Gartner (2025) — CMO Spend Survey budget snapshots

Summary:

Gartner’s report focuses on how big companies split their marketing budgets in 2025. It looks at total marketing spend, digital versus offline, and which channels get the most money. It also shows how spending has shifted over time and which channels seem to punch above or below their weight.

It was published by Gartner, a research and advisory company that sells paid benchmarks and consulting to business leaders.

The point of this piece is to help CMOs compare their spending with peers and steer budget decisions. Gartner says the figures come from its CMO Spend Survey, covering 11 countries, 10 industries, and a mix of B2B, B2C, and mixed business models, with mean annual revenue of $5.7 billion.

The main topline is that digital now makes up 61% of the total marketing budget, leaving about 39% for offline channels.

• Paid media is the biggest resource bucket.
• Search advertising stands out as a high-spend, high-impact digital channel.
• In offline, event marketing gets the most budget, followed by sponsorship and linear TV, and Gartner says those top three stayed the same from the prior year.

The snapshot also shows marketing budget as a share of company revenue at 7.7% in 2025 overall, down from 7.9% in 2024.

By industry, 2025 budget shares range from 5.9% in manufacturing to 9.5% in pharma, with several sectors clustered around roughly 7% to 9%.

Please note that the free version only includes the promotional snapshot, not the full report, so the methodology is only lightly described.

We get broad sample facts, but not the sampling method, response rate, weighting, fieldwork dates, question wording, or how the impact rankings were built. That makes the findings useful for directional benchmarking, but not something to treat as a precise market census.