The real reason the CMO-CFO gap won't close

The disconnect between a CMO and CFO —and by extension the CEO — isn’t a gap in expectations, terminology or even ideology. It’s that the math isn’t mathing.

The conversation goes something like this:

The CFO asks, “What did we get for this $100M we spent on media?”

The CMO points to the Q4 marketing report: “Marketing grew sales by 22%!”

The CEO side eyes the CFO, who presented the Q4 numbers this morning.

“Total sales grew 2%,” the CFO says.

Sound hyperbolic? Here’s a real-life story: An executive at a CPG company told me that one of their major retail media networks reportedly drove 45 million units of product A. The problem? The entire company’s sales of product A were 42 million.

The common wisdom in our industry is that the gap between the CMO and their C-suite peers is a language problem:

Lou Paskalis, the former “CFO whisper” at Bank of America, often says that when the CMO walks into the CFO’s office and opens their mouth, it sounds like the teacher from Charlie Brown: ‘‘Wah wah wah wah wah wah.”

But if media investment were delivering the record-breaking growth numbers it claims, you can be sure the CFO would figure out marketing jargon. They don’t because the jargon is associated with dubious claims. Translating it into real talk still wouldn’t transform it into real math.

The breakdown isn’t the equations themselves; it’s that equations are a series of disjointed calculations solving for the wrong variable.

The real math for marketing that drives growth is incremental lift: 

• Sales without marketing are X. 

• Sales with marketing are Y. 

• Incremental lift is Y minus X. Though it's a simple equation, in practice, it’s not simple to solve for X.   

But it's also not impossible.

Marketing Mix Models (MMMs) are, at their core, about this inference. Many are good, and treated as the marketing holy grail, but they are slow and imperfect. Still, perfect is the enemy of the growth equation. Attribution nirvana should not be the goal, but marketers need more than video completion rates and viewability percentages.

Getting sales data faster is where marketing AI can really shine, but not with black boxes where the math always ends up in favor of the platform. Social media impulse buys are great for last-click conversions, topline-only decks, and signals that will show up in the dashboard by Friday’s reporting call. But what happens when those buys run out? Advertisers need transparency to predict sustained impact. You cannot use someone else’s black box for that.

Real growth leadership looks like Vinny Rinaldi at Hershey's. He is a marketing leader who didn't need an economic downturn to tell him the math — and the signals underlying that math — was broken.  

Vinny doesn’t wait for the biannual MMM. Hershey’s knows how many bags of candy were grabbed off the shelf in a matter of days, and they’ve turned that raw data into signal that AI models use to push ad investment when and where sales are falling behind. There is no impression-level tracking or attribution. There are geographic hold outs to measure sales lift and repeated experiments that prove consistent sales lift time and again.

Vinny isn’t getting mired in that impossible quest for attribution nirvana, but he also isn’t settling for proxies like video completion rates and viewability. He knows sales drives MMM, not the other way around, and getting real-time signals on sales, matched with AI, will get candy sold.

The leaders who will actually move the needle aren't chasing a new dictionary or pushing faulty math. They're chasing real growth. They bring the CFO a number that holds up in the same room as the P&L. When that happens, marketing stops being a cost center and starts being an investment thesis. 

This op-ed represents the views and opinions of the author and not of The Current, a division of The Trade Desk, or The Trade Desk. The appearance of the op-ed on The Current does not constitute an endorsement by The Current or The Trade Desk.