Gartner's CMO Spend Survey shows marketing budgets moving toward consumption-based martech and paid media, a shift that changes how CMOs plan contracts and measure returns.

The survey, tracked by Chief Marketer, indicates that marketing leaders are allocating a growing share of budget to paid media and to martech sold on consumption or usage-based pricing rather than flat licensing fees. For CMOs, the finding signals a structural change in budget composition, not just a cyclical adjustment.

What does the shift toward consumption-based martech mean?

Consumption-based pricing ties cost to actual usage — seats, API calls, data volume or platform activity — rather than a fixed annual contract. When marketing organizations adopt this model at scale, several budget consequences follow:

• Spend becomes more variable and harder to forecast on an annual basis.
• Underused tools surface quickly, because idle licenses no longer hide inside flat enterprise agreements.
• Procurement and finance teams need new benchmarks to evaluate martech vendors.
• Marketing operations teams gain leverage to consolidate overlapping platforms.

The Gartner survey result suggests CMOs are accepting that variability in exchange for closer alignment between spend and actual marketing output. It also implies scrutiny of the traditional martech stack, where flat-fee subscriptions have historically absorbed large shares of budget regardless of utilization.

Why is paid media taking a larger share?

The survey points to increased paid media spend alongside the martech shift. Paid media — search, social, programmatic display and retail media — competes directly with owned channels and in-house content production for budget.

Several pressures explain why CMOs direct money there:

• Paid channels deliver measurable, attributable short-term performance.
• Media costs on major platforms continue to rise, forcing budget increases to maintain reach.
• Privacy changes have pushed marketers back toward channels with reliable targeting and conversion data.
• Retail media networks have opened new paid inventory that did not exist in earlier budget cycles.

The combined effect, per the survey, is a budget mix that tilts toward channels and tools priced by consumption — media impressions and martech usage alike.

How should CMO leaders respond?

For marketing leadership teams, the survey findings carry three practical implications.

First, budget planning needs scenario models. If martech costs scale with usage, a surge in campaign activity raises tooling costs as well as media costs. CMOs should build elasticity assumptions into annual plans rather than fixing martech line items at a flat number.

Second, vendor negotiations should reflect the pricing model. Consumption contracts reward marketers who can forecast usage accurately and penalize those who cannot. Marketing operations leaders who track utilization data hold a stronger hand in renewals.

Third, measurement frameworks must keep pace. As more budget flows to paid media, CMOs need to isolate incremental lift from paid channels versus organic and owned performance. Without that discipline, the budget shift reads as growth when it may simply represent higher auction prices for the same outcomes.

The bigger picture for marketing budgets

Gartner's CMO Spend Survey is a recurring benchmark that marketing leaders use to calibrate their own allocations against peers. A documented increase in both consumption-based martech and paid media spend tells CMOs two things: the industry as a whole is trading fixed costs for variable ones, and competition for paid inventory is not easing.

For CMOs still running predominantly flat-fee martech contracts and organic-first channel mixes, the survey data offers a prompt to reassess. The trend reported in the findings suggests the market has already moved, and budget structures that ignore it risk paying more for less flexibility.