These overwhelmingly high recognition rates didn’t happen by accident. It took decades of brand building to cement these companies’ assets into consumers’ minds.
But new survey results suggest that brand building has fallen on the growing list of priorities for chief marketing officers, as they are increasingly under the gun to prove their work drives revenue growth.
According to the survey, conducted by NewtonX for ADWEEK, close to half of executive-level marketers (48%) say that their primary objective is to increase revenue, while just a quarter (24%) cited building long-term brand awareness. (The pool of 501 respondents consisted of 82% brand marketers, 18% agency professionals, and 20% C-suite executives overall.)
“The CMO is now the leading single owner of overall revenue growth,” said NewtonX director of brand partnerships Daniel Sills. “One of the things that CMOs are still struggling with is understanding their financial literacy—how their marketing is making a financial impact and being able to measure it.”
Its a challenge marketing chiefs are grappling with in real time. At ADWEEK House in October, Major League Baseball CMO Uzma Rawn Dowler described her corporate role as “a get-shit-done officer.”
For today’s CMO, Dowler said, “the ‘C’ and the ‘O’ are there, and then in the middle you should just put whatever you need to put in there, because our roles are not just marketing.”
Two major forces seem to be influencing the CMOs’ priority shift—economic worries and the arrival of AI.
Economic anxiety
According to Pew Research released earlier this month, 72% of Americans rate current economic conditions as fair or poor—pessimism that remains largely unchanged from the fall of 2025.
NewtonX’s findings suggest that those same fears are affecting the corporate suite. According to the survey, two out of three of marketers’ biggest worries relate to the economy: While 44% of respondents said they’re concerned about reputational risk, between 42% and 43% cited the possibility of a recession and 39% pointed to layoffs.
“Economically, it’s a bit more uncertain than it was a few years ago, and that has hit the marketing department,” said senior director of strategic insights and analytics Jasmin Siegle. “When [marketers] are in front of the board or have investors to answer to, they have to demonstrate how their activities can be attributed to financial KPIs.”
