Eight questions on whether marketing runs as a commercial discipline: insight, channel economics, measurement, agency governance, experimentation, budget rigour, creative testing and alignment with the P&L.
Marketing is often the largest discretionary budget in the company and the one judged on the thinnest evidence. These eight questions score the machinery around the spend: what is known, what is measured, and who is held to what.
Last reviewed 3 July 2026 · Free and ungated
The Global Board includes operators who have owned marketing budgets and CFOs who have judged them. A client brief puts your plan in front of both, confidentially, before the planning cycle locks it in.
Review this before committingAnswer against evidence the CFO would accept, not against the narrative in the marketing review deck.
On these answers, the marketing budget is a faith-based line item: allocated by history, measured by the platforms selling the media, and defended by narrative. That is survivable in good years and the first casualty in a downturn, precisely because nobody can prove what would be lost.
Pockets of rigour exist, usually in digital channels, surrounded by legacy habits in media, creative or agency management. The risk is asymmetric scrutiny: the measurable channels get optimised while the largest, least measurable spend escapes examination.
This is a function with real commercial machinery: economics understood, experiments running, budgets that move. The typical residual weakness is people-dependent: the discipline lives in a strong CMO or analytics lead rather than in the operating model, and departs with them.
These answers describe marketing run as a commercial discipline, with evidence flowing and money moving accordingly. The danger at this level is optimisation lock-in: a machine tuned beautifully for the current model can be measuring its way past a market shift.
No other budget of comparable size gets approved on evidence this thin, and no other function is asked to prove itself with data generated by its own suppliers. The eight questions deliberately score the surrounding machinery (measurement, governance, reallocation) rather than the marketing itself, because that machinery determines whether anyone can tell good spend from momentum.
Answers score 0, 5 or 10; totals are normalised to 100 and mapped to four bands. It is fixed arithmetic with no interpretation layer, which makes it safe to use in a mixed marketing-finance meeting: the same answers give the same score regardless of who clicks.
The assessment earns its keep when marketing and finance complete it separately. The questions where the two scores diverge, usually measurement quality and commercial alignment, map precisely onto the arguments that recur every planning cycle. Scoring them makes the disagreement discussable instead of seasonal.
Yes. The disciplines are identical even where the channels differ. B2B functions typically score lower on channel economics and measurement quality because of long sales cycles, which makes the commercial alignment question more important, not less.
An honest 5 is the point. The assessment does not reward perfect attribution, which rarely exists; it rewards triangulation and the willingness to let imperfect evidence move money. A confident 10 built on platform-reported numbers is the worse answer.
No. Two of the eight questions score how the agency relationship itself is governed, and the answers change when the agency is in the room. Share the results afterwards if the relationship is strong enough to bear it.