CMOs Are More Focused On Growing Revenue Than Brand Awareness

Nearly 98% of children aged 3-11 globally can identify Mickey Mouse. Meanwhile, 82% of consumers know that Nike is the brand associated with “Just Do It.”

These overwhelmingly high recognition rates didn’t happen by accident. It took decades of brand building to cement these companies’ assets into consumers’ minds.

But new survey results suggest that brand building has fallen on the growing list of priorities for chief marketing officers, as they are increasingly under the gun to prove their work drives revenue growth.

According to the survey, conducted by NewtonX for ADWEEK, close to half of executive-level marketers (48%) say that their primary objective is to increase revenue, while just a quarter (24%) cited building long-term brand awareness. (The pool of 501 respondents consisted of 82% brand marketers, 18% agency professionals, and 20% C-suite executives overall.)

“The CMO is now the leading single owner of overall revenue growth,” said NewtonX vice president of partnerships Daniel Sills. “One of the things that CMOs are still struggling with is understanding their financial literacy—how their marketing is making a financial impact and being able to measure it.”

Its a challenge marketing chiefs are grappling with in real time. At ADWEEK House in October, Major League Baseball CMO Uzma Rawn Dowler described her corporate role as “a get-shit-done officer.”

For today’s CMO, Dowler said, “the ‘C’ and the ‘O’ are there, and then in the middle you should just put whatever you need to put in there, because our roles are not just marketing.”

Two major forces seem to be influencing the CMOs’ priority shift—economic worries and the arrival of AI.

Economic anxiety

According to Pew Research released earlier this month, 72% of Americans rate current economic conditions as fair or poor—pessimism that remains largely unchanged from the fall of 2025.

NewtonX’s findings suggest that those same fears are affecting the corporate suite. According to the survey, two out of three of marketers’ biggest worries relate to the economy: While 44% of respondents said they’re concerned about reputational risk, between 42% and 43% cited the possibility of a recession and 39% pointed to layoffs.

“Economically, it’s a bit more uncertain than it was a few years ago, and that has hit the marketing department,” said senior director of strategic insights and analytics Jasmin Siegle. “When [marketers] are in front of the board or have investors to answer to, they have to demonstrate how their activities can be attributed to financial KPIs.”

Interestingly, the pressure to generate revenue isn’t a function of decreasing marketing budgets. Between 36% and 40% of brand marketer respondents said their budgets had “somewhat increased” over the prior 12 months, while about 25% said they had “somewhat decreased.”

Irrespective of whether budgets are up, down, or unchanged, “brand leaders repeatedly describe a ‘do more with less’ environment,” the study found. That’s especially true on the agency side, where only 25-26% are reaping the benefits of growing marketing budgets.

“Agencies feel the squeeze,” reads the report.

AI fears

Asked about how AI has affected their day-to-day jobs, 63% of respondents said it has already had a moderate or significant impact. But for CMOs and their teams, “it’s putting more demand to generate actual, measurable growth,” Sills said.

“Executive leaders believe in AI’s potential to increase productivity and cost efficiency,” he continued. “So the expectations for growth are [increasing] simply because of the perception of what AI can do.”

Even if AI is creating pressure, the executive suite assumes that its driving efficiencies, which in turn maneuvers marketing executives into justifying their investments in it.

“It’s easier to not be on the chopping block if you can say, ‘hey, I’m contributing to revenue. I’m doing something every day that is moving us as a company forward,’” Siegle explained.

Though revenue growth has become the focus amid the pressure to navigate disruption and economic uncertainty, its important to note the study’s findings don’t suggest that CMOs no longer see long-term brand building as part of their job.

“It’s something we’re seeing across most of our datapoints,” Sills said, “and it’s the number-one challenge most marketers have: How do I prove my financial impact?”