I can usually tell how the year is going to play out for a client the moment I see their next yearly budget, writes Shai Luft, co-founder and COO of Bench Media, in this op-ed.
Not because the strategy isn’t strong, or the opportunity isn’t there, but because more often than not, the number has very little to do with either. In many cases, it’s simply a slightly adjusted version of what was spent the year before.
That’s where the problem starts.
Instead of beginning with a clear growth ambition and working out what level of marketing investment is required to achieve it, the process often begins with what feels safe. What was spent last year, what can be justified internally, and how far it can be pushed without creating too much friction.
From there, everything becomes incremental. A small increase, a minor reduction, a few channel shifts to create the sense that something has changed. But rarely does the conversation begin with a bold target and work backwards to determine what it would actually take to get there.
After more than a decade running an independent agency, this has become a familiar pattern. We’ll work closely with a client, build out a strategy grounded in real data, map the relationship between investment and return, and present a clear path to growth. The logic is sound, the opportunity is understood, and everyone in the room agrees on what success looks like.
And then the budget comes back.
And it looks almost identical to the year before.
At that point, nothing has technically gone wrong, but something important has shifted. The strategy is no longer driving the investment. The investment is defining the strategy. Over time, that changes the role marketing plays within a business, from a lever for growth into a cost line that needs to be managed.
The chicken and egg problem
One of the reasons this happens is that marketing sits in a difficult position internally.
Businesses want growth, and marketing teams are expected to deliver it, but the investment required to unlock that growth is rarely committed upfront. Instead, marketing is asked to prove better performance within essentially the same budget envelope, and even when it does, the budget doesn’t always scale in response.
I’ve seen this play out repeatedly. Performance improves, efficiency increases, results exceed expectations, and yet the following year the conversation resets back to the same baseline. The number becomes familiar, and once it becomes familiar, it becomes difficult to move.
Over time, that creates a subtle but powerful constraint. Budgets stop being a strategic decision and start becoming a reference point. Planning becomes less about what is possible and more about what fits within that number.
You see it most clearly during annual planning cycles. There is a huge amount of effort that goes into building thoughtful strategies, modelling different investment scenarios and outlining what it would take to drive meaningful growth. But once those plans move through finance and executive approvals, they often come out the other side looking very similar to the previous year.
Slightly up, slightly down, but rarely reflecting a genuine shift in ambition.
What makes this more frustrating is that most other parts of the business don’t operate this way. When a company wants to expand, launch something new or enter a different market, the starting point is the opportunity, and the investment is assessed against the return.
Marketing should be no different. If the goal is to grow by 20 per cent, then the conversation should start with what it takes to achieve that, not what was spent last year.
Not every answer involves significantly higher budgets, but meaningful growth rarely comes from incremental change alone. Expecting step-change results from flat investment is a tension that is very difficult to resolve.
The brands that back their ambition
When I look at the companies that have achieved outsized growth, what stands out is not just their product or their strategy, but their willingness to invest ahead of the outcome.
Airbnb didn’t wait for demand to fully materialise before investing in marketing. It put significant investment behind building trust and awareness in a completely new category because it understood that growth depended on it.
Uber took a similar approach, investing heavily to build both sides of its marketplace at the same time. That level of growth didn’t come from incremental budget increases, it came from making a deliberate decision to scale.
Even in more mature categories, brands like Nike continue to invest at a level that reflects their ambition rather than their history. They understand that maintaining leadership requires ongoing commitment, not optimisation of what worked last year.
Closer to home, Afterpay is a good example of a business that didn’t hold back during its growth phase. It invested heavily in brand, partnerships and customer acquisition, particularly with younger audiences, and used marketing as a driver of expansion rather than something that followed it.
Across all of these examples, the pattern is consistent. The investment came first, and the growth followed. Marketing wasn’t something that scaled after success, it was part of how that success was created.
Marketers need to change the conversation
I don’t think this is about marketers not understanding the problem. Most do. The challenge is that budget conversations are often approached cautiously, with an expectation that they need to fit within certain boundaries before they’ve even started.
But marketers are in a unique position. They have the data, the market context and the understanding of how investment translates into outcomes. That puts them in a position to do something that doesn’t happen often enough, which is to make a clear, commercial case for investment.
The strongest marketing leaders I’ve worked with don’t treat budgets as something they inherit. They treat them as something they help shape. They bring forward different scenarios, model the impact of increased investment, and are explicit about what happens if the business chooses not to invest.
Because the real risk is not spending more. It’s under-investing and expecting growth anyway.
In a market that is becoming more competitive, more fragmented and more expensive, continuing to anchor marketing budgets to last year’s number is unlikely to produce materially different outcomes. At some point, the conversation needs to shift towards ambition, and towards backing that ambition with the level of investment required to achieve it.
Because in my experience, the brands that grow are rarely the ones that play it safe.
The future tends to favour the bold, and if marketing budgets continue to be set by looking backwards, growth will tend to follow the same pattern.
Written by Shai Luft, co-founder and COO of Bench Media.
