On TBPN on 24 April, Gary Vaynerchuk put a number on something every CMO already knew. "Fortune 500 CMOs are wasting 93 cents of every dollar they spend," he said, "and every brand on earth should be spending 20% of their entire marketing budget just on social media organic production." His reasoning was that AI has collapsed the cost of mid-funnel content, the funnel itself has shifted, and the budget hasn't caught up. He's right about the waste. He's wrong about the fix, because the wasted 93% is doing other work most critiques never look at: it's what currently produces the dashboard the board reads each quarter.

The number itself is engineered for a podcast clip. Ninety-three is precise enough to sound rigorous and vague enough that nobody can cleanly disprove it. The substance underneath is genuine, though. Most enterprise marketing budgets are pointed in the wrong direction, most CMOs know it, and AI has now made the mid-funnel work they ought to be doing instead much cheaper to produce. The question worth asking is why the people running these departments, most of whom are perfectly capable, can't move the money even when they see the gap. The answer the original argument doesn't really address is that the wasted spend has a second job that the dashboard requires.

The dashboard's real job

Impressions, reach, MQLs, top-of-funnel pipeline contribution, share of voice. These are activity numbers. They tell you what the function did each quarter — how much content went out, how many ad slots were filled, how many leads were qualified. They give the CMO a number to put on a slide each quarter, the CFO a column to compare with last year, and the board a way to evaluate a function that otherwise lacks an obvious evaluation criterion. Most of these numbers could be deleted tomorrow without anyone's revenue moving by a pound. But if you delete them, the function loses its budget, because the people setting the budget don't know what else they'd judge it on.

This is the part that doesn't show up in marketing critiques very often. The reason the wasted spend exists is structural. Buying impressions produces the report. Cut the impression-buying and the report empties out. Cut the report and the budget gets a haircut at the next planning round. Most CMOs understand this perfectly well; it's their job to.

It's the same dynamic I ran into when writing about marketing's two-front war: the work that actually matters happens somewhere there's no dashboard for it and no obvious owner of it, so the comfortable, measurable activity gets resourced instead.

Mid-funnel work, and why it's hard to fund

Mid-funnel work is hard for exactly this reason. It doesn't return a number in thirty days. Brand-building, organic social, podcasts, content that earns trust over six months — these activities produce results you can only see as compounding effects on win rates, deal size, and inbound velocity. By the time the effect shows up in a quarterly report, you can't cleanly attribute it to any single piece of work. There's no dashboard tile that says "this episode of our podcast contributed £40,000 of pipeline." There can't be. So when budget time comes around, the CMO who reallocated 20% to organic mid-funnel content has nothing to point at, while the colleague who kept buying programmatic impressions has a chart that goes up and to the right.

The 20% reallocation Vee is recommending is, technically, sound. AI tools have collapsed the cost of producing organic social. A small in-house team can now ship in a week what a creative agency used to bill for over a quarter, and the unit economics have flipped exactly as he says they've flipped. Producing it has never been cheaper. None of that matters in the boardroom, because the boardroom isn't reading unit economics. It's reading the same dashboard it read in 2019, and that dashboard has no row for "trust accumulated."

There's an argument I've made before that AI didn't break marketing so much as expose which content was ever worth finding — the rules of discovery changed, and the content built to game the old ones became invisible. Vee's 93% is downstream of the same shift. The economic case for the mid-funnel is overwhelming. What hasn't shifted is the internal political case, and the political case is what actually funds it.

The vinyl signal

There's a counter-signal worth holding next to all of this. Vinyl records hit $1 billion in US sales last year — the first time since 1983, growing 9.3% year on year. Independent bookshops are growing again. In-person conferences are oversubscribed and prices are rising. The marketing channels that have worked most reliably for premium brands over the past few years share a feature: they don't appear on any funnel diagram, and they produce no impressions data at all.

What's emerging is barbell-shaped. At one end sits the slow, expensive, hard-to-measure analog work: events, physical media, direct mail to a hundred named people, the things that look like 2002. At the other end sits the cheap AI-produced organic content that Vee is talking about: TikToks and shorts and podcast clips, the things that look like 2026. The middle of the bar — impression-buying, programmatic, MQL factories — is quietly hollowing out. That's the shape of where attention has gone.

What the two ends share is a problem: neither produces a number you can put on a quarterly slide. A handwritten note to ten key prospects doesn't make a dashboard. Neither does a TikTok that earns three million organic views over six months and changes how a category talks about itself. A marketing director who funds either is doing real work. A marketing director who keeps buying impressions is doing dashboard work. From the boardroom seat, only the dashboard work is visible. So that's what gets resourced, every quarter, in every public company you've ever worked with.

The measurement question that comes first

Vee's prescription is a budget reallocation, but the harder, prior question is about measurement. The CFO has to accept results that take six months to show up and can't be cleanly attributed to a single campaign. Founder-led companies do this routinely, because the founder has the standing to say "we're going to stop measuring the bit that's easy and start measuring the bit that matters." Public-company CMOs reporting to a CFO and a board generally can't make that move alone. Their budget conversations are constrained by what their counterparts can see on a slide, and the slide hasn't changed in twenty years.

Marketing is full of perfectly capable people producing reports nobody believes, because the alternative is a report nobody can read. I've written before about how the industry's self-indulgent culture lets a lot of this go unchallenged — the awards, the jargon, the trend-chasing — but the part that survives every one of those critiques is the dashboard. The dashboard is the mechanism by which the function keeps its budget. Critics can attack the awards or the jargon and nothing happens. Attack the dashboard and the function's whole budget conversation collapses, which is exactly why nobody does.

If you're going into a planning round wanting to do what Vee suggests, there are three tests that decide whether the reallocation will actually hold:

  1. What evidence will you accept? Before you move any money toward mid-funnel work, get clear on what trust-building evidence — pipeline velocity over a year, deal-size shifts, inbound-source mix — you're willing to track and defend. If you can't name it now, you won't be able to defend it in six months when the impressions chart looks sparse.
  2. Who in the boardroom will hold the line? The CFO and the board are reading a specific dashboard. You need someone senior — ideally the CEO, often the founder — who will keep saying "we're running on the longer measure now" when the easy numbers start looking thinner.
  3. What's coming off the dashboard, and when do you tell them? You can't add a measurement without retiring one. Decide which existing metric you're letting go of and brief the board before the next quarter's report shows up looking different.

Skip any of those three and Vee's 20% reverses itself within two planning cycles, and the budget returns to the same line items it left.

Vee's right that the marketing budget is misallocated. But the 93% is the consequence of an earlier change that hasn't happened yet — about what the board is willing to call evidence — and I'm not sure whether that change has to come from the CFO or further up. Either way, until somebody at the top accepts evidence that's slower, fuzzier, and harder to attribute, the dashboard wins. And the dashboard knows what it likes.