When the Harris Poll surveyed marketing executives at last week’s ANA Masters of Marketing conference, only 30% said they’d recommend their profession to young people. Meanwhile, 44% suggested electrician careers instead.
That divide isn’t about pessimism. It’s about strategy.
The conference revealed a widening competitive gap – not between companies using AI versus those that aren’t, but between CMOs using AI efficiency gains to fund brand building versus those using it to justify budget cuts. The former are quietly pulling ahead. The latter are wondering why their efficiency improvements aren’t translating to growth.
The Math That Separates Winners From Losers
One of the best presentations at ANA Masters this year was from Newell Brands, the maker of Elmer’s Glue, Rubbermaid and everyone’s favorite pen – Sharpie. Working with her tech partner Adobe, President Melanie Huet demonstrated how her team works with AI on everything from consumer insights to making new creative assets. In one video, she explained how they have compressed months of consumer research into days using synthetic AI personas.
“The AI one is just as great, if not better,” she said about the AI-generated insights. “If there’s anything we want to change, we just immediately start re-prompting based on our personas.”
The efficiency gains are real. But they create a critical decision point.
Option A: Cut the marketing budget by the same percentage as the efficiency gain. If AI makes you 80% more efficient, reduce spend by 80%. Show the CFO immediate cost savings. Book the win.
Option B: Keep the same budget. Use AI to handle commodity execution. Redirect the savings toward strategic brand building that AI can’t replicate.
According to a 2024 Google/WARC study analyzing European brands, companies that invest 50-60% of their marketing budget in brand building – with 40-50% on performance tactics – see dramatically higher returns. The research shows that short-term ROI averages £1.87 for each £1 invested. But when sustained brand-building effects are measured, this increases to £4.11 – a 120% improvement.
Most companies are choosing Option A. The smart ones are choosing Option B and not telling competitors.
What Smart Marketers Understand That Others Miss
As the CMO of KraftHeinz, Todd Kaplan could have discuss all of the innovative ways his team are using AI across their portfolio of more than 200 brands including Heinz, Kraft Mac & Cheese, Oscar Mayer, and Philadelphia. In fact, Heinz had one of the first true viral AI campaigns back in 2022 when it used the DALL-E 2 image generator to prompt phrases like “ketchup,” “ketchup bottle,” and “ketchup in space,” and the AI consistently generated images that resembled Heinz’s iconic packaging.
However, he chose not to make AI the focus of his presentation and instead made the case for brand building in a data-driven world. It was a pretty compelling case: while competitors obsess over AI-optimized efficiency, his team is doubling down on what algorithms can’t manufacture – emotional connection. His presentation centered on understanding that “emotion, not information, is the primary driver of most consumer choices.”
In an era where AI can generate infinite marketing variations and analyze every data point, Kaplan argues that emotion becomes the scarce resource worth fighting for. It’s the inverse of what most CMOs are doing: instead of using AI to automate emotional appeals through synthetic personas and sentiment analysis, Kraft Heinz is using AI efficiency gains to fund the deeply human creative work that actually moves people to choose their brands. “Emotion, not information, is the primary driver of most consumer choices”, said Kaplan. When AI can generate infinite information and insights, emotion becomes the scarce resource worth investing in.
This isn’t nostalgia for pre-digital marketing. It’s recognition that when everyone has access to the same AI tools optimizing for the same performance metrics, sustainable competitive advantage shifts to what can’t be commoditized: authentic emotional resonance built through creative excellence and cultural understanding. The kind of work that requires experienced human judgment, not just better prompts.
LVMH’s Global Brand Officer Mathilde Delhoume delivered perhaps the conference’s most illuminating contrast to the efficiency-obsessed AI narrative. Her presentation on “The Art of Crafting Dreams” centered on four pillars that AI fundamentally cannot commoditize: Exceptional Craft, Elated Customer, Extraordinary Creativity, and Elevated Culture.
While other CMOs discussed compressing timelines and reducing costs, Delhoume articulated luxury’s core business model: they don’t solve problems – they create desire. In her framework, going for “80/20” efficiency gets you fired the next morning. Perfection isn’t the goal; it’s the minimum requirement. This isn’t romantic idealism about craftsmanship – it’s a business strategy that again recognizes when everyone has access to the same AI optimization tools, the competitive advantage shifts entirely to what algorithms cannot replicate.
NewellBrands, KraftHeinz, and LVMH are just three examples of brands offering a preview into how smart marketers are using AI strategically. They leverage automation for the operational infrastructure – media planning, customer research analytics, performance tracking. But the savings don’t go to the CFO as cost reductions. They fund the exceptional craft, the creative excellence, the cultural positioning that creates desire and emotional connection rather than merely satisfying needs.
The sustainable advantage shifts to what AI can’t easily replicate: deep brand equity, emotional connections, cultural relevance, mental availability built over years.
The Real ROI Picture Most CFOs Miss
Research from Ahrefs’ 2025 study found that branded mentions, branded anchors, and branded search volume are the top three factors correlated with AI Overview presence. As AI-powered search expands, brand strength increasingly determines visibility—both with humans and algorithms.
In a standing-room only panel session, Jeff Greenspoon, Kantar’s CEO for the Americas, shared data that should terrify every c-suite cutting marketing budgets. Kantar’s BrandZ valuation work – tracking 14,000 brands across two decades – reveals a widening gap between companies that treat brand building as measurable enterprise value versus those that see it as soft spending.
“We believe in the connection between brand value and enterprise value,” Greenspoon explained at the conference.
In a later interview with The Drum, Jeff further explained how “too many conversations are about efficiency. We want to be the effectiveness layer that helps CMOs show their CFOs exactly what brand investment delivers.”
The distinction matters because Kantar’s data shows what most attribution models miss – that brand strength directly correlates with total enterprise value. This isn’t just marketing ROI, but actual enterprise value.
Kantar’s BrandZ Global Top 100 reached record total brand value in 2025, driven overwhelmingly by brands that maintained consistent long-term investment even while optimizing tactical efficiency.
Greenspoon’s framing cuts through the AI efficiency hype: “Anyone can build tech. What matters is what you train it on. And we’ve got decades of evidence for what actually makes brands grow.” That evidence base – spanning 50 years of brand-growth data, 4.5 million consumer respondents, and 22,000 brands – points to a clear pattern. The brands dominating enterprise value aren’t those that cut fastest or automated hardest. They’re those that used efficiency gains to fund the brand building that creates “meaningful difference to more people.”
Spoiler Alert: traditional attribution models significantly undervalue brand building
A Nielsen 2025 study found that companies measuring only short-term performance miss approximately 50% of their marketing ROI. Brand awareness campaigns show a 1% increase in brand awareness leads to 0.4% short-term sales lift but 0.6% long-term sales increase—the long-term effect is 50% larger and typically unmeasured.
McKinsey research on performance branding found companies applying data-driven approaches to brand building report marketing efficiency gains of up to 30% and incremental top-line growth of up to 10% without increasing budgets. One consumer goods company optimized creative rotation across channels using better MROI measurement, resulting in a 14% increase in advertising impact on sales.
The CMOs cutting budgets based on AI efficiency are optimizing for metrics they can measure (short-term performance) while accidentally defunding the work that drives sustainable competitive advantage (long-term brand equity).
What Winning Organizations Actually Do
General Motors CMO Norm de Greve described his strategy: moving from “buyer of marketing to makers of marketing” in the AI era. GM brought brand strategy, social media, and analytics in-house – both the strategic and commodity work AI can accelerate. But they’re “keeping agencies focused on breakthrough creative and what they do best.”
This is the emerging playbook:
Automate the execution layer. Use AI for media planning, content production variations, data analysis, campaign optimization—work where speed and efficiency create value. Keep these costs low and let AI drive continuous improvement.
Invest the savings in strategic differentiation. Fund the business strategy, brand building, creative development, cultural insights, and strategic positioning that creates defensible competitive advantage. This is where humans with judgment make decisions AI can’t replicate.
The math is compelling. If AI makes your execution 70% more efficient, you of course could cut your budget by 70%. However, the smart marketers would maintain their budget, get the execution done with 30% of resources, and invest the remaining 70% in brand building that competitors cutting budgets can’t afford.
The Self-Assessment Framework
The ANA conference provided an unintentional litmus test for separating the CMOs who’ll survive the next five years from those who won’t. If you’re facing the efficiency versus effectiveness dilemma – and every marketer is – here are the questions that reveal which side of the divide you’re on:
How are you measuring marketing ROI? If you’re focused primarily on short-term attribution and performance metrics, you’re likely undervaluing your brand building by 50% or more. Marketers always identify measurement as a growing priority, but many still lack frameworks that capture long-term brand impact. You can’t manage what you don’t measure – but you’re destroying what you measure wrong.
Where are AI efficiency savings going? This is the defining question. If they’re flowing back to the CFO as cost reductions, you’re choosing short-term P&L improvement over long-term competitive position. If they’re being reinvested in brand building, you’re using AI strategically. The decision you make here determines whether you’re still relevant – as a brand, a business, and an executive.
What’s your brand building allocation? Research suggests 50-60% of budget should fund brand building with 40-50% on performance. Most companies are heavily skewed toward performance because it’s easier to measure—exactly the work AI is commoditizing. If your budget allocation looks like everyone else’s, your competitive position will too.
How are you developing strategic judgment? If junior marketers are learning to prompt AI efficiently, that’s not enough. They need to develop the strategic thinking that determines which AI outputs are valuable—something that requires years of domain expertise. Companies eliminating these development opportunities today are creating their own talent crisis tomorrow.
What’s your Marketing Efficiency Ratio (MER)? E-commerce brands typically target 3-5x (total revenue divided by total marketing spend). If your MER is improving but revenue growth is flat, you’re getting more efficient while becoming less effective. Congratulations – you’ve optimized your way to irrelevance.
Why This Matters Now
The ANA conference made one thing brutally clear: we’re in a brief window where strategic choices about AI will determine competitive positions for the next decade.
Companies cutting marketing budgets based on AI efficiency will report strong short-term margin improvements. They’ll look smart for 18-24 months. Then they’ll discover their brand equity has eroded, their talent pipeline has dried up, and competitors who reinvested in brand building have pulled ahead.
Companies maintaining budgets while using AI to fund brand building will face skeptical CFOs for the next 18 months. They’ll need to defend investments with long-term payback periods while showing strong short-term efficiency gains. But in three years, they’ll have competitive advantages competitors can’t easily replicate.
The electrician statistic – 44% of marketing executives recommending trade work over marketing – reflects this divide. The executives recommending trade work are those watching their profession commoditize. They built careers on execution excellence that AI now performs faster and cheaper.
The executives quietly recommending marketing careers? They’re the ones who understand that when everyone has the same tools, judgment becomes the only sustainable advantage. They’re using AI to fund the brand building that creates that advantage.
The Bottom Line
AI isn’t making marketing obsolete. It’s separating strategists from tacticians faster than anyone expected.
The tacticians are celebrating efficiency gains while commoditizing their own expertise. The strategists are using those same efficiency gains to fund competitive advantages AI can’t replicate.
Your choice isn’t whether to adopt AI. Everyone will. Your choice is whether to use AI for cost reduction or competitive differentiation. Whether to cut budgets or reinvest in brand building. Whether to eliminate junior roles or reimagine them. Whether to optimize for quarterly metrics or sustainable advantage.
The CMOs still in the room five years from now will be those who understood that efficiency isn’t strategy. The real opportunity isn’t automating marketing—it’s using automation to finally afford the kind of brand building that actually drives long-term growth.
Adobe CMO Lara Hood Balazs framed it perfectly at the conference: CMOs must become “Chief Transformation Architects” in the AI era. The job isn’t managing the marketing department’s AI adoption—it’s architecting how AI transforms the entire enterprise’s relationship with customers, markets, and growth itself. That’s a role that requires strategic vision, not operational efficiency. It’s a seat at the table that gets earned through demonstrating enterprise value creation, not cost reduction.
Those are the CMOs who’ll be recommending marketing careers in 2030. The ones cutting budgets today? They’re the ones their kids will ignore when they suggest becoming electricians instead.
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