The industry’s move to 'outcomes' is, in principle, a step forward. After years of proxy metrics, optimisation theatre and dashboards that impress nobody outside marketing, it is healthier to ask what actually changed in the business. But there is a risk here that APAC leaders can see coming a mile off: outcomes become the next talking shop.
If past form is any guide, the outcomes debate will create an ecosystem of frameworks, workshops and consultants, all busy defining the perfect model while very little changes in the way budgets are won and defended. The board does not need another vocabulary. It needs marketing to slot into the only agenda that ultimately matters at the top table: capital allocation.
That is the real problem. Not that boards don’t believe in brands. They do. Most directors understand instinctively that brand is a cash flow multiplier. They might not use those words, but they understand that strong brands convert better, retain longer, command price, and bounce back faster when the world turns ugly. And they are not naive about measurement either. Boards live in a messy reality. They are sceptical of anyone who claims a frictionless attribution machine that neatly isolates marketing from everything else that influences demand.
So why is marketing still on the defensive? Because CFOs don’t allocate capital on vibes. They allocate capital on payback, cash conversion, margin durability, demand volatility, pricing power and guidance confidence. When marketing cannot connect itself to those variables, it doesn’t just lose the argument–it loses trust.
This is a trust issue, not an outcomes issue.
Outcomes-based agency models can make that trust problem worse. They sound aligned, but they often embed a category error: they treat marketing as if it were a controllable input with a clean, contractual output. In reality, outcomes are an entangled product of distribution, product-market fit, price, competitive intensity, macro conditions, retail execution, platform dynamics and plain luck. If agencies are paid on outcomes, one of two things happens. Either the outcomes are defined so loosely that it becomes PR with spreadsheets. Or they are defined tightly, and agencies end up underwriting variables they do not control.
Both routes push agencies into vendor economics. The risk transfers to the agency, the client keeps the discretion, and the platforms quietly capture the upside. Procurement loves it because it turns marketing into an outsourcing contract. Finance can tolerate it because it resembles a cost model. But strategically it encourages short-termism, cherry-picked objectives and a bias towards what can be counted quickly, not what builds durable advantage.
If you want a simple test, it is this: does your 'outcomes' model help the CFO make a capital allocation decision, or does it simply rearrange the measurement deckchairs?
The stronger move is to reframe marketing as the thing boards actually buy when they approve investment: reduced risk and higher-quality earnings.
Marketing done well does all the operational things we know it does - higher conversion, stronger retention, lower churn, lower CAC, greater lifetime value. But the board-level synthesis is more powerful: marketing reduces volatility. It stabilises demand. It protects the price. It makes revenue more repeatable and margins more defensible. That is not a theory. That is what higher-quality earnings mean.
And higher-quality earnings are worth more.
Capital markets pay up for businesses with stable demand, loyal customers and pricing power because those characteristics improve forecastability and reduce the probability of nasty surprises. That is why two companies can grow at similar rates yet trade on very different valuation multiples. One has fragile, promotion-driven demand and weak pricing power. The other has a brand moat, a loyal base and resilient unit economics. In CFO language, the second business deserves a lower risk premium - and therefore a lower cost of capital.
Once you see marketing through that lens, the question shifts. It is no longer “did the campaign drive growth?” It becomes “did this investment improve the reliability, durability and risk profile of the cashflows?” That is how boards think and that's how CFOs allocate.
This matters even more in APAC right now. Many multinational companies are quietly re-tilting senior attention and incremental investment back toward North America and Western Europe. Sometimes it is because growth has normalised and budgets are being consolidated. Sometimes it is because geopolitics and supply chain fragility have increased the perceived risk of far-flung bets. Sometimes it is simply because HQ wants fewer moving parts. Whatever the driver, the implication for APAC marketing leaders is clear: you will win less by arguing that the region is strategic and more by showing that your spend improves the quality of earnings.
APAC boardrooms are not uniform—Japan’s discipline differs from India’s growth tempo, and Singapore’s regional HQ procurement machine is not the same as Southeast Asia’s fragmentation—but the finance logic travels. If you want to protect budgets, you need to speak the language of the CFO. Not as a slogan, but as a working operating model.
So what should agencies do? Stop positioning outcomes as the end state and start positioning yourselves as capital allocation partners. Bring CFO-ready investment cases: what risk is being reduced, what volatility is being dampened, what pricing power is being protected, what payback profile is realistic, and what the downside looks like if the investment is not made. Build measurement that is decision-useful, not cosmetically precise. Be explicit about controllables versus non-controllables. And focus on helping clients defend marketing spend as an investment that improves guidance confidence and lowers the risk premium on the business.
Speak and think the language of the CFO and the board.
That is a more ambitious mandate than selling outcomes. But it is also the only one that escapes commoditisation.
And if APAC leaders want to keep winning attention and capital in a world where HQ focus is narrowing, this is the shift that matters: away from outcomes theatre, and toward capital allocation reality.
As usual, this is not investment advice.
The founder and managing director of Liberty Sky Advisors, Ian Whittaker, regularly writes for Campaign about the advertising landscape from a financial standpoint.
