BCG published “Why Most CEOs Are Failing Marketing’s New Math Test” in late September. The pitch: AI is rewriting the economics of CPG marketing, and it finally lets CEOs see what their marketing dollars produce.
They got part of it right. But on measurement, the part that actually matters, they name the problem and then skip the one method that solves it. That’s a controlled test.
Let’s go through it.
What does BCG get right?
Three things, and they’re worth saying up front.
Marketing is a growth investment, and cutting it because the P&L looks ugly is a mistake. The real budget question is where the next dollar works hardest, not whether to spend more or less. And measurement belongs inside the company, not with an agency or a tech vendor.
I agree with all three. The trouble starts when BCG explains how to get there.
Does the new math add up?
BCG gives two numbers. A big CPG company that used to make about 500 marketing assets a year now needs five to six million. And a personalized product shot for a beauty brand that cost $4 two years ago now costs four cents.
Do the math on that. Volume goes up about 10,000x. Cost per asset drops 100x. If those numbers describe the same kind of asset, total content spend goes up about 100x.
If they don’t, the article gives you no way to figure out the total at all. Either way, BCG calls it AI collapsing the cost of content and never shows the bill. And the bill is the first thing a CFO asks for.
Does more content mean more growth?
No. More volume means more noise.
Good content compounds. A strong piece keeps paying off long after it ships. A million variations on a weak idea never add up to one strong one. They’re just cheaper to ignore.
And look at what those five million assets really are. Personalized product shots. The same asset, resized and retargeted over and over. That’s production work. If a plan needs 10,000 times the output to stay visible, the output was never what made it work.
Is AI actually cheaper?
Cheaper per token, sure. Cheaper on the invoice, no.
BCG lists token spend as one of the costs going up. In the next breath, it says agentic AI can triple ROI, but it never subtracts that cost. You can’t count the return and leave out the newest line item.
Token prices keep falling, but usage climbs faster. An agent hits a model repeatedly to finish a single task. Gartner puts agentic work at 5 to 30 times the tokens of a normal chatbot exchange. In a McKinsey survey, 93% of companies said they’ve blown past their AI budgets. Uber burned through its whole 2026 AI coding budget in four months.
And today’s prices aren’t the floor. The big AI labs still spend more than they bring in, and prices propped up by investor money don’t stay put.
So build the business case on the full cost per task, at prices that could double. If the ROI only works at today’s rates, it doesn’t work.
Does AI make marketing ROI measurable?
Not the way BCG describes it.
Their method uses AI to pull together fragmented signals and identify which investments drive incremental growth. That’s the same correlation problem marketers have been stuck with for decades. Stitch more signals together, faster, and you still have signals. None of them tells you what would’ve happened if you hadn’t spent the money.
That’s what incrementality needs: a comparison point. You spend in some markets, hold back in matched ones, and measure the gap. No amount of data stitching gives you that gap. You have to create it.
BCG also wants measurement that guides real-time spending. That’s an AI-induced pipe dream. A real test takes weeks to read. You can have real time, or you can have cause and effect, and the article never picks one.
Where’s the proof that AI triples ROI?
The article offers none.
One unnamed entertainment company tripled ROI. One unnamed auto OEM got “100% effectiveness gains” and a CFO who feels more confident: no baseline, no definition of effectiveness, no method. A confident CFO is nice. It isn’t a result.
Then there’s a CPG insights agent that went from 50% to over 90% accuracy writing campaign briefs. Accurate compared to what? A brief isn’t a true-or-false answer, so comparing it to a coin toss means nothing.
The threefold ROI claim shows up twice. Neither instance includes anything you can check.
Do David Protein and Poppi prove it drives growth?
No. They prove that a great product, a strong founder, and the right distribution can grow fast.
Poppi rode Shark Tank and TikTok. David launched with the RXBAR co-founder behind it. BCG calls AI the rocket fuel but gives you no way to separate AI from the product, the founder or the timing. And it doesn’t mention a single AI-native brand that flamed out. That’s survivorship bias.
The breakfast aisle example has the same hole. Insurgent cereal and granola brands took share from the big names, and BCG backs that up by linking its own article on CPG’s lost decade of R&D. That’s a product story. BCG is using it to sell a marketing fix.
What does “human judgment” actually mean?
BCG never says.
The article calls human creativity and judgment the new currency and says companies have to decide which calls stay with people. Then it stops. There’s no list of decisions and no rule for where the line goes. The only evidence that companies are doing this is a survey where about a third of CMOs say they are. That’s what they reported. Nobody observed it.
Judgment isn’t a skill you put on a slide. It’s a set of calls that someone owns, like which market to enter, which channel to cut, or what a test result means. Strategy is what you choose not to do, and someone owns that choice.
Write those decisions down and put an owner on each one. If nobody can do that, “human judgment” is just a phrase covering for a plan nobody made.
Is AI shopping a new threat?
Not really. It’s the same shift with a new interface.
BCG says nearly a third of shoppers now use AI somewhere in their purchase journey, and 13% buy what the AI recommends. It doesn’t say whether that 13% is all shoppers or only those using AI, and that’s a big difference.
We’ve been here before. Search changed how people found products. Then answer boxes cut the clicks, and everyone declared SEO dead. Now AI answers the question, and everyone’s declaring it dead again. SEO isn’t dead. It’s undead. The job never changed. Be the right answer; it’s that simple.
What did change is the buyer. Every buyer now has a research assistant that reads every review. BCG sees this. Its first answer is a stronger narrative, with fixing the product as the follow-up. That’s backwards. If the product doesn’t deliver, a better story just gets caught faster.
AI doesn’t bury bad products. It sends them to the trash compactor faster. Fix the product and the story takes care of itself.
How should upper-funnel spend be measured?
BCG says brand spend should be measured against leading indicators like consideration and mindshare. Those are survey numbers. They tell you people remember the ad. They don’t tell you the ad sold anything.
You can measure brand spend against sales. Run it in test markets, hold it back in matched ones, and look at the difference in revenue.
What actually answers the CFO?
Matched-market testing. Here’s how it works:
Group markets that behave alike, based on sales, demographics and seasonality.
Pick test and control markets from inside each group.
Change one thing in the test markets: spend, channel or message.
Measure each test group against its own control.
Combine the results to get the real effect, and how confident you can be in it.
This isn’t new. At Wharton’s 2014 customer analytics conference, a Santa Clara University study used this approach to prove paid search’s incremental value for big box retail. Retailers have been doing it for over a decade.
This is where AI earns its keep. It speeds up the grouping, flags bad matches and reads results faster. It makes testing cheaper. It doesn’t replace it.
The Cold Take
BCG makes an argument: AI makes marketing knowable. The evidence is unnamed clients and undefined metrics.
Don’t argue. Test it. Put the plan in front of real markets and let it prove itself or fail. The result is the only number a CFO can take to the board.
Until next time, keep your market tests honest.
Bill
Marketing Systems Guild.
Build it. Prove it. Scale it.
P.S.
Yes, I used AI to help write this. I also used a calculator to check my work and the internet to research my topics. Go figure.