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Image Credit: State of Brand

Growth & Strategy

Where B2B Marketing Budgets Are Going in 2027, and What's Getting Cut

Q: What is State of Brand?

State of Brand is a trade publication covering brand strategy and category positioning for CMOs, brand strategists and marketing leaders. We report on the ideas, people and developments shaping brand strategy, category positioning, and how brands hold meaning as media fragments, with a particular focus on perspectives from the executives, operators and subject matter experts doing the work firsthand. Our readership is global and includes professionals at Fortune 500 companies and leading organizations across brand and marketing. Our goal is to give practitioners a useful place to learn from their peers and give experts a credible platform to contribute their experience to important industry conversations.

Q: Who do you interview, and why was I invited?

We regularly speak with senior executives, operators, practitioners, researchers and other subject matter experts whose experience is relevant to the topics we cover. Our editorial team proactively identifies potential contributors based on their professional expertise, experience and perspective. You do not need to be a customer of, partner to, or otherwise affiliated with any company to participate. Interviews are designed to surface useful firsthand perspectives rather than promote a product or company. For participants, they provide an opportunity to contribute to the conversation around their field, share lessons from their work, and build a published body of thought leadership around the subjects they know best. There is no fee to participate.

Q: Who publishes State of Brand?

State of Brand is published by Outlever, which produces it as one of its own media properties rather than on behalf of an outside sponsor. The articles and interviews are produced by the State of Brand editorial team. Experts are invited because their perspectives are relevant to our coverage, not because they have paid to appear. An interview invitation from State of Brand should therefore be understood as an invitation to contribute expertise to an editorial trade publication — not as a sales solicitation or paid placement.

Q: Where will my interview appear, and who will see it?

Your interview will be published on State of Brand, where it becomes part of our ongoing coverage of brand strategy and category positioning and can continue to be discovered and referenced after publication. Our audience includes CMOs, brand strategists and marketing leaders at organizations around the world, including professionals at Fortune 500 companies and other leading enterprises. We also make interviews easy to extend through professional networks. Contributors receive a shareable article link and professionally designed quote-card asset that can be used on LinkedIn, and stories may receive additional amplification through the publication, contributor networks and relevant professional communities. For many contributors, the value is not simply appearing in one article. It is having their expertise captured in a credible editorial format that can be shared with colleagues, customers, peers and their broader professional network.

Marketing budgets have barely moved as a share of revenue since 2022, but CMOs are rearranging what's inside them for 2027. The biggest gains are going to AI, labor and events, and martech is giving up the most ground.

ByState of Brand Editorial

Oct 21, 2026

Nine in ten marketing leaders told Forrester they expect a bigger budget next year. Gartner's data says the share of revenue going to marketing hasn't changed. For most CMOs, that means a 2027 plan built on moving money around rather than adding to it.

Forrester's 2027 budget planning research found that 91% of marketing decision-makers expect their budgets to increase over the next 12 months. Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey of 401 marketing leaders found budgets at 7.8% of company revenue, up from 7.7% in 2025 and still below where they sat before 2022.

The two findings fit together once you separate dollars from share. Revenue growth lifts the dollar figure, while marketing's slice of the company stays flat. In Gartner's survey, 56% of CMOs said they don't have the budget to deliver this year's strategy. In The CMO Survey 2026 from Duke, Deloitte and the American Marketing Association, 56% of marketing leaders said their CFO is pushing harder for proof that marketing pays off.

We read through this year's major spend surveys and our own recent reporting to see where 2027 money is headed. AI and marketing labor are gaining share, and so are events and spending on outside experts. Martech, gated content and retention programs are paying for it.

At State of Brand, we think the surveys understate one category. For a company working with a flat budget, owned media is the best place to put new money in 2027. By owned media we mean a publication that covers your industry, interviews the people your buyers listen to and keeps publishing between campaigns. Most budgets file it under content. We'd make it a line of its own.

AI now takes 15% of the average marketing budget

Gartner found CMOs put an average of 15.3% of their marketing budgets toward AI this year. Companies that consider themselves ready to scale AI spend closer to 21.3%. Only 30% of CMOs rated their AI readiness as mature, though, so a good share of next year's AI spending will go to tools that teams are still learning to use.

The same survey found labor's share of the marketing budget went up, from 21.9% in 2025 to 24.5% in 2026. Many CMOs expected AI to shrink their teams. Gartner's analysts read the increase as a sign that companies need skilled people to get anything out of the tools they've bought.

More money is going to outside experts and events

TopRank Marketing's B2B influencer research found 85% of B2B marketers now use influencers, compared with 34% in 2020, and most of the advanced programs expect their dedicated budgets to grow. B2B influencers are usually practitioners, analysts and executives with a following in one field. Increasingly, companies are counting their own leaders among them.

Events are also taking a larger share. Event marketing made up 23.1% of offline budgets in Gartner's 2026 survey, compared with 19.4% the year before, Chief Marketer reported. Forrester's events research found most teams plan to add gatherings of fewer than 200 people.

AI search is getting its own line in the budget

Some teams call it GEO. Others call it AI search or fold it into PR. The goal in each case is to show up when a buyer asks ChatGPT or Perplexity which vendors to look at.

AI engines rely far more on third-party sources than on company websites, as we explained in September. That pushes AI search budgets toward earned media, original research and owned publications run to journalistic standards. The line is still small at most companies, and few are measuring it. A McKinsey survey of Fortune 500 consumer-brand CMOs found only 16% systematically track how they perform in AI search.

Owned media is the line we'd fund first

AI engines cite reported, third-party material, and buyers trust practitioners more than brands. For years the trade press supplied a lot of both, and it is getting smaller. As we reported this week, one analysis now counts about six PR people for every working journalist, and niche B2B beats tend to be cut first.

Earned coverage is getting harder to win at the moment it matters most. A Muck Rack study of 25 million links cited by ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini found 84% came from earned media. Meltwater found that an identical piece of content was cited 8% of the time on a brand's own site and 34% of the time on a third-party outlet. We take that as an argument for owned channels that work like independent publications, with a defined beat, reported stories and named sources. A corporate blog with product updates won't get the same treatment from the engines.

Some large companies already budget this way. Ford hired a former AP bureau chief as editor-in-chief. Robinhood built Sherwood as a standalone media brand, and Andreessen Horowitz put together an in-house New Media team with its own writers and producers.

The finance argument is about how long the spending keeps working. Paid media stops producing when the spend stops, and a campaign asset is usually stale within a quarter. A publication keeps building on itself. Executives and customers who are interviewed share their stories, the archive grows, and AI engines have more to cite each month. With Gartner showing paid media at a five-year high, a channel whose cost per result drops over time is worth a serious look.

Martech is giving up the most budget

Martech's share of the marketing budget fell to 19.4% in Gartner's 2026 survey, its lowest in five years and down from 26.6% in 2021. Teams haven't stopped buying software. Chief Marketer noted that 62% of CMOs still plan to spend more on martech, but more contracts are usage-based now, and some of what used to count as martech spending is being booked under AI or labor instead.

For most teams, the 2027 version of this is consolidation: retiring overlapping tools bought between 2020 and 2023 and moving the savings into AI and the staff who run it before finance reclaims the money.

Gated content is losing its budget

Gated ebooks, templated webinars and high-volume content calendars were designed for buyers who started on Google and filled out a form to get a PDF. Fewer buyers work that way now. G2 found 51% of software buyers start their research in an AI chatbot, which summarizes a category for them without a download.

Generative AI has also driven the cost of producing that material close to zero, and buyers can tell when they're reading it. Content budgets are moving toward fewer pieces built on original data, named experts and reporting. That is also the kind of material AI engines tend to cite.

Retention cuts could cost B2B companies later

Gartner found spending on customer loyalty and retention has dropped 29% since 2024 and now accounts for less than 15% of media spend. Awareness and conversion climbed to 62.6% over the same period, and paid media reached a five-year high of 31.4% of the total budget.

Gartner's analysts flagged a problem with that trend. The most AI-mature marketing organizations put more into loyalty and retention and less into digital channels, and Gartner suggested less mature teams may be over-investing in whatever is easiest to measure and automate. In B2B, existing customers are also a company's most believable references. Pulling budget away from them weakens the stories a brand can tell about itself.

CEOs and CFOs want control of AI spending

Who controls the 2027 AI budget may matter as much as its size. Gartner found 88% of CEOs plan to increase AI investment, and agencies are selling to them directly. Publicis chief executive Arthur Sadoun has said the group is pitching CEOs instead of going through the CMO, and he credits that approach for a record run of new business that included PepsiCo's global media account.

Finance is also involved. Martin Sorrell has argued that CFOs, rather than marketing chiefs, will drive enterprise AI adoption, and more marketing AI projects are now being judged against ROI targets that finance sets. UPS, Etsy and Walgreens have all eliminated the standalone CMO role.

If AI budgets move above marketing, much of the money could go to efficiency projects that have nothing to do with how buyers find and evaluate a company. CMOs who can show how AI is changing their company's visibility with buyers will have a stronger claim on that budget than those reporting only on internal productivity.

Our take

Across the surveys, the budget lines losing share are mostly ones AI has made cheaper to produce or easier to automate, like software seats, templated content and programmatic media. The lines gaining share depend on people. That includes the staff who run AI, the experts buyers follow and the events where buyers meet each other.

We think owned media should sit at the top of that second group, and that most B2B companies are still putting too little into it. In a 2027 plan, we would protect funding for a publication that covers your category, staffed by at least one editor with newsroom experience. We would fund interviews with your executives, customers and the practitioners your buyers already follow, published as reporting on their expertise so they have a reason to share it. And we would keep budget for the people who make AI tools useful, which is the trend behind Gartner's rising labor numbers.

We should be upfront that this is the business our publisher is in. State of Brand is published by Outlever, which builds brand newsrooms for companies, and this publication is one of them. We think the model works because we run it every day. We're also not neutral, so weigh the argument with that in mind.

We cover the strategy behind these budget lines in The 2027 B2B Marketing Playbook.

Disclosure: State of Brand is published by Outlever, which builds owned media programs and brand newsrooms for companies.

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Frequently Asked Questions

What is State of Brand?

State of Brand is a trade publication covering brand strategy and category positioning for CMOs, brand strategists and marketing leaders.

We report on the ideas, people and developments shaping brand strategy, category positioning, and how brands hold meaning as media fragments, with a particular focus on perspectives from the executives, operators and subject matter experts doing the work firsthand.

Our readership is global and includes professionals at Fortune 500 companies and leading organizations across brand and marketing. Our goal is to give practitioners a useful place to learn from their peers and give experts a credible platform to contribute their experience to important industry conversations.

Who do you interview, and why was I invited?

We regularly speak with senior executives, operators, practitioners, researchers and other subject matter experts whose experience is relevant to the topics we cover.

Our editorial team proactively identifies potential contributors based on their professional expertise, experience and perspective. You do not need to be a customer of, partner to, or otherwise affiliated with any company to participate.

Interviews are designed to surface useful firsthand perspectives rather than promote a product or company. For participants, they provide an opportunity to contribute to the conversation around their field, share lessons from their work, and build a published body of thought leadership around the subjects they know best.

There is no fee to participate.

Who publishes State of Brand?

State of Brand is published by Outlever, which produces it as one of its own media properties rather than on behalf of an outside sponsor.

The articles and interviews are produced by the State of Brand editorial team. Experts are invited because their perspectives are relevant to our coverage, not because they have paid to appear.

An interview invitation from State of Brand should therefore be understood as an invitation to contribute expertise to an editorial trade publication — not as a sales solicitation or paid placement.

Does it cost anything to be interviewed or featured?

No. There is no fee to participate in an interview or to be featured in State of Brand.

We do not charge executives, subject matter experts, or their companies for editorial coverage. There are no placement fees, participation fees, required subscriptions, or other payments associated with being interviewed or included in an editorial feature.

Our editorial team invites contributors because their experience, expertise, or perspective is relevant to the subjects we cover — not because they have paid for exposure.

State of Brand is published by Outlever, which allows the publication to produce ongoing reporting and interviews without charging the experts who contribute to our coverage.

Participation also does not require you or your organization to purchase anything from, become a customer of, or enter into a commercial relationship with anyone.

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Our goal is to accurately represent your perspective while keeping the process lightweight for busy executives and subject matter experts.

Where will my interview appear, and who will see it?

Your interview will be published on State of Brand, where it becomes part of our ongoing coverage of brand strategy and category positioning and can continue to be discovered and referenced after publication.

Our audience includes CMOs, brand strategists and marketing leaders at organizations around the world, including professionals at Fortune 500 companies and other leading enterprises.

We also make interviews easy to extend through professional networks. Contributors receive a shareable article link and professionally designed quote-card asset that can be used on LinkedIn, and stories may receive additional amplification through the publication, contributor networks and relevant professional communities.

For many contributors, the value is not simply appearing in one article. It is having their expertise captured in a credible editorial format that can be shared with colleagues, customers, peers and their broader professional network.