undermining growth’ – Peter Field. AdNews (republished by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute).
• Brodherson, M. et al. (2023). The Power of Partnership: How the CEO–CMO Relationship Can Drive Outsize Growth. McKinsey & Company.
• Brodherson, M. et al. (2024). Put Marketing at the Core of Your Growth Strategy. Harvard Business Review.
• Ehrenberg-Bass Institute (n.d.). A Marketing Guide: What to do in a Recession. University of South Australia.