In Issue #1 I wrote about a meeting that changed how I thought about Lifesight. A CFO at one of our largest customers asked me what would happen to revenue if they turned paid social off for a month. I didn't have a good answer. The product I'd spent years selling wasn't built to answer it.
I want to write the follow-up letter to that one. Because the meeting wasn't an outlier. It was an early signal.
The CFO who asked that question is not the only CFO asking it. Over the last eighteen months, every measurement deal Lifesight has closed has had finance involvement at a depth I didn't see when I started the company. About half of them have had the CFO in the room from the very first call. A handful have had the CFO running the procurement.
That's not a sales anecdote. That's a market shift.
The shift is this: marketing measurement is migrating, in real time, from the CMO desk to the CFO desk. It is happening faster than most vendors in this space are acknowledging, and it is happening for reasons that are structural rather than cyclical. By 2027 I expect the CFO to be the primary economic buyer for marketing measurement in most mid-market and enterprise companies.
This issue is about why that is happening, why it is - counterintuitively - the best thing that has happened to serious CMOs in a long time, and what it forces every vendor in this category, including us, to change.
Why this is happening
The simple version is this. When marketing spend was five percent of OPEX, CFOs didn't pay close attention to how it was measured. They cared whether the spend was below the budget line.
That number isn't five percent anymore.
For most consumer brands of any meaningful scale, marketing is now twelve to thirty percent of revenue. For DTC brands at scale, it can clear forty. Even at the typical mid-market B2B SaaS company - where marketing is often the most counterintuitively expensive function - total go-to-market spend is regularly a third or more of revenue.
When a single budget line is that material, the system that determines how that budget gets allocated stops being a marketing concern and becomes a capital allocation concern. Capital allocation is the CFO's job description.
The CFOs I've been meeting are not arriving in these conversations because they want to second-guess the CMO. They are arriving because their own accountability has changed. The board is asking about marketing return on invested capital with a precision that didn't exist five years ago. The audit committee wants to know how the company validates the numbers that show up in the marketing P&L line. The lead investor reads a Recast blog post on the flight in and shows up to the quarterly with a methodology question. None of that can be delegated. The CFO has to be able to answer it.
There is a deeper structural reason this is happening too, and it is the one I think most vendors in this space are underweighting.
A modern marketing measurement system is no longer a tool. It is the substrate on which a meaningful share of the company's capital is allocated week to week. When that substrate produces numbers that are systematically wrong - and as I wrote in Issue #1, in most companies it is - the entire capital allocation function of the business is impaired.
That impairment is not a marketing problem. It is a CEO problem with a CFO chair on it.
Why this is good news for serious CMOs
Here is the counterintuitive part of the shift, and the part that the CMOs in our customer base have figured out fastest.
For most of the last decade, the CMO's job included a side quest that was unfair and exhausting. Defending the marketing budget every quarter with a story built on data the CMO knew was incomplete. The CMO would walk into a budget review armed with a deck of attribution numbers, knowing privately that those numbers overstated the impact of bottom-funnel paid channels and understated brand. The CFO would nod. The numbers would be accepted. The budget would be approved. And the CMO would walk out of the room feeling like they had won an argument they didn't believe.
That game is bad for CMOs. It is especially bad for the best CMOs, because the best CMOs are the ones most uncomfortable defending numbers they know are flawed.
The CFO showing up in the room changes the game.
The CFO is not asking the CMO to defend numbers. The CFO is asking - in a way the rest of the org has not been able to - for a shared system that both functions can rely on. That is a different conversation, and it is a healthier one.
The CMOs I have watched succeed in this transition share a posture. They stop showing the CFO attribution dashboards and start showing the CFO incrementality. They stop defending the marketing budget and start co-authoring the marketing P&L. They invite the CFO into the methodology, not just the result.
Here is the line I keep coming back to with the CMOs in our customer base. Your CFO is not your judge. Your CFO is the only ally in the company who already shares your language of return, risk, and allocation. If you've been waiting for someone in the C-suite who actually wants to talk about marginal return per dollar of marketing spend, that person just showed up.
The CMOs who are hurt by this shift are the ones who built their authority on being the only person in the room who understood marketing. The CMOs who win are the ones who have been quietly begging, for years, for a credible counterparty.
What this changes for every vendor in this space
Here is the part where I have to be honest about Lifesight.
When the buyer changes, the product has to change. The measurement vendors who win the next five years are not the ones with the best CMO-facing dashboard. They are the ones whose product is legible to a CFO.
Let me define what I mean by legible.
A CFO does not need a prettier UI. A CFO needs to be able to trace any reported number back to a methodology they understand, a data source they trust, and a defensible decision rule. A CFO needs to know what would have to be true for the number to be wrong. A CFO needs the system to be conservative in the right places and decisive in the right places. A CFO needs the vendor to be honest about uncertainty in a way most marketing tools historically have not been.
The vocabulary CFOs care about is the vocabulary of capital allocation. Marginal return. Incremental cost. Risk-adjusted return. Hurdle rate. The vocabulary most measurement vendors built their product around is the vocabulary of marketing reporting. Funnels. Channels. Attribution. Conversion.
Those are different languages, and most vendors in our category are still selling in the wrong one.
I want to be specific about what this changed for us.
The first thing it changed was who we sell to. About fifteen months ago we stopped running our discovery process as a CMO-only conversation. Every Lifesight discovery call now expects the CFO or their senior finance lieutenant to be a participant. If the CFO is not in the room, the deal almost never closes.
The second thing it changed was the product. We rebuilt the platform so that every recommendation it makes is traceable back to a methodology and a calibration anchor. (Rajeev wrote about why that traceability matters in the first issue of The Incrementalist, and I'll send anyone who's curious about the methodology side of this story there.) That work was expensive and slow. It is also the only reason we win CFO-led deals now.
The third thing it changed was the marketing function inside our own company. We stopped writing copy for CMOs and started writing copy for buying committees. The Decision Desk you're reading is, in part, an artifact of that shift. I am not writing this for you to forward to your CMO. I am writing it for you to forward to your CFO - and for the CFOs reading this to forward it to their CEOs.
Honest caveat. We are not yet good enough at any of this. Our discovery still surfaces too many CMOs who are buying us on a marketing-narrative argument rather than a capital-allocation argument. Some of those deals will run into trouble in year two when the CFO finally walks into a budget review and asks what they are paying us for. The vendors who survive the next five years are the ones who can answer that question on Day One. We are working hard to be one of them and not pretending we already are.
What I'm watching
Three things I'm watching in this shift.
One. Whether CFOs hire their own marketing analysts. I expect this to happen by 2027 in most mid-market and enterprise companies. The CFO function will quietly add headcount that owns calibrating marketing's numbers against finance's numbers. That headcount will not sit on the marketing team. It will report to finance. The CMOs who see this coming and partner with that hire early will run a much better function. The CMOs who treat it as an encroachment will lose ground.
Two. Whether vendors rebrand around finance vocabulary. Some are already trying. I have seen at least three measurement vendors in the last quarter add the word audit or trust or finance to their messaging without doing the underlying methodology work. That is the obvious commercial response. It will not survive contact with a real CFO procurement. CFOs are particularly hard to bluff. They are the only function in the company whose job description includes being skeptical of confident numbers.
Three. Whether the CMO–CFO partnership produces a shared metric. The most interesting signal I'm watching is whether companies start reporting marketing performance in a single number that both the CMO and the CFO sign off on. The early candidates I keep hearing in our customer conversations are incremental contribution to growth and risk-adjusted iROAS. Neither is standard yet. If one becomes standard within the next two years, that metric will reshape the measurement category as profoundly as ROAS did fifteen years ago.
A note on what this isn't
I want to head off one misread of this letter before it lands.
The CFO becoming the new buyer is not a victory of finance over marketing. It is the maturation of marketing into a function that is taken as seriously as finance has been for a century. The CMOs I respect most are not threatened by this shift. They are relieved by it. For the first time in the modern history of the function, marketing is going to be measured, defended, and resourced on the same terms as every other capital allocation decision in the company.
That is a higher standard. It is also a fairer one. And the marketers who have been frustrated for years that they couldn't get the rest of the C-suite to take their function seriously are about to discover that the conversation they wanted to have is, finally, the conversation everyone is having.
The serious CMO's job in 2026 is not to defend the marketing budget. It is to author it - alongside the CFO, on numbers both of them trust.
If you're a CFO who is increasingly the buyer for measurement in your organization - or a CMO learning to share that authority - I'd like to hear from you. Not to demo. To compare notes on what is changing in the room.
Thanks for reading the second one.
Tobin Thomas
Co-Founder & CEO, Lifesight