Flat Budgets, Bigger Targets: Seven Ways Businesses Are Finding Money They Already Have

By Assyl Yespanova, Higgsfield 

Marketing budgets have stayed essentially unchanged. Gartner’s CMO survey reports that in 2026 marketing budgets are at 7.8% of revenue, up from 7.7% in 2025. “CMOs are being asked to deliver growth, efficiency and transformation without meaningful budget expansion,” said Ewan McIntyre, VP analyst at Gartner. The survey, which drew on the responses of 401 marketing leaders, mostly at companies with over $1 billion in annual revenue, revealed over half of respondents (56%) reported they lack the budget to fund their strategy. There’s also tension in the numbers: 70% of the surveyed companies prioritize AI leadership, and 70% also say the AI processes involved are unready and immature.

A bigger budget isn’t the only way to get more out of marketing, though. When One of One Studios built a campaign around Diego Maradona, it skipped the usual physical production and the expensive archival footage. The agency secured the rights to Maradona’s likeness and used camera-controlled generative AI to render cinematic, highly realistic video ads for social media. With very little traditional marketing money behind it, the campaign reached more than 10 million people through organic sharing alone. The videos were striking enough that people passed them along on their own, and the apparel collection they promoted sold out in three weeks.

Not every brand will get a Maradona moment. But the same thinking applies to everyday production budgets. The seven tips below look at where that money goes, starting with the repeat work and archived assets a company already has and ending with how to spend what gets saved.

Tip 1. Audit the full cost of each asset

Take stock of the resources each asset requires. Ideas typically go through five rounds of development and approval, according to the BetterBriefs for the BetterIdeas Project report, which surveyed 1,034 agency, marketers and in-house respondents across 54 countries. Those rounds apply only to revisions to the ideas themselves, before the work gets close to editing or to a finished ad. Any rework adds to the cost of the ad.

A practical cost checklist extends far beyond the typical shoot budget. It should cover everything from the first idea to the last edit of the finished media, including revisions and approvals, versions for different channels, postproduction and staff hours.

Tip 2. Decide which work belongs in-house

The share of companies with in-house agencies nearly doubled from 42% in 2008 to 82% in 2023, according to 162 respondents of an Association of National Advertisers (ANA) member survey. While 65% of these companies had transferred some of the established work in-house, 92% still use outside agencies. Respondents named cost efficiency as the biggest benefit of this structure. When an in-house team doesn’t have enough expertise or is already at capacity, outside specialists can bring more dedicated skills and narrow expertise, and take on the extra work. By combining the advantages of both, businesses can win by maintaining the recurring work inside and taking the best from the outside. The real decision is understanding and selecting which work goes where.

Tip 3. Cut duplicate production work

In a 2025 press release, Unilever announced that it uses digital replicas of its products in 3D, which significantly simplifies its production of marketing images. Every digital twin is saved in a single file that contains variations of the product, including language translations alongside labels and packaging. It reduces duplicated production work, giving marketers an opportunity to send and use the same models across various marketing channels whether it’s a TV commercial or online retail. The company reported producing product imagery twice as fast at half the cost. Thus, application of AI creates an approach that allows marketing specialists to have more time to concentrate on the creative side of producing content.

Tip 4. Test variations before spending more on media

Google Ads offers an experiment that allows users to run their ad campaigns for Search, Display, Video and Hotel in variations and split traffic and budget between them while showing how each of them perform. That way, the team gets to choose which ad variation to use before spending any more.

Product-ad variations based on preexisting creatives can be a good foundation for AI use cases; however, the emotional and creative components should still be human-made and led by people in teams, recommends a 2026 report from Ipsos and Syracuse University’s Newhouse School. Researchers showed 3,000 U.S. respondents 20 different ads, half made by people and half AI-generated with zero human post production. According to Ipsos’ predicted effectiveness score, “human-made ads are 14% stronger on short-term effectiveness (Creative Effect Index) and 17% stronger on long-term effectiveness (Equity Effect Index).”

Emotional brand storytelling should belong to humans, while AI’s main scope is helping with product work, ad variations and scale.

Tip 5. Turn product pages into new social ads

Plenty of businesses already have enough raw material to run more than one ad campaign. “What every brand has is an asset library, and they don’t realize they’ve got one,” Billy Corbyn, head of Global Creative Works at Google, told Think with Google in a February 2024 article. A typical product page already has product photos, specifications, FAQs and customer reviews the business has permission to publish and reuse. Those assets alone can turn into a variety of new ads, like feature close-ups or an ad built around clients’ questions and answers.

Tip 6. Give AI spending a measurable job

The 2026 Gartner survey of 401 CMOs and other marketing leaders illustrates that 15.3% of marketing budgets go to AI, while organizations with fully mature AI readiness spend 21.3% of their budgets on AI initiatives. The same organizations with developed AI readiness report about 8.9% of revenue in total marketing budgets, slightly above the overall average of 7.8%. 

However, the survey doesn’t explain if bigger budgets lead to bigger spending on AI or more AI spending leads to bigger budgets. This is important information. The measurement of the success of an AI campaign might rely on comparison of cost per approved asset, which includes the number of generation attempts, editing, revisions and staff time. Only by taking all that into consideration can the team draw a conclusion on whether AI helped save money. The main two goals of any AI budget are to define production and find a useful method to measure the finished work.

Tip 7. Decide where the savings will go

A campaign that wraps up early frees up hours for work teams didn’t have time for before. A smaller outside bill frees up cash that now can be redirected to other things that kept getting postponed, like customer interviews.

A 2026 CMO survey of 308 U.S. marketing leaders points out that fewer than half of these companies report that marketing and finance work together on growth. Now that the saved cash and time can build a better foundation for the next campaign with the new opportunities, marketing can propose a better budget plan. For example, saved money could be repurposed to spend on audience research that allows teams to understand how to build the next campaign better. That kind of plan can help convince finance to agree on the next investment.

Gartner’s numbers suggest marketing budgets won’t loosen much in the near term, so any extra room has to come from inside the business. For most teams, that money is already tied up in extra approval rounds, unused product-page assets and shoots that could cost a fraction of what they do now. The companies that track what each asset really costs, and decide in advance where the savings will go, will walk into their next budget meeting with a stronger case.