The CMO Council Marketing Vitality Index points to a defining, milestone year ahead

Source: © 123rf 123rf The CMO Council’s inaugural Marketing Vitality Index forecasts waves of vitality, volatility and velocity in 2025

An annual assessment of leading MPIs, the Index is a new way of tracking the dynamic state of marketing using critical business, economic, market, customer, operational, employment, training, outsourcing, channel, budgetary, media spend and technology investment indicators.

Key findings

Key findings of the report include:

• Gen AI and data utilisation technologies will enable significant marketing momentum and customer engagement moments to be tracked, attributed and measured for business value.

• Migration to digital channels and automated marketing platforms will multiply exponentially for both brand equity and performance marketing reasons and results.

• Revenue science platforms will gain traction and lift as chief growth officers examine all areas of monetisation, retention, conversion, expansion, extension, and yield/price optimisation.

• Marketing investments and outcomes will be more productive, predictive, accountable and measurable with spend more surgical and certain to deliver ROI.

“This year’s Marketing Vitality Index shows CMOs under pressure to grow revenue, meet rising customer expectations, create operational efficiencies, improve campaign performance, rein in costs, and address challenges in MarTech,” notes Donovan Neale-May, executive director of the CMO Council, which has 16,000 members in 10,000 companies worldwide.

“The good news is that the expansive CMO remit showcases marketing’s rising influence in the enterprise.”

MPIs curated for the MVI

Some of the notable MPIs curated for the Marketing Vitality Index include:

• 57% of CMOs said MarTech investments in GenAI are likely to create the most value and ROI, followed by 49% in Customer Data Platform & Insights (Source: CMO Intentions 2024)

• 80% of highly evolved marketers are satisfied with their intention-based marketing, compared to only 17% of lesser evolved marketers (Source: Fire Up Your Revenue Generation Engine)
• 37% of CMOs said their campaign performance needs improvement (Source: CMO Intentions 2024)

• Over two-thirds of buyers involved in large and complex transactions valued over $1m are Millennials and Generation Z buyers (Source: Forrester)

• 90% of CMOs are aggressively expanding their investments in digital commerce (Source: Gartner)

For the 2025 Marketing Vitality Index, The CMO Council has curated statistics from trusted third-party sources and centres of domain knowledge, including proprietary data from quantitative surveys and qualitative interviews, to inform an analysis of five core marketing categories: Marketing Mix and Spend, Organisational Dynamics, Market Outlook and Trends, Customer Affinity and Attachment and finally, Technology Adoption and Execution.

CMO Council’s 2025 Marketing Vitality Index includes expert commentary and in-depth insights from industry-leading organisations, including Clickatell, Chief Outsiders, Wise Marketer Group, InMarket, Analytic Partners, Brand Finance, and others.

You can download the CMO Council’s Marketing Vitality Index here