The fight for marketing budget in any business tends to be one of extreme politics. CMOs must balance everyone’s interests and demands. The sales managers demand sponsorship of their beloved events to network at and want quality sales leads. The CEO wants marketing dollars for the sponsorship of their favorite sports team or golf tournament, personal profiling in tier one media and engagement on their content on social. Product managers want budget to launch their products. And country managers who want to run campaigns in their local markets. Just to name a few of the many powers at play.
On the other side there is the CFO asking for proof for all of this spend. How is it helping the bottom line? Procurement is asking if the best price was negotiated. The CMO has the ungrateful task of trying to cobble all the various campaigns, events, and media spend across a variety of channels together. And try to shed some light on what is working and what isn’t.
And that is usually the start of the business’s oldest debate. Is the marketing working? How can we justify those millions of dollars spent?
To complicate things further, we are not operating in a vacuum. The way customers select products and make buying decisions is always evolving and changing. Over the past years social media and influencers have gained a strong position in impacting buying decisions. Followed by a quantum shift in search, with the arrival of LLMs. Google’s longstanding monopoly when it comes to search, has ended abruptly. Now customers can use a variety of tools to research products or services before purchase. This is changing the playing field and requires CMOs to take a close look at their metrics. KPIs need to evolve to provide proper insights into how the company is showing up in LLMs.
AI can help with providing structure in the chaos. A recent CMO outlook*, showed that they are fully aware of its powers. When they were asked where they intend to increase marketing investment most this year, AI adoption and implementation received the most mentions. Followed by demand generation and sales enablement, campaigns and media spend and marketing analytics.
As an answer to this demand, and to help clients navigate the pressures from the various internal stakeholders, TEAM LEWIS has developed Orbital, a marketing operating system with eight marketing agents. Providing customers with one platform, uniting all marketing systems in a single view. This enables them to query the data coming from all those systems and connect the dots. With the help of Scout, you no longer need a degree in dashboard programming to gain insights into the ROI of your programs. You can simply interrogate the data and get direct output – in graphs, PPT, or any other desired format. You can use the Playbook agent to create content fast and easily in your own brand style and tone of voice. You can repurpose the content in many different guises using the agent Prism. These are just a few of the capabilities of the platform.
The tools all come together to provide a seamless marketing platform experience. Marketing agents, developed by marketing people who actually use and improve the systems everyday, working on the campaigns for hundreds of clients. All those learnings are feeding into the system which gets smarter and better day by day.
Marketing will remain a game of thrones and AI is shifting the power in the Kingdom. It can be a powerful weapon to win the ROI battle.
TEAM LEWIS combines Orbital with hands-on marketing expertise to turn insight into action. Helping teams strengthen ROI reporting and allocate budget with confidence. Speak to TEAM LEWIS to explore how Orbital can make your marketing investment work harder.
* CMO Outlook 2026, created in partnership with Bloomberg Media and based on a global study of 541 CMOs and equivalent marketing leaders.
