TL; DR
- In the U.S. alone, ~$500B in marketing spend runs without an operating system.
- Tool sprawl and siloed campaigns create activity versus outcomes reports.
- The PESO Model© functions as marketing’s operating system.
- With an operating system, roles, cadence, and decision rights are baked in—and you can shift when platforms or policies change.
The Case for a Marketing Operating System
The boardroom is tense.
The CMO is halfway through the quarterly update when the chair interrupts: “What’s our marketing ROI?”
On the screen, 12 dashboards flash to life—website traffic, social engagement, media impressions, and campaign attribution models. None of them align, and none of them answer the question.
The CEO cuts in, sharper this time: “Fine. Then tell me this—where can we cut 20% without losing momentum?”
The CMO hesitates. There’s no system for distinguishing what’s essential from what’s expendable. The team has been patching together platforms, campaigns, and agencies, but there’s no master framework that makes sense of it all.
The CFO flips through the packet with a pen in hand. “Why are we spending here? What’s the return? Which of these efforts are actually driving revenue?”
The silence stretches for seven seconds as the CMO shuffles slides, searching for a chart that doesn’t exist. A bead of sweat forms despite the arctic AC.
Across the table, a director glances at his watch. Another taps her pen. The head of sales leans back, smirking, as if to say, “Told you.”
In a room where every other function runs on systems, marketing’s lack of one isn’t a quirk—it’s a liability.
It’s not that the CMO isn’t smart, or that the team hasn’t been working hard. The problem is more fundamental: marketing has no operating system. Finance does. IT does. Supply chain does.
But marketing? It’s still duct-taping tactics together, hoping the numbers add up.
The Boardroom Scene
Just having you imagine that boardroom scene gives me a pit in the bottom of my stomach. I can’t actually see you raise your hand if I ask how many of you have been there, but I can imagine it’s most of you.
I remember being on Zoom with an inexperienced, know-it-all tech startup founder who did something similar to my team and me. It didn’t matter how much data we showed him or how much we could prove the percentage of sales that came from our work, he just didn’t believe the numbers.
He said to me, “The thing is, you’re counting that $2MM contract as having come in through marketing, but I’ve known their CEO for 10 years.”
I didn’t shoot back, “OK, then why didn’t he buy 10 years ago?”, which is what I really wanted to say. We had proof that he found (OK, maybe refound) the organization through our marketing efforts and ended up buying from a combination of us and sales, but the founder didn’t want to give either of us credit.
The problem is that this scene plays out in boardrooms every day. And, even though I could not (and still cannot) stand that founder, he taught me something very valuable. I had to be ultra prepared for every question that would come up during a meeting. And the only way to do that was with a marketing operating system.
Marketing’s $550B Blind Spot
Marketing is the only C-suite function managing hundreds of billions in annual spend without an operating system.
In the U.S. alone, marketing accounts for $550B+ every year—ballooning to approximately $1.7T globally. That’s bigger than many national budgets—and large enough to earn scrutiny from any audit committee.
Compare that to other enterprise functions:
- IT spends roughly $5.6T globally, but every dollar flows through standardized infrastructure and operating systems.
- Pharmaceutical R&D is worth more than $260 billion worldwide, but it is based on clinical frameworks and regulatory systems that guarantee comparability and accountability.
- Supply chain spend dwarfs both—but no one in procurement would dream of running it without an ERP backbone.
Most marketing, by contrast, still runs on duct tape: a jumble of disconnected platforms, dashboards, and agencies that can’t deliver a single version of the truth.
This is like trying to run your iPhone without iOS. You can download all the apps you want, but without an operating system, none of them talk to each other. Imagine what your phone would be like with that kind of chaos! None of us would use them.
A marketing operating system, though, delivers what leaders need: clarity, control, and confidence.
Chaos Disguised as Activity
A couple of weeks ago, I recorded Under Embargo with Becca Chambers and Parry Headrick. Not only was it fun to record, as if three friends were out for drinks and chatting about work, but we also discussed how stressful it is to keep up with all of the things that come at us all of the time.
(When the episode is live, we’ll post on our socials so you can listen.)
It does feel like every quarter brings a new “must-have” platform or campaign. AI tools, influencer programs, branded podcasts, the latest social network, executive orders, presidential memorandums. Each one gets bolted on or reacted to, siloed, and handled and measured differently.
As you well know, the result is chaos disguised as activity.
Campaigns overlap. Agencies compete. Teams duplicate work. Measurement becomes a tug-of-war: PR reports impressions, digital reports clicks, and content reports downloads. And still, the board’s question lingers: “What’s the ROI?”
The CMO feels like they’re running in quicksand—working harder, spending more, and still sinking under the weight of disconnected tactics.
(Remember when we all thought quicksand was one of the world’s most worrisome events? Oh, those were the days.)
Markets are moving faster than budgets. Boards are shortening their patience window. The winners won’t stack tools; they’ll install a marketing operating system. More tools won’t fix tool sprawl. Systems fix sprawl.
The Missing Infrastructure
Which brings us to the missing piece—the marketing operating system itself.
That’s where the PESO Model© functions as your marketing operating system. It looks simple. That’s the point. The best operating systems are.
But beneath that simplicity is a discipline that integrates every marketing dollar, every message, every channel into a single, unified system.
PESO isn’t another framework. It’s the operating system modern marketing has been waiting for. It’s been road-tested across Fortune-level enterprises and startups alike and it is taught in universities; it scales, it governs, and it lasts.
Think about it:
- A new AI tool? Plug it into your PESO marketing operating system and it supports the whole system, not just one campaign.
- A new agency partner? They work inside the same model as everyone else.
- A new board demand for attribution? The system already connects spend to outcomes.
Instead of competing dashboards, you get a single source of truth. Instead of scattered campaigns, you get a system that aligns channels, content, and measurement around business outcomes. Instead of chaos, you get confidence. And in a world where the board demands clarity and the market punishes waste, confidence is currency.
From Chaos to Confidence
Install PESO as your marketing operating system and three changes happen fast: clarity, efficiency, attribution.
Instead of 12 competing dashboards, you have clarity—one version of the truth.
Efficiency follows: duplication disappears, dollars stretch further, and every channel amplifies the others.
That clarity and efficiency unlock what boards care about most: revenue attribution.
For the first time, marketing spend ties directly to business outcomes.
And when algorithms shift, platforms change, or regulators rewrite the rules, the system doesn’t crumble. Resilience and governance are built in, so you’re not scrambling—you’re steering.
PESO as your marketing operating system reduces risk while increasing return. It makes marketing not just more efficient, but more defensible.
And in today’s boardroom, defensible is everything.
The Cost of Waiting
The cost of waiting is real—and it compounds every quarter.
Without an operating system, marketing continues to lose budget through redundancies and inefficiencies. Teams create overlapping content. Agencies pull in different directions. Platforms shift, and entire campaigns collapse overnight.
Consider the retailer that scaled influencer marketing without a framework—only to face brand-safety crises they couldn’t track or measure.
Or the healthtech company that poured millions into TikTok advertising just as the algorithm deprioritized branded content.
Add the financial-services firm that ignored looming privacy changes; when third-party cookies finally died, their digital performance collapsed.
Competitors with a marketing operating system had already diversified channels and adapted without panic.
Early adopters of PESO as a marketing operating system are reporting measurable gains—some seeing a 30% reduction in content redundancy alone.
That’s not just saved dollars; it’s time, focus, and capacity redirected toward growth.
And the first-mover advantage matters. The companies that install a marketing operating system today will reset the performance benchmarks for their industries tomorrow.
Everyone else will be scrambling to catch up—explaining to their boards why competitors can show clear attribution and scalable efficiency while they’re still shuffling through disconnected dashboards.
Delay doesn’t keep you safe. It widens the gap between you and the leaders who had the discipline to act first.
IT and Their Operating System
If this feels familiar, it should.
Before operating systems, IT was a patchwork of mainframes, terminals, and code that only a handful of specialists could interpret. It was powerful but chaotic, siloed, and impossible to scale.
A new piece of software meant months of custom coding. Adding a user meant weeks of setup.
Then operating systems arrived.
Suddenly, everything connected. Software became usable. Enterprises could scale, standardize, and finally put technology at the center of business strategy. IT went from back-office support to boardroom essential.
Imagine if IT today worked like (some) marketing does: every team using different systems, no single way to connect, every CIO answering the board’s questions with a jumble of incompatible dashboards. It would be absurd. Yet for marketing, it’s business as usual.
Like IT in the 90s, the discipline shift happens first; the tooling follows.
Marketing is standing at the same inflection point. Install an operating system, and marketing becomes what it was always meant to be: a growth engine with measurable, defensible results.
Do You Have a Marketing Operating System?
I promised a quick checklist to help you prepare for your next board meeting or for the next all-hands where marketing gets to report results.
Do you have:
- One source of truth for all of your paid, earned, shared, and owned efforts?
- A quarterly plan that shows channel interlocks (not siloed calendars)?
- A revenue attribution approach that you’ve agreed to with the senior leadership team?
- Governance artifacts: roles, review cadence, decision rights?
- A living “kill list” for redundant content/tools?
In 18 months, there will be two types of CMOs—those running on a marketing operating system, and those still shuffling dashboards.
The good news is you have time to choose which one you’ll be.
Imagine your next board meeting. The chair asks about ROI, and you pull up one dashboard—not twelve. The CEO asks where to cut, and you know exactly what’s driving growth and what isn’t. The CFO challenges a line item, and you can show precisely how it connects to revenue.
That’s not a fantasy. That’s what happens when you run on a marketing operating system. Start with that checklist. Choose one area to fix this quarter. Build from there.
Because the next time you’re in that boardroom, you want to be the one with answers, not excuses—and that is a dream worth living!
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