A brand doing $10 to $15 million a year puts 15 to 20 percent of revenue back into marketing. At $100 to $500 million, that drops to roughly 8 to 10 percent. Past a billion, it’s 2 to 3 percent.
These marketing spend benchmarks come from Justin Jefferson, who has a view across 450 brands and $45 billion in media investment through Keen’s marketing mix modeling platform. The numbers are where the real conversation starts: not how much you spend, but where it goes once Meta and Google stop being the whole plan.
Harness the Halo is about the spend that doesn’t pay you back the same day, and the measurement that gives you room to make it anyway. This first episode sets the state of the market. The next five are the bets themselves, told by the operators who made them and the people who signed off.
Two ways into this episode
If you run growth: this is the episode about defending a slow-payback bet to a finance team that closes the books quarterly.
If you sit closer to the P&L: Justin walks through discounting future marketing revenue back to present value, so marketing and finance are finally arguing about the same number.
Marketing budget benchmarks by revenue
What brands actually spend on marketing changes fast as they scale. Justin breaks the curve into four bands:
- $10M to $15M in revenue: 15 to 20 percent of revenue reinvested in marketing
- $100M to $500M in revenue: roughly 8 to 10 percent
- $500M to $1B in revenue: closer to 5 to 7 percent
- Past $1B in revenue: 2 to 3 percent
What else Justin gets into
- Marginal ROI versus blended ROI, and why a 1.4 return can hide a next dollar worth 60 cents
- The brand that went zero to a hundred on top-of-funnel spend, lost sales volume in year one, cut budget in response, and had nothing left to capture the demand it had created
- The golf apparel brand that moved deliberately into CTV, linear TV, and audio advertising: roughly flat revenue in year one, about 23 percent growth in year two
- Why Amazon search is often the most overspent line in a marketing budget, and where the real incrementality is instead
- The gap between top-of-funnel and bottom-of-funnel returns: roughly 180 against 120 to 140
- Why brands growing 5 percent or more changed their channel mix significantly more year over year than the brands standing still
Who this episode is for
Operators between $10M and $500M in revenue who have squeezed Meta and Google as far as they go and need a defensible case for spending where the attribution is fuzzy.
What to steal
Report return on the next dollar by channel, alongside blended ROI. Most teams have only ever seen the second number.
