Marketing Leaders See Their Budgets Collapse Since the Pandemic

How to do more with less? This is the question many marketing leaders must be asking themselves. A study by Gartner reveals that marketing budgets have never returned to pre-COVID levels. Worse still, they have been steadily decreasing over the past three years. Here are the key highlights.

This is the main finding of the annual survey conducted in February and March of this year among nearly 400 marketing leaders in North America and Europe. In the four years preceding the pandemic, average marketing budgets represented 11% of total company revenues. In the four years following, they dropped to 8.2%.

More specifically, they accounted for 7.7% of total revenue in 2024, compared to 9.1% in 2023 and 11% before the pandemic.

“Marketing leaders are living in an era of contraction,” says Ewan McIntyre, Vice President Analyst and Chief of Research for Gartner’s marketing practice.

Generative AI as a Lifeline?

Ewan McIntyre adds:

“Despite financial challenges, most marketing leaders believe that AI could save the day. 64% of marketing leaders say they lack the budget to execute their 2024 strategy, but generative AI offers the opportunity to increase the impact of the marketing function far beyond its budget constraints.”

Investments in generative AI (GenAI) are indeed most likely to be cited as delivering time savings and cost efficiencies—more than one-third of marketing leaders identified these as their top three benefits when considering the return on investment of AI spending.

A Reprioritization in Marketing Budget Allocation

Gartner also notes a shift in how marketing budgets are allocated. Spending on human resources or agencies remains flat (22.6% and 22%, respectively), while investment in marketing technologies (martech) has decreased from 29.2% to 23.8% between 2018 and 2024. Conversely, more budget is being directed toward media purchases (from 23.2% to 27.9%).

“We’ve observed a significant shift in investment strategies,” comments Ewan McIntyre. “The decline in martech investment does not signal a reduced appetite for technology but rather a decrease in the influence of marketing leaders in favor of other business leaders, such as IT managers.”

Of course, these allocations vary by business model. In industries where products or services target the general public, media investments are naturally higher (34.2%). In B2B, martech takes a relatively larger share of the budget.

The share of digital in media purchases continues to grow (from 54.9% of budgets in 2023 to 57.1% in 2024). The main channels? SEA (13.6%), social advertising (12.2%), and digital display advertising (10.7%). Offline, event marketing (17.1%), sponsorship (16.4%), and television (16%) are the main investment channels.

In these challenging times, marketing leaders are prioritizing investments with a demonstrable impact. However, there is a gap between the channels they invest in and their perceived impact. For example, marketing leaders ranked digital video/streaming as the most impactful digital channel, even though it is only fourth in terms of spending,” continues the Gartner analyst.