Discover the secret weapon for marketers battling rising multichannel costs

This article was co-authored with Aparajita Mazumdar and Audrey Brosnan, experts in the Gartner Marketing Practice specializing in martech stack optimization, marketing technology, personalization and customer data management.

Marketing leaders are facing a new reality: the costs of running multichannel campaigns are rising at an unprecedented rate. Expenses tied to technology, labor and media are ballooning, fueled by the sheer volume of campaigns and the shift to consumption-based pricing models for marketing technology.

CMOs and marketing leaders with the highest marketing technology spend were nearly 2x as likely to report significant over or under buying of consumption based technologies, per Gartner’s 2025 CMO Spend survey. As a result, leaders are caught off guard, underestimating the actual cost of their operations. This lack of visibility clouds the ROI and exposes organizations to significant strategic risk.

As brands strive to reach customers across more channels — social, email, search, display and beyond—the complexity and frequency of campaigns have soared. At the same time, marketing technology vendors are moving away from flat-rate pricing to models that charge based on actual usage. This means every additional campaign, every new segment and every piece of personalized content can drive up costs in difficult ways to predict and control.

Marketing leaders already have less room for strategic error in martech investments: According to the Gartner 2025 CMO Spend Survey, martech’s share of company revenue is 29% lower than in 2022. With shrinking budgets and rising costs, the pressure to maximize every dollar spent has never been greater.

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Deconstructing campaigns: The power of unit cost analysis

One way forward is to break down campaign operations into their component steps and apply unit cost analysis to each phase. Instead of viewing marketing technology and channel spend as monolithic, leaders should dissect their campaign processes into strategy, segmentation, channel configuration, content creation, review, execution and analysis. By understanding the cost drivers at each stage, marketers can pinpoint inefficiencies, forecast expenses more accurately, and align spending with business value.

This granular approach is more than just an accounting exercise — it’s a strategic imperative. With Gartner projecting that campaign volumes will grow tenfold by 2034, the old ways of managing budgets simply won’t scale. Unit cost analysis empowers marketing teams to make informed decisions about where to invest, which campaigns to optimize and which to eliminate. It also provides the transparency needed to justify spending to stakeholders and to adapt quickly as market conditions change.

For example, if content creation is consuming a disproportionate share of resources, marketers can explore automation, repurposing or outsourcing. If segmentation and channel configuration are driving up technology costs due to consumption-based pricing, teams can refine their targeting strategies or negotiate better terms with vendors. The result is a more agile, efficient, and accountable marketing operation.

Scaling for the future: AI, financial rigor and sustainable growth

The future of marketing is both exciting and daunting. As campaign volumes and complexity continue to rise, marketing leaders must embrace new tools and practices to stay ahead .When marketing operates more like a mass-production factory than a manual craft, leveraging AI agents becomes real, either to improve scale, impact or to free up human talent for higher-value work. AI can help with everything from audience segmentation to content personalization, enabling marketers to scale their efforts without a corresponding spike in costs.

But technology alone isn’t enough. Financial operations must be strengthened to ensure that every dollar spent delivers measurable value. This means rigorously tracking both costs and outcomes, continuously optimizing underperforming campaigns and adapting to the nuances of consumption-based pricing. By doing so, organizations can maintain profitability and competitive advantage — even as the marketing landscape evolves at breakneck speed.

Ultimately, the key to sustainable growth lies in transparency and accountability. Unit cost analysis provides the foundation for both, enabling marketers to see exactly where their money is going and what it’s delivering in return. As the pressure to do more with less intensifies, those who master this approach will be best positioned to thrive.

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From cost center to value driver

The days of treating marketing as a cost center are over. In a world where every campaign, channel and technology decision can impact the bottom line, marketing leaders must become stewards of both creativity and financial discipline. By deconstructing campaign operations, applying unit cost analysis and embracing AI-driven efficiency, marketing leaders can transform their organizations into engines of growth and innovation.

The path to marketing success in the next decade will be paved by those who understand their costs, measure their outcomes and adapt relentlessly. The time to act is now — so AI adoption can grow up within cost controls rather than bolting on guardrails in a panic.

With the right tools and mindset, marketers can capture not just the unit cost, but the full value of every campaign.