60% of CEOs Now Call Marketing a Cost Center. Last Year It Was 35%.
Boathouse's fifth annual CEO Study found 60% of CEOs now classify marketing as a cost center, up from 35% one year ago. The survey of 150 top U.S. companies also recorded top CMO performance grades sliding from 24% to 15% over the same window. CMOs who want to keep their seats need to reattribute every dollar to a revenue line the CFO can audit, before Q3 budget reviews reopen.
The number that stopped me: 14% of CEOs admitted they considered eliminating the CMO role in the past year. Roughly one in seven companies in the survey is running internal calculus on whether the seat justifies its salary. And that conversation is happening at the same time CEOs say their relationship with the CMO has never been better.
That gap is the whole story.
The 25-point flip
Marketing-as-cost-center went from 35% to 60% in twelve months. Twenty-five points in a year moves at the speed of a category reclassification. Add the grade slide (A grades from 24% to 15%, B grades up to 53%, C or lower up to 32% per Digiday's writeup) and the picture is CEOs walking marketing across the budget review from the strategic column over to the line items they trim quarterly.
The leadership-skills questions look arguably worse. Problem-solving dropped from 57% to 49%. Long-term vision sits at 47%. Roughly 40% of CMOs now rate C or below for driving strategy and growth. From the CEO seat, this starts to look like execution work that could be moved closer to the COO or split into a paid-acquisition VP plus a brand director.
The relationship score went up while the bottom-line score collapsed
Boathouse CEO John Connors framed the paradox cleanly: "From where we started five years ago, the CMO has cleaned up the relationship variables considerably. They've strengthened the relationship test, but weakened on performance and execution variables."
That is the trap. Five years of CMOs being told to "earn a seat at the table" by speaking finance, attending offsites, learning the P&L. They did the homework. CEO trust is up. CMOs being seen as loyal partners is up. And then the room asked the obvious follow-up question: now that we trust you, what did the dollars do?
The answer apparently was not convincing. Connors again, this one carrying the bite: "CMOs are trying to buy time by spending more budget on more short-term variables. CEOs are seeing that lack, that gap, so you have this real performance confidence problem that's emerging."
What kills the seat is rarely the bad quarter. It's usually the second consecutive quarter where the CEO realizes the CMO can't describe what changed and why with finance-grade specificity. From what I've seen in agency conversations this year, that's the conversation already happening behind closed doors at maybe a third of the Boathouse 150.
Martech got bought. ROI did not.
Connors put a number on the spend side via The Drum's coverage: "There are now like thousands of different martech solutions, and yet no one's getting ROI from martech. Now you add AI fragmentation on top of data fragmentation, and their orgs are siloed."
The CFO reads this as: we keep approving software invoices the marketing team can't tie to revenue. Two consecutive years of that hardens into a budget category. Once marketing is "the team that buys software," it sits next to facilities and IT support in the CEO's mental model. That's the cost-center reclassification, just spelled differently.
Spring 2026 numbers from the Duke CMO Survey reinforce this from the other direction. Marketing budgets as a percent of company budget kept climbing, but marketers' self-reported ability to demonstrate the impact of marketing spend hasn't improved at the pace of the spend. CFOs notice both lines.
AI accountability landed on CMOs four times harder than anyone else
This one changed how I read the rest of the data. Boathouse found CMOs are held 4x more accountable for AI ROI than other executives. Yet only 36% of marketing functions reported a coherent AI strategy, against 69% on analytics. And 46% of CMOs were rated C or lower on AI capability.
That's a structural setup for failure. CEOs are pricing the AI bet into marketing's P&L expectations roughly a year ahead of where most marketing teams have actually built the infrastructure to deliver against it. From what I've seen in agency conversations this quarter, this gap is the one that takes down the most CMOs in 2026, not Meta attribution loss or AI Overviews click decline.
If you're in the seat, the AI line item on your Q3 deck cannot be "we are running pilots." Connors flagged that exact phrase: "Please stop telling me you're running pilots, because that is also known as you're covering your ass." You need a deployed use case, a revenue line tied to it, and a date you turned it on.
The reattribution play before Q3 budgets reopen
Most CMO commentary ends here with vague advice about "earning the trust of the CFO." That isn't actionable. Here's what I'd actually do, in this order.
1. Audit and tag every line item from the last four quarters. Pull marketing spend by line. Tag each as one of three things: revenue-attributable (with the attribution method named on the line), brand-equity (with a tracked brand metric the CFO has agreed to), or operational (martech licenses, headcount, agency retainers). Anything you can't defend gets cut by you before the CFO cuts it for you.
2. Move at least one line per quarter from operational to revenue-attributable. The fastest candidate is usually a martech tool you can shut off without anyone screaming for 60 days. If nobody screams, it was overhead. The CFO will register the deletion in your favor on the next review.
3. Put one live AI deployment on the next earnings deck with a named revenue line. Not a pilot. Not a roadmap. A live deployment, the channel it runs in, the lift it has produced, the cost it replaced. The Hershey delay we covered in Hershey's $450M Media Team Was Reading 2024 Data Halfway Through 2025 is the wrong end of this conversation. You don't want to be the team explaining why the data lag was the problem.
4. Pre-brief the CFO before the budget meeting. Walk in with the CFO already nodding at your reattribution. The Boathouse data shows 51% of CMOs are still seen as "core to growth strategy." The other 49% are still seen as periphery, executing whatever the CEO already decided. That distinction is the actual seat to defend.
The Q3 window is roughly six weeks of internal time before most companies open budget reviews. The CMOs who survive 2026 are doing reattribution math right now, not the deck for the all-hands.
Who actually keeps the seat in this cycle
From what the Boathouse numbers actually show, I don't think the winners here are the loudest CMOs or the ones with the biggest brand-stunt budget. The survivors are probably the ones who quietly shrink their own discretionary line and grow the revenue-attributable line, even if topline budget stays flat. The 53% of CMOs holding a B grade in this environment are doing something right that the A-grade CMOs from 2025 forgot to keep doing. That's the floor to defend.
And to be fair, none of this is entirely new. CEOs have always wanted attribution they could audit. It just feels like the patience for "we are figuring it out" ran out somewhere between the Q4 2025 earnings call and the Q1 2026 budget cycle. The CMOs reading that signal early are already reframing the deck. The rest are about to be in a 14% conversation.
By Notice Me Senpai Editorial
