We sat down with five marketing leaders across industries and org sizes to have a deep
discussion about what’s really going on behind the data in our recent Voice of the CMO Report.
Taylor Corrado
Senior Director of Brand Marketing | Wistia
Currently leading the brand marketing team at Wistia, the complete video marketing
platform leading businesses use to make an impact, Taylor has spent the last 15 years
driving awareness and growing brands across industries.
The primary metric CMOs track has shifted from sales in 2024 (46%) to brand awareness
in 2025 (62%), perhaps indicating a broader, more brand-building mindset. The findings
suggest that CMOs in 2025 are operating with a sharper strategic focus. While financial
pressures remain high, there’s a clear pivot towards prioritising long-term brand equity
over short-term sales metrics, and a more comprehensive approach to measuring
marketing effectiveness across the board.
It’s really interesting to see such a shift in the data year over year from sales to brand
awareness — brands and CMOs are clearly seeing that shift back to brand investment. Wistia
has always kept brand as a priority. But I think in a lot of companies, that mindset shifted very
heavily towards driving MQLs, driving sales, and driving pipeline. So I’m really happy to see
such an increase towards brand-building.
I think it speaks to the fact that we’re in a shift back from performance-based marketing, where
you have so much data — you can track every click and every email open and everything that
anyone does — and get a really good sense of what spend results in revenue. Marketers have
been losing that data over the last five years with ad blockers, cookies going away or being
limited, and SEO data really being very limited.
We’re now going back to what I call the Mad Men days of marketing, where you are investing
more in brand forward content and partnerships, then after a certain period of time, you hope to
see a bump in your metric, whether it’s a month or three months or six months. But you can’t
necessarily pinpoint exactly where people are seeing an ad or content, what they’re doing when
they see it, and what they’re doing next because so much of the interaction with brand
marketing is happening off your site now. It’s all on social media, it’s in communities, it’s in DMs,
it’s in text messages and no one can track that stuff anymore.
Organic traffic has declined so much over the last year with AI search optimization and Google
AI summaries — we’ve seen our organic traffic go down by 50%. We’re seeing that shift back to
needing to connect with your audience through your brand and having a strong brand point of
view and voice. CMOs have to go back to that mentality of doing something that’s going to capture people’s attention and being ok with not being able to track it all the way down the funnel.
There’s been a culture over the last 10 years of justifying every dollar that you spend on
marketing, and wanting to tie every dollar to a result, and now that’s really hard to do. Marketers
are having to get better at telling the story to the C-suite beyond the simplistic view of we did a
thing and it resulted in this other thing — they’re having a harder time showing the data so they
need to go back to messaging in the market and telling the story of a campaign, how they’re
connecting with the audience, and the qualitative feedback that they’re hearing. They are really
having to shift to where their audience’s attention is across so many different platforms which
is a hard shift especially if you’re fighting for budget on a regular basis. It’s especially hard for
people that have built companies over the last 15 years on the fact that you could predict your
pipeline and where your leads are coming from, then report back on it from a marketing
perspective. It’s a big mind shift that we’re all going through.
Activism doesn’t appear to be something brands can shy away from, without potentially
alienating half of UK consumers. Younger generations, in particular, expect brands to
take a stand on key social issues, while B2B decision-makers also consider a company’s
values when making purchasing decisions.
CMOs are acutely aware of brand backlash when planning campaigns. Almost a quarter
(24%) state it’s always on their mind, and 2 in 5 (40%) worry about brand backlash most of the
time. Just 7% of CMOs never feel concerned about this issue.
Before I joined Wistia, there was a lot of internal conversation about DEI. And it’s part of our
ethos and our culture, it’s in our hiring and communication practices. It’s very much ingrained in
our company. But over the last five years — since Covid and Black Lives Matter — it’s so hard
for companies to continually message on and have commentary on everything that’s happening
in the world, because there is so much happening and there’s so many places you can support
and give awareness to or have a perspective on. It’s really challenging for leadership to keep
up.
A couple years ago we were communicating with everybody internally and even making some
statements externally. And it got to the point where every month we were discussing whether we
comment on something — what do we say externally? What do we say internally? We
eventually had to shift our focus to just supporting our employees and being really clear
internally where we are as people and how we can support each other. But externally, we’ve
gotten to more of a neutral position where we don’t comment on everything that’s happening in
the world. We also focus more locally and support a lot of local organisations and nonprofits. We
do a handful of local events at our office and so we’ve tried to lean back into the community that
we can impact right around our office, but it’s really tough.
I do think there’s a difference between consumer brands and B2B brands. I think consumer
brands have to take a stand, and it’s much more important and expected for them to be
opinionated and take a stand on social and political issues. In B2B it’s just not as expected. And
I think we’re all trying to balance supporting our employees internally and trying to support our
customers’ points of view externally.
Some CMOs still have a way to go to win the backing of business leaders. 62% say
stakeholders fully understand marketing’s importance, so they have full buy-in. But 33%
say their stakeholders only somewhat understand the value of marketing, resulting in
partial buy-in. This partial buy-in indicates a level of scepticism from stakeholders and
doubtless has an effect on budgetary decisions. However, it’s clear that market research
is key in securing stakeholder backing.
Notably, almost 7 in 10 (69%) CMOs who measure effectiveness using market research
also state stakeholders at their business are fully invested in the marketing strategy;
whereas significantly fewer (45%) CMOs who don’t employ market research enjoy
complete boardroom backing.
When I joined Wistia five years ago, we were at a crossroads on our company strategy,
especially on the product side. So we did a lot of market research to investigate where the video
space was going, and what companies needed. We did a ton of research to develop personas
of our ideal customer. We also did research on where we stacked up against competitors, how
to improve our customer journey, and reactions to our current pricing model.
I don’t know where we would be without that research. It informed almost all of our product
strategy that we’ve been implementing for the last five years. It’s the foundation for Wistia going
from a point solution to a full platform and offering more solutions that help people save money
and consolidate their tools for video.
I’ve seen a lot of companies at that crossroads — leaders are guessing, and assuming that if I
want this, then our audience definitely wants it. And they guess over and over, then nothing
works. Then they get to the point where they decide they should talk to their customers and their
target audience.
I feel like you can waste so much time and energy testing and guessing and assuming what
your target customers want, when you could literally just ask them. Sometimes it’s the ego of
leadership that plays into that — they think that they know the problem and the solution, and
they’re adamant about it, so they’ll just go forward. I wish companies would do market research
more often and give their teams the tools to be able to do it regularly than once every five years.
Marketing teams are grappling with budget constraints. In fact, 89% CMOs face budget
challenges. The most common challenge reported is deciding what the best decision for
the brand is with limited budget (46%).
However, the future outlook is optimistic. High percentages of CMOs surveyed expect PR
(72%), marketing (85%), brand awareness (79%) and market research (75%) budgets to
increase in the next year.
Everyone’s facing challenges, but then they’re also going to increase their spend.
Marketing has become so dispersed on so many channels and in so many mediums — we want
to do it all. We want to host events in person, we want to go to conferences, we want to build a
community, we want to support other communities, we want to run advertising campaigns, we
want to work with influencers, we want to do paid search, we want to do everything. You likely
cannot do that efficiently and effectively with the amount of budget that you’re given.
I’m constantly making trade offs of what channels are going to be the most impactful for the
goals that we’re trying to hit next year. It all goes back to the fact that you can’t necessarily track
performance very accurately for a lot of brand-specific initiatives. I’m going on qualitative
feedback, or on the limited amount of data that I have for a campaign or channel that we’ve
invested in. It’s a never-ending conversation of figuring out what’s going to be the most impactful
way to use the budget and the resources we have.
As marketers, we see so many businesses doing a lot of these things — influencer campaigns,
hosted events, everything — and it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking we should be doing
those too. But you have to stop and evaluate why you’re doing them, what goal they’re going to
help you reach, and what you might not be able to spend money on if you do them. I’m literally
in budgeting season now and trying to figure out what we should be doing and what trade offs
we may need to make. It’s really hard because I think there’s a lot of outside pressure to do
everything and you really cannot do it all efficiently, both on the spend and resources side, as
well as the creative side.
We always want to be on the people’s top three list when they are ready to buy. So how do we
make that list? That can be so hard to wrap your head around, because I think a lot of people
want a campaign to result in sales, and they don’t understand that the campaign has to run over
the long term, then you need to do other things to nurture that person, to connect with them
more, to get them in front of the product, to try the product.
There’s phases of brand campaigns where you’re building a big brand awareness bubble.
You’ve got a lot of attention on your brand — you’re doing OOH and big sponsorships at events,
you’re doing a lot of speaking, you’re all over social with advertising. Then you’ve got the next
phase of connecting that bubble down into your community and doing more one-on-one
connections with webinars and in-person events to give them opportunities to try the product and pull them into your ecosystem. I think that wave happens every couple years and you need to do a big brand push for some reason, followed by community building — it’s never ending because there’s always going to be people in the market that you want your brand to be top of mind.
We were at HubSpot’s conference in San Francisco, and I had someone come up to me and
say they saw our booth two years ago, and they’re still thinking about evaluating Wistia. That
investment in that conference is hundreds of thousands of dollars for us. We have to keep doing
that because people will still show up years later, remembering us.
