We Asked 8 Marketing Leaders What They’d Cut First If Their Budget Fell 30%. Here’s Where They Actually Disagreed.

Eight marketers sat down with us to talk about hypothetical marketing budget cuts. We asked them a simple question: if your marketing budget was cut by 30% tomorrow, what would you cut first?

Most of the marketers we spoke to would cut based on performance, not simply on which marketing channel costs the most. But they disagreed on what counts as performance, especially when it comes to branding, social media, and other activities with delayed or difficult-to-measure returns.

We expected some obvious answers about paid ads, influencer marketing, events, and maybe even content. Instead, the answers were more interesting. While most of them agreed that you should cut what’s not working, they disagreed on what “not working” actually means.

For some, that meant cutting anything that couldn’t connect to measurable results. For others, it meant protecting the activities that build the brand even when their return is harder to prove. Still, these conversations offered some insight into how marketing budgets are actually managed.

When budgets get tighter, it’s not necessarily about what costs the most, but what the team can afford to stop doing.

Key Takeaways

• Cut based on performance, not category. Six of the eight marketers said they would prioritise cutting activities that aren’t producing enough value.
• Brand marketing is particularly vulnerable. Its impact is harder to attribute directly to revenue, making it easier to challenge during budget reviews.
• AI saves time but doesn’t eliminate work. Marketers are spending less time on production but more time on verification, editing and differentiation.
• Budget cuts can expose capacity problems. Smaller budgets can leave already-stretched teams with less capacity for measurement and testing strategies.
• The safest cut isn’t always the smartest cut. Removing a cost and removing a capability can have very different consequences.

Why Marketing Budget Cuts Expose a Measurement Problem

Ask a marketer what’s hardest to measure, and branding will probably be near the top of the list.

Benjamin Adekunle, a marketing professional who has seen this play out many times, adds that “the effect usually shows up much later and alongside other factors.”

Jeremiah-Jésù Badero, Head of Growth & Marketing, takes Benjamin’s point a step further. For him, it’s not just branding. It’s anything where the distance between “someone saw this” and “someone paid for this” is too wide.

He added that you can spend real money on a marketing activity and still not know, months later, whether it worked or merely looked like it did.

The measurement problem matters more than it seems because it’s not about brand marketing specifically. It’s about any activity with a delay built into it before the result. But if you think about it for more than a minute, it describes much of what actually builds a company.

This is part of a larger problem. Marketing teams are often expected to prove their value while working without a clear strategy for deciding what success looks like. That matters because documented marketing strategy is associated with better reported outcomes. O8 Agency’s research found that marketers with a documented strategy were 313% more likely to report success than those without one.

Quick wins are the ones that show up on a dashboard next week. But the slower work of building trust, recognition and the touchpoints that eventually lead someone to convert might not show up immediately or directly in the numbers. So it’s always the first thing that looks expendable in a budget review, whether it is or not.

You can see the same pattern play out from a different angle with social media. Jelani Khalfani, a marketing specialist, calls it a genuine paradox instead of just a measurement gap. He recalled the time he helped increase an agency’s impressions by 1000% across social platforms, but all of the leads came from the website.

So, the channel that’s hardest to justify on a spreadsheet might be the one doing the most invisible work.

If nearly every marketer agrees that branding and awareness work is hard to measure, then if the overall budget falls, “cut what you can’t prove” might not be the best advice. It might simply lead teams to cut the same categories every time, whether or not they are actually the right ones to touch.

What Marketers Would Cut When Their Marketing Budget Falls

The eight marketers didn’t give us completely different answers, but most of them landed on the same basic principle: when money is tighter, cut what isn’t producing enough value. The interesting part was how differently they decided which marketing activities were worth protecting.

Six out of the eight marketers we spoke to agreed on roughly the same principle when asked what goes first. They plan to cut based on evidence, not category. Halan Haruna put it plainly, as he’d “rather reduce things that are hard to track than cut the campaigns that are bringing in leads, sales, or real engagement.”

Another marketer, Destiny Tawo, gave a nearly identical answer. He said he’ll look at “what’s not performing well and cut that,” and keep whatever’s “actually bringing in results.”

On the surface, that sounds like a tidy consensus, but it’s more complicated than that. Oluwaseyi Onibudo, a marketing lead, breaks from the group entirely and names a category outright: brand marketing.

This is a deliberate tradeoff, but it also contradicts the idea that brand is unmeasurable and therefore automatically vulnerable. Oluwaseyi is choosing to accept that vulnerability on purpose, for a short time, and betting he can undo it later.

Jelani Khalfani goes further still, in the opposite direction from everyone else. He’d scale back social spend specifically to redirect budget into AI-powered ad tools his agency got early access to, describing a “skyrocket” in leads since making the switch.

Where five people are protecting whatever’s already converting, Jelani is actively allocating away from an established channel toward an unproven one, betting that the new tool outperforms the old channel before the money runs out.

From these conversations, it’s clear that these marketers want to protect what they believe drives growth and cut what they believe does not. The disagreement focuses on how confidently they can prove either one.

How AI Changes Marketing Work When Budgets Are Tight

When budgets fall, AI looks like an obvious way to do more with less, but our conversations revealed a catch.

Another finding from our conversations concerned how marketers are using AI, especially when teams are working with tighter budgets. AI is saving marketing teams time, but it’s also creating a different kind of work in its place. All eight people we spoke to described different versions of the same idea: AI is saving time on the front end of the work while quietly adding to the back end.

Judith Korodele, a marketing campaign strategist and copywriter, uses it for “repetitive systems like online research and data analysis, creating slides for my strategy doc, brainstorming creative ideas.” There’s nothing controversial there.

That neatly summarises what several of the marketers told us in different ways, but two people flagged a cost that had nothing to do with accuracy at all. Oluwaseyi Onibudo’s team is saving time on research and documentation, but losing it back on “refining what actually has soul and speaks to a unique brand identity.”

AI isn’t reducing the marketing workload, but it seems to be relocating it away from production and toward verification, differentiation, and taste. While all these marketers have seen the benefits of AI, they also described the extra work it creates.

That matters even more when budgets are under pressure. AI can reduce the time required to produce certain types of marketing work, but it does not remove the need for marketers to review, fact-check, differentiate and decide what is worth putting in front of an audience. In some cases, the efficiency gain simply moves the workload somewhere else.

Why Marketing Budget Cuts Put More Pressure on Teams

Underneath the budget question is a staffing one, and the answers were also consistent across the board. When the marketing budget is cut, teams often have to work with the people they already have, which means some tasks will suffer.

Halan Haruna told us his team is “currently sourcing for a content strategist and creator” because content creation has simply outgrown their bandwidth. Destiny Tawo said the same thing, noting that content creation and testing suffer most “when the team is stretched.”

Benjamin Adekunle’s answer points to a more structural problem. He points out that teams might be too stretched to make content, but they are also too stretched to check whether any of it is working.

Jeremiah-Jésù Badero goes further by explaining that this problem never gets fixed because nobody has time to build proper measurement and attribution infrastructure.

Everyone’s too busy running the machine to build the dashboard that would tell them if the machine is actually working.

Teams are cutting their budgets and reallocating their focus based on evidence, but those same teams might not have the bandwidth to generate good evidence in the first place. That means the decision to cut what can’t prove itself in marketing might be made on incomplete data.

Why Marketing ROI Does Not Always Show Up Immediately

Perhaps one of the most frustrating parts of marketing is trying to convince executives that you actually need that channel or strategy, even if the results might not come instantly. Marketing is often treated as an expense that should produce an immediate payoff, when in reality, it behaves more like an investment with a lag.

One marketer made the point using a football analogy. They argued that organic content can spend months building trust while paid advertising gets the credit when a customer finally converts.

The analogy captures a real attribution problem. The channel closest to the conversion is not necessarily the channel that created the conditions for it.

In marketing, what you created months ago can be what produces the result today. Judith Korodele’s thoughts connect directly to the marketing ROI problem running through this piece. She says that once something can’t prove a direct return, it gets treated as unnecessary, “even when it is clearly necessary for the overall success of the campaign.”

Benjamin Adekunle’s point is about what a 30% cut should actually mean in practice, and it’s the kind of thing that sounds obvious once someone says it, yet it’s absent from a lot of budget conversations today.

Jeremiah-Jésù Badero pushed back on the idea that organic growth is free, saying, “It just moves the cost from media spend to people’s time, incentives, and relationship-building, which is harder to see on a line item.”

He adds that high volume doesn’t automatically mean efficiency. A channel can look great on downloads and signups while quietly losing money underneath.