The CMO Tax

A recent idea circulating in marketing circles that resonated with us is what’s been called the “CMO Tax.” We saw it shared by Jon Miller, co-founder of Marketo on LinkedIn (credit to Jon for the comic above).

The concept is simple: most executives spend their time explaining decisions, while CMOs often spend a disproportionate amount of time justifying why marketing itself matters. Finance teams aren’t routinely asked to defend the existence of finance. Product teams aren’t asked to prove product should exist. But marketing is frequently put in the position of having to justify its own function.

This creates a hidden cost on the role. Not just in time spent defending budgets or strategy, but in focus diverted away from actual marketing work.

At its core, this is less a marketing problem than a visibility problem. Most corporate functions produce outputs that are inherently visible inside an organization. Products are tangible. Headcount is easy to track. But marketing’s most valuable outputs are often intangible. They show up as familiarity, trust, preference, and momentum long before a sales conversation ever begins.

A prospect may become aware of a company months before entering a buying cycle. Trust is formed before intent is expressed. Category leaders benefit from reputation long before purchase decisions are made. These forces are real, but they rarely show up cleanly in quarterly reporting or even in many marketing dashboards.

Human beings tend to overvalue what is easily seen and undervalue what is not. Yet some of the most important drivers of business performance such as brand, culture, distribution, reputation are largely invisible while they’re doing their work.

This is one reason out-of-home (OOH) advertising has become increasingly relevant again.

OOH is one of the few brand channels that is inherently visible not just to consumers, but to the rest of the organization. It exists in physical space. It signals presence in a way that is hard to ignore. It makes brand investment tangible. When a company is active in OOH, it often creates an internal perception that the brand is “everywhere,” which can subtly reduce the need to constantly justify marketing’s existence, reducing the CMO tax.

Historically, one of the main criticisms of OOH was measurement. That objection is becoming increasingly outdated. Modern attribution, reporting, and analytics infrastructure has made OOH significantly more measurable and accountable than its legacy reputation suggests.

At AdQuick, we’ve focused on building tools to help teams plan, measure, and understand OOH with the same rigor as digital channels. Industry data continues to reinforce what we’re seeing in practice: OOH is not only a brand-building channel, but one that is increasingly legible inside modern performance frameworks.

Which leads to an interesting shift: a channel once viewed as difficult to measure is becoming one of the most effective ways to make brand-building visible across an entire organization.

Reducing the CMO tax isn’t really about defending marketing for its own sake. It’s about helping organizations better recognize and value the forces that were driving growth all along.