2027 Marketing Budgets Are Growing. Spending Them the Old Way Is the Real Risk

The Signal: Budgets Are Up, Confidence Is Back

After a cautious 2026, marketing leaders are planning to spend again. In its 2027 Budget Planning Guides, Forrester reports that 89% of B2B marketing decision-makers and 91% of B2C marketers expect marketing investments to increase over the next 12 months. More than 80% of business and technology leaders overall expect budget growth, and roughly one in four anticipates growth of 10% or more.

The survey covers more than 2,600 business and technology decision-makers globally. In B2B, technology is expected to receive the biggest boost: 80% of marketers plan to increase tech spending, with personnel and programs close behind at 76% each. Programs currently take the largest budget share at 37%, followed by personnel and technology at 32% each.

One more number frames the whole cycle: Forrester finds that 94% of business buyers now use generative AI during the purchasing journey. That single figure changes what "visibility" means in 2027.

What This Means: Budget Growth Without Reallocation Is Standing Still

Here is the uncomfortable part of the report. Forrester explicitly warns against treating a bigger budget as permission to buy more of what you already have. Increasing investment without modernizing operating models, strengthening data foundations, and improving AI readiness will accelerate three observable problems: fragmented data, duplicated work, and technical debt.

Sharyn Leaver, Forrester's chief research officer, puts it plainly: the organizations that outperform in 2027 won't be those that spend the most on AI. They'll be the ones that invest in the foundations that make AI effective — trusted data, strong governance, organizational readiness, and the ability to adapt continuously.

Why This Is a Problem: The Buyer Moved, the Budget Didn't

Think about how a typical B2B budget was built three years ago. A share for paid search, because that's where discovery happened. A share for the martech stack, because every gap got its own tool. Program allocations rolled over from last year, adjusted a few points up or down.

Now look at where the buyer actually is. If 94% of business buyers consult generative AI during their purchasing journey, a meaningful share of discovery, shortlisting, and comparison happens inside AI-generated answers before anyone touches your website. Traditional search rankings still matter, and they no longer describe the full funnel. A brand can hold page-one positions and still be invisible in the answers ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Mode give a buyer who asks "which programmatic advertising platforms should I evaluate?"

Meanwhile, the average martech stack keeps accumulating overlapping tools, each with its own data model. The result is measurable: duplicate contracts, integration projects that consume engineering quarters, and campaign data that cannot answer basic attribution questions. Bigger budgets fed into this structure produce more of the same, faster.

Where 2027 Marketing Budgets Should Go: Six Reallocation Priorities

Forrester's guidance converges on redirecting spend rather than expanding it evenly. Six concrete moves stand out.

1. Fund Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), Not Just SEO

Answer engine optimization advertising is the discipline of making your content citable by AI systems, on top of ranking in traditional search. Forrester recommends increasing AEO investment because AI-powered search is changing how buyers and consumers discover brands. In practice this means: explicit definitions, clearly scoped claims, structured comparisons, and authority built through third-party sources — customers, partners, and industry experts. Generative engine optimization for brands follows the same logic on the B2C side, where earned credibility (PR, reviews, influencer coverage) increasingly shapes what AI answers say about you.

2. Consolidate the Martech Stack Before Adding to It

Forrester's strongest warning targets technology spending. Direct new budget only toward platforms that support a defined business objective. Simultaneously cut duplicate tools, reduce integration complexity, and pay down technical debt. A useful test before any renewal or purchase: can the team name the decision this platform improves, and the metric it moves? If the answer takes more than a sentence, the money belongs elsewhere.

3. Reallocate Program Spend by Buyer Signals, Not History

Historical allocation is the default because it is easy. Forrester's recommendation is continuous adjustment based on buyer behavior, customer needs, and market conditions. Two concrete examples from the guides: brands with an awareness gap should invest in reputation before accelerating demand generation; brands seeing slowing purchase intent should shift resources into retention and renewal marketing. This requires market intelligence spending — the capability to detect those signals early enough to act on them.

4. Put AI Into Campaign Execution, Not Only Content Production

Most marketing teams currently use generative AI for content drafts. Forrester's guidance goes further: embed AI across planning, execution, optimization, and measurement. This is where ai in programmatic advertising becomes a budget line rather than a buzzword. Autonomous ad optimization — systems that adjust bidding, placements, and creative delivery against live campaign signals — is the operational form of this recommendation.

This is the layer where Adello operates. Adello's Mobile DSP applies machine-learning optimization to programmatic campaigns, adjusting delivery continuously against performance data rather than waiting for weekly manual reviews. PXLSTRM, Adello's patented contextual targeting technology, analyzes video content frame by frame to place ads in relevant contexts on YouTube and TikTok without relying on third-party cookies or personal identifiers. For a marketer following Forrester's reallocation logic, the expected outcome is specific: campaign optimization that runs at machine speed, cookieless targeting that survives privacy regulation, and fewer manual production hours per campaign — freeing program budget for the strategic work AI cannot do.

5. Build Marketing-Specific AI Capability, Including AI Agents

Forrester recommends investing in AI architects, governance specialists, and continuous workforce training — and experimenting with AI agents for advertising tasks: campaign execution, audience generation, content production, and customer engagement. Agentic AI advertising is early, which is exactly why 2027 budgets should fund controlled experiments rather than wait for category maturity. The report also flags synthetic data for faster customer research and concept testing, with the explicit condition that governance is in place first.

One caution from the guides: AI is a workflow redesign, and treating it purely as a cost-cutting exercise backfires. Redesign the workflow first, automate individual tasks, and let people move to higher-value work. Cutting headcount in anticipation of productivity gains reverses that order.

6. Evaluate Commerce Media With a Business Case, Not FOMO

Forrester lists commerce media among the areas deserving redirected investment. The same discipline applies here as with martech: a defined objective, a measurable outcome, and integration with existing data before budget commits. Commerce media rewards brands with clean first-party data foundations — which loops back to priority two.

Budget Priorities at a Glance

Why Act Now: The 2027 Planning Window Is Open Once

Budget cycles are the one moment when reallocation is structurally easy. Forrester's own framing shifted within a single year: the 2026 guides focused on scenario planning and AI readiness; the 2027 guides assume AI investment and ask where it should go. Teams that lock 2027 budgets into 2024-shaped allocations will spend twelve months funding channels their buyers have partially left. The practical step: before finalizing the plan, map current spend against the six priorities above and identify the two largest gaps. Those two gaps are the reallocation agenda.

2027 will bring bigger marketing budgets for roughly nine out of ten teams. The Forrester data suggests the competitive separation won't come from budget size. It will come from whether the money funds AI-ready foundations — answer engine optimization, consolidated data, autonomous ad optimization, and the skills to govern all of it. The budget conversation this autumn is really an operating model conversation. Treat it that way.

Created with help of AI.