Outcomes, Scale, and Agility: Transforming Marketing Spend in Uncertain Times with Advertising Intelligence

Confidence is out; Uncertainty is in

The COVID-19 era taught hard lessons about how inflexible media spend could be: many brands found themselves locked into commitments they couldn’t quickly pivot when consumer behavior shifted abruptly.

Today we’re seeing new disruptions: for example, recent tariff battles have caught car manufacturers off-guard, suddenly raising costs in one region and forcing them to shift marketing investments on the fly to other markets where sales remain viable. In such an environment, boards and executive teams are pressuring marketing leaders for speed, impact, and intelligent spending decisions. The message is clear: simply throwing money at marketing is no longer enough.

The latest researches showed how US CEOs’ confidence reached the lowest levels since November 2012:

Most of the Marketing Spend is Unmanaged

This shift in mindset comes not a moment too soon. Despite marketing being one of the largest expenditures for enterprises, it remains astonishingly unmanaged compared to other corporate spend categories. Consider this: according to BCG’s 2024 Enterprise Spend benchmarking, 80% of marketing and media spend is not managed through enterprise systems – by far the biggest unmanaged spend pool, a “white space hiding in plain sight”.

By contrast, functions like procurement, travel, and IT expenses are largely tracked and optimized with dedicated systems.  

It’s no surprise, then, that CFOs are waking up to close this gap. In Gartner’s latest CFO Priorities Survey, 85% of CFOs now rank real-time visibility into marketing performance as a top-3 priority – up from just 45% in 2021.

In other words, the finance chief who once only cautiously eyed the marketing budget is now actively demanding transparency and ROI from it. Marketing leaders must respond by reimagining their strategy: moving from spend to outcome, from spend to scale, and from spend to agility.

From Spend to Outcomes

The Problem:

For years, many marketing teams have been budget-centric: success was often measured by “did we spend the allocated budget?” rather than what outcome did that spend achieve? This spend-first mentality leads to waste and misses opportunities.

CFOs fret that millions in marketing dollars behave like a black box, with weak links to tangible business outcomes. CMOs, for their part, struggle to defend their budgets when the only metric is spend itself or vanity metrics like impressions. In uncertain times, this is especially risky: every dollar wasted on low-impact ads is a dollar that could have driven needed sales elsewhere. Simply put, focusing on spend means focusing on the input, not the output – and enterprises can no longer afford that imbalance.

‍

The Opportunity:

Shifting from spend to outcomes turns marketing into a precision growth and value engine. Instead of asking “how much can we spend?”, the question becomes “how can each dollar work harder for our goals?” This approach aligns marketing investments directly with business KPIs – revenue, pipeline, customer acquisition, brand lift – rather than with a static budget plan. When every marketing activity is tied to an outcome, teams can optimize and redeploy resources toward what actually works.

It’s a change in mindset from treating marketing as a cost center to treating it as an investment portfolio. Modern technology is making this feasible: new AI-driven analytics can connect expenditures to outcomes in real time, revealing which campaigns boost sales or which media buys drive high-value leads. AI can transform marketing into a precision instrument, aligning every dollar to key business outcomes with AI-powered intelligence and agility. In practice, this means a campaign that isn’t hitting targets can be identified and adjusted mid-flight, while high-performing tactics get more support – all with the ultimate goal of maximizing ROI and impact rather than just exhausting the budget.

‍

How MINT enables the shift:

Achieving outcome-driven marketing at scale calls for sophisticated tools – and this is where MINT comes in. MINT’s AI-powered, real-time platform is built to ensure every ad dollar is accountable to results. It integrates data from across the enterprise (media channels, advertising platforms, analytics tools, etc..) to show marketing leaders exactly what outcomes they’re getting for each slice of spend.

If a certain product line or region needs a boost, MINT helps dynamically reallocate budget toward that outcome. Conversely, if spend isn’t translating into results, the platform flags it and can automatically dial it down. This kind of continuous optimization was unimaginable in the old spend-centric world. With MINT, marketing stops being about spend for its own sake and becomes about spend as a means to an end – namely, real business outcomes. The platform even uses AI to learn and predict which investments will likely drive better results, so CMOs and CFOs can make more informed decisions together. The outcome? Marketing dollars start to behave like an investment portfolio managed for growth: higher returns, less waste, and clear line-of-sight to business goals.

‍

From Spend to Scale

The Problem:

When marketing strategy is only about “how much can we spend,” the knee-jerk solution to drive growth is often to spend more (hire more agencies, launch more campaigns, buy more ads). But this approach doesn’t scale efficiently – it typically yields diminishing returns and bloated operations.

Many enterprises have found that doubling the marketing budget does not simply double the sales output; in fact, without better management, it can just double the complexity. Especially in volatile markets, pouring money into more channels or markets can lead to fragmented efforts that strain the marketing team and budget with little incremental gain. CFOs see the spiraling overhead: more vendor contracts, more manual reporting, more wasted impressions – and ask, “Where is the efficiency? Why does scaling marketing always mean scaling cost?” The traditional spend-driven model offers no good answer, because it wasn’t designed to optimize efficiency or productivity of spend.

‍

The Opportunity:

Shifting focus to scale means figuring out how to grow impact exponentially without growing spend linearly. It’s about scaling outcomes (revenue, market share, customer engagement) while containing or even reducing the cost per outcome. This is where technology and AI can change the game. By leveraging intelligent automation and insights, marketing organizations can do more with less: for instance, quickly replicate a successful campaign from one region to another at a fraction of the original cost or run 100 personalized micro-campaigns with the effort that used to fuel one broad campaign.

‍

The key is to scale smart, not scale big.  An AI-driven platform can analyze vast amounts of media and advertising data to find what’s working, then amplify those winning tactics across channels and markets instantly: something a human team alone would struggle to do promptly. It also means eliminating the inefficiencies that come with scale. Instead of hiring an army of analysts to crunch performance numbers, an intelligent system can do it in real time, continuously. This empowers leadership teams to confidently expand marketing’s reach and effectiveness without a proportional budget increase. In short, the organization can grow outcomes (like conversions or brand equity) not overhead.  

‍

How MINT enables the shift:

‍MINT provides the engine to realize scalable marketing efficiency. Its AI-driven platform acts as an autonomous analyst and optimizer, ingesting performance data and learning over time what yields the best results.

‍

Suppose an unexpected channel that didn't receive a lot of budget in the initial planning is delivering an outstanding conversion rate at a low cost: MINT will recognize this pattern and can automatically suggest scaling that channel. Conversely, if some advertising activities are producing very little outcome, MINT’s system will spot the underperformance and recommend reallocating those funds to higher-impact areas. By automating these decisions, MINT lets you scale up what works and scale back what doesn’t in real time. Importantly, this scaling isn’t just about spending more in the high-performing areas – it’s about reallocating and optimizing within your existing budget to get more out of it.

‍

The platform’s Agentic AI (intelligent agents acting on your behalf) means it can execute adjustments faster, ensuring no opportunity is missed in fast-moving markets. For marketing executives, this translates to being able to support a larger number of campaigns, markets, or product lines without a commensurate increase in budget or team size.

‍

From Spend to Agility

The Problem:

Perhaps the biggest pitfall of a spend-centric approach is its rigidity. Traditional marketing plans are locked in early: budgets allocated by region, channel, or product well in advance, often on an annual or quarterly cycle. While that might work in stable times, it becomes a liability when markets shift rapidly. We saw this during COVID: companies that had pre-committed their media spend to certain channels (like out-of-home ads or big in-person events) struggled when those channels suddenly became ineffective or irrelevant under lockdowns.

Many were stuck with misaligned spend – money going where the eyeballs weren’t – because they lacked the agility to reallocate quickly. The same thing can happen with any sudden change: a new tariff or regulation hits a region, a supply chain hiccup means you have no product to sell in Europe this month, or a competitor’s viral campaign overnight changes where your marketing should focus. If your marketing dollars are inflexible, you end up either overspending in areas that no longer need it or missing critical chances to capitalize on new demand. In an age where change is the only constant, static spend is a recipe for lost opportunities and wasted resources.

‍

The Opportunity:

Shifting from spend to agility means treating the marketing budget not as a fixed plan to execute, but as a fluid investment portfolio that can be rebalanced at a moment’s notice. Agile marketing organizations can redirect investments instantly when conditions change. This could mean pausing a campaign and diverting funds to another region in response to a geopolitical event, or ramping up spend on a suddenly trending product category this week and dialing it back next week as interest normalizes.

The benefit of agility is twofold: defense and offense. On the defensive side, real-time agility prevents waste: you’re not stuck pouring dollars down a channel that’s gone cold or a market that’s in turmoil. On the offensive side, agility allows you to seize emerging opportunities – you can jump on a new consumer trend or a surge in demand before competitors do, because your budget isn’t stuck in bureaucratic limbo waiting for next quarter’s reallocation. Enabling this agility requires real-time data and the ability to act on it immediately. It’s about having visibility (seeing what’s happening now) paired with flexibility (being able to course-correct now).

As the saying goes, “You can’t control the market, but you can control how you respond”.  

‍

How MINT enables the shift:

With the right systems, marketing spend can become as agile as the markets it aims to conquer: an always-on, always-adjusting engine that moves in sync with customer needs and external conditions.

For example, if sales data or web traffic indicates a spike in demand in the Asia-Pacific region, MINT can immediately suggest shifting more of your budget to APAC campaigns right now, not next month. If a sudden event (say, a tariff impacting your European sales) diminishes the ROI in that market, MINT’s algorithms will catch the drop in performance and pull back spend, recommending to move those funds to other growing areas or reserving them until the strategy is adjusted.

This responsiveness saves money and captures value that would otherwise be lost. Crucially, MINT’s agility doesn’t require constant manual intervention as it’s an adaptive, self-learning system. Marketing and finance teams set the strategic guardrails (business objectives, budget limits, acceptable ROI thresholds) and MINT’s AI takes care of the minute-by-minute adjustments within those parameters. In sum, MINT turns static spend into agile investment – automated, intelligent, and outcome-driven, all in real time. It gives enterprise leaders the confidence that even in a highly unpredictable environment, their marketing can pivot proactively instead of reacting too late.

Advertising Intelligence: The Missing Link

At the heart of this transformation lies a critical enabler: Advertising Intelligence. In a world where speed, precision, and adaptability are paramount, Advertising Intelligence bridges the gap between decision and execution. It connects data, media workflow, and the latest AI layers into one intelligent system capable of acting in real time.  

‍

Rather than relying on static media plans or lagging reports, brands equipped with Advertising Intelligence can predict, pivot, and perform, instantly. It’s not just about tracking ads, but about optimizing every investment moment-by-moment. MINT embodies the shift toward outcomes, scale and agility, offering the platform enterprises need to move from reactive to proactive, from overspending to outperforming.

‍

In uncertain times, it's not the biggest spenders who win, but the smartest.

‍

‍