Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo 2025: Day 3 Highlights

We are bringing you news and highlights from Day 3 of the Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo, taking place this week in Denver. Below is a collection of the key announcements and insights coming out of the conference. 

On Day 3, we are highlighting how CMOs can strengthen their connection with CFOs, insights from the 2024 Gartner Channel and Campaign Management Survey, and how to establish processes, protocols, and best practices for responsible AI usage.

• Gartner Survey Finds Digital Channels Account for 61.1% of Total Marketing Spend
• New CMOs Must Bridge the Expectations Gap by Aligning Marketing with C-Suite Priorities
• Gartner Survey Reveals Personalization Can Triple the Likelihood of Customer Regret at Key Journey Points
• Marketing Leaders Can Unlock Commercial Value by Redefining Personalized Digital Interactions with Customer-Shared Data

Presented by Chris Ross VP Analyst at Gartner

Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) need strong relationships with Chief Financial Officers (CFOs). In this session, Chris Ross, VP Analyst at Gartner, delved into the distinct opportunities and challenges of this relationship and showed how CMOs can strengthen their connection with CFOs.

• “Rarely has any CMO accomplished something substantial without the support of their CFO partners. ”
• “CFOs are generally very supportive of marketing, but not quite as effusive as CEOs.”
• “When CFOs were asked which relationships with other executives relate to their ability to achieve objectives, CMOs were close to the bottom of the list.”
• “In addition to clearly being focused on the highest level business priorities, CFOs will also have other hotspots – areas of need or prioritization – and part of effective alignment with CFOs is to ensure marketers understand all the hotspot areas and do what we can to support them in these areas.”
• “One of the ways to make it as easy as possible for CMOs to share marketing performance is to integrate into the way CFOs communicate financial KPIs is with something we call a CFO scorecard. 
• "The CFO scorecard makes sure CMOs connect what they do in marketing to the way CFOs are sharing their business performance story.”

Journalists can receive additional information and/or request an interview with the Gartner expert by contacting Juliette Dixon at juliette.dixon@gartner.com.

Presented by Greg Carlucci, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner

Marketing campaigns and new technology investments can sometimes fail to meet expectations. In this session, Greg Carlucci, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner, outlined how to pinpoint the right skills, processes, and technologies for effective marketing campaigns, drawing insights from the 2024 Gartner Channel and Campaign Management Survey.

• “More than half of marketing leaders are exceeding revenue and customer acquisition goals. The bad news however, is nearly all are having campaign performance issues – even with AI, software tools and available data.” 

• “These are three things marketing leaders are doing to  exceed both profit and revenue goals, as well as marketing goals: 

  • Identifying critical capability gaps: Closing advanced capability gaps for marketing campaign success

  • Adopting a holistic approach: Integrating marketing fundamentals of governance, routes to market, and measurement

  • Embracing new technologies: Leveraging GenAI pilots for strategic development activities”

• “Nearly every marketing leader experienced campaign performance issues last year with common campaign issues cited in the survey including poor targeting and lack of integration via consistent channel execution.”

Journalists can receive additional information and/or request an interview with the Gartner expert by contacting Juliette Dixon at juliette.dixon@gartner.com.

Presented by Rene Cizio, Director Analyst at Gartner

Marketers need to establish clear GenAI content guidelines to succeed. In this session, Rene Cizo, Director Analyst at Gartner, explored how to establish processes, protocols, and best practices for responsible AI usage. 

• “Many organizations lack GenAI content guidelines. Further, less than half are offering GenAI training around safe and ethical use, and 26% say they aren’t doing any training at all.”

• "As AI continues to transform marketing work, the way CMOs manage and govern content must evolve to keep pace.”

• “By prioritizing governance, CMOs can provide a framework to ensure their teams understand how to safely use AI for content and help mitigate legal risks associated with AI and genAI use.”

• “The level of AI involvement on your team can vary. Most marketers start with basic use cases using AI as a:

  • Tool: For important tasks such as copywriting, headlines or images. This is where 80% of enterprises play. 

  • Partner: This can be referenced as an agent, and it's often used in things like advertising optimization, for campaign recommendations and providing strategic guidance to aid decisions.  

  • Game changer: There are marketing use cases that can shift the way marketers do business in a way not possible without AI that are ‘game changing’ for marketing.”

Journalists can receive additional information and/or request an interview with the Gartner expert by contacting Juliette Dixon at juliette.dixon@gartner.com.