You have the same budget. Finance wants more growth. Here’s how to deliver both

This post is sponsored by Analytic Partners.

The budget email landed in December last year, and the number was exactly what you feared: same as 2025. Maybe slightly less. But the growth target? That went up.

This is the APAC marketing reality in 2026. Budgets are holding steady while everything that consumes those budgets – platform costs, content production, media rates – continues to climb.

For CMOs, this creates an impossible equation: delivering 10% to 15% growth while your purchasing power quietly erodes. The only way through is efficiency, effectiveness, and measurement that proves every dollar is working harder than it did last year.

But the fight for the budget is really a fight for translation. When you’re asked to maintain flat budgets while your input costs are rising, you need to prove your marketing efficiency and effectiveness are both improving, not just sustaining. Finance defaults to “cut” unless you can show otherwise.

Analytic Partners’ ROI Genome analysis, based on thousands of campaigns and billions of dollars of spend across regions and categories, shows just how much is at stake.

Marketing typically contributes around 10% to 50% of total business growth, depending on category maturity, competitive dynamics, and execution quality, with the remainder driven by factors such as pricing, distribution, product and macro demand. Even at the conservative end of that range, 10% of a $100 million business represents $10 million in value creation.

That’s why the real question finance is asking isn’t “does marketing work?” but can you deliver the same $10 million with less waste – or unlock $12 million with the same nominal budget through better allocation and mix decisions?

That’s not soft metrics – it’s shareholder value. Yet many marketers still describe success in “reach” and “impressions”, not in growth and profit, which drives business leaders crazy.

The first fix is language. Use ROI, NPV, and hurdle rates. Talk about growth, not “likes”. When you show marketing through a financial lens, it stops looking like cost and starts looking like capital. And in a flat-budget environment, make sure you show efficiency gain: “Last year we delivered $2.50 in revenue per marketing dollar. This year we’re tracking $2.85.” That’s the conversation that keeps flat budgets from becoming cut budgets.

The second fix is balance. In Asia, marketers often over-index on short-term performance because it feels measurable. But the data is clear: campaigns that sustain for 31 weeks or longer deliver around 65% higher ROI than stop-start bursts.

When you can’t increase spend, extending campaign duration becomes your growth lever. And when brand and performance are planned together, campaigns deliver around a 90% higher ROI than those focused on performance alone. Cutting brand to chase efficiency isn’t saving money; it’s starving future demand.

Creative strength matters just as much. Analytic Partners has tested more than 51,000 creatives and, of the creatives, do you know how many truly “wore out”? Fourteen. Yes, that’s right, 14. The rest were pulled too early, right before they peaked. The fact is, creative is the second-largest driver of ROI after spend.

In a constrained budget environment, getting 15% to 20% more life out of your creative is the equivalent of a budget increase, without asking finance for a single additional dollar.

The same logic applies to experimentation. “Test and learn” often sounds to finance like “spend and hope”, but it’s actually disciplined risk management.

When each test has a clear hypothesis, success metric and stop-or-scale rule, you’re not gambling – you’re managing a growth portfolio with a lab coat on. The flat-budget version: “We’re not testing new channels for novelty. We’re testing to find the next 10% efficiency gain that funds next year’s growth.”

Speaking of portfolios, that’s exactly how marketers should frame budgets. In a flat-budget year, this framework becomes even more critical. Pitch a “Growth CapEx” line that mirrors investment language your CFO already trusts:

• Allocate 70% to proven drivers: consistent brand, media diversity, and an omnichannel presence.
• 20% to scaled pilots: already tested initiatives that are ready for rollout.
• 10% new bets: ring-fenced innovation capital.*

This shows you’re not asking for more money to innovate, you’re reallocating from what doesn’t work to what does. In short, it signals your commercial discipline as opposed to a creative indulgence.

Finally, adapt like a market economist. Right-time marketing isn’t about reacting faster; it’s about budgeting smarter. Align spend to seasonality. Categories with natural peaks can lift ROI by 30%.

In a flat-budget environment this is how you avoid leaving growth on the table. Track competitor activity and macro shocks. Publish a monthly “conditions update” that links every reallocation to projected sales, profit and cash flow. Turn perceived flakiness into agility and it starts to look like foresight.

For CFOs, predictability is trust. For CMOs, flexibility is growth. In 2026, add a third principle: efficiency and effectiveness are survival. The sweet spot is measurement that proves all three and that’s where the Marketing Mix Modelling (MMM) comes in.

MMM translates the messy reality of campaigns, promotions, and competition into financial terms. It shows, with evidence, how brand + performance multiplies ROI, why consistency compounds, and how agility preserves margins in volatile conditions.

And when budgets are flat, but costs are rising, MMM becomes your evidence for why marketing should be protected – or even increased – while other departments face cuts.

Analytic Partners’ APAC Marketer’s Budget Playbook: How to Get Your CFO to Say “Yes” in 2026 distils these lessons into six CFO-ready arguments built on ROI Genome data. It’s not a sales deck, it’s a conversation guide. Because CFOs don’t wake up wondering how to fund your campaign, they wake up wondering how to fund growth. With our help, you can provide both those things.

The best defence against budget cuts isn’t a tighter spend plan. It’s a stronger argument, grounded in data the CFO can trust, delivered in a language they understand.

Download APAC Marketer’s Playbook here.

The writer is Nikki Taylor, APAC marketing and communications director, Analytic Partners.