IKAg Sector Report · Benelux · 2026 edition
How to split your budget across media, agencies, people and tools. What the figures say, what they leave out, and which way things are moving.
of revenue goes to marketing, says Gartner. The CMO Survey says 9.4%. First lesson: no single figure is sacred.
new advertising euros go to online platforms worldwide. The rest divide the crumbs.
of the budget goes to the short term, while marketers themselves call 50/50 ideal. The gap between knowing and doing.
On average 7.7% of revenue goes to marketing (Gartner), or 9.4% (The CMO Survey), and that budget breaks into four almost equal buckets: 30.6% media, 22.4% tools, 21.9% own people and 20.7% agencies. Only the first bucket can be benchmarked reliably in the Benelux. Media is growing, the other three are shrinking in share. And the split between brand and sales sits at 31/69, while marketers themselves call 50/50 ideal.
What you do with that is in Part 3: six steps, a worked example and three scenarios for 2027.
In this report
of revenue goes to marketing on average (Gartner 2025). The CMO Survey measures 9.4%. Half of CMOs sit at 6% or less.
The budget splits into four almost equal buckets: media 30.6%, tools 22.4%, people 21.9%, agencies 20.7% (Gartner 2025).
of marketers expect a lower budget this year, almost double last year (WARC). Plan defensively.
The actual long-term versus short-term split is 31.2% brand and 68.8% performance, while marketers themselves call 50/50 ideal (The CMO Survey 2025).
of global adspend is digital in 2026. Nine in ten new advertising euros go to online platforms (WARC).
of global adspend is already retail media, the fastest grower. In the Benelux still young territory (WARC).
net media market in the Netherlands (+6.1%), of which 63% digital. And 83% of the digital euro goes to the international platforms (Nielsen, Deloitte/VIA).
of Belgian net media investment was digital in 2024, past the symbolic 40% line (UMA-UBA).
of CMOs say generative AI already makes them less dependent on agencies for creative and strategy (Gartner 2025).
buckets (people and tools) are missing from the public Benelux benchmarks. What the market does not measure, you measure yourself.
Most budget reports act as if every percentage is equally reliable. It is not. That is why every figure in this report carries a label, so you know whether you can build on it or only lean against it.
Measured published research with a known sample. Estimate a derivation or a secondary publication. No Benelux data no equivalent research exists here.
You do not have to guess next year. You cannot know exactly what the market will do, but you can know which way it is moving and how certain that movement is. That is a compass. We do not sell crystal balls, because they do not exist and the people who do sell them bill by the hour.
Every marketing budget breaks into four buckets: media, agencies, people and tools. First we count how much goes in, then how it is divided, and then where it flows. Two of the four buckets we see sharply. The other two sit in the fog.
The honest answer starts with a counter-question: according to whom? Because the two largest benchmarks in the world do not agree.
On average around 7.7% of revenue goes to marketing according to Gartner, and 9.4% according to The CMO Survey. The figure varies widely by sector and is usually lower for SMEs than for large companies.
of company revenue goes to marketing. Stable two years running, after years of erosion.
Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2025 · 402 CMOs, mostly companies above $1bn · Measured
of revenue, says the same question asked by a different researcher. One and a half percentage points is not a detail.
The CMO Survey 2025 (Duke / Deloitte / AMA) · US · Measured
Why do two serious sources differ by almost a point and a half? Not because one of them is lying. Gartner mostly measures billion-dollar companies, The CMO Survey a broader palette. Different companies, a different definition of "marketing", a different average. Which is exactly why you do not pluck a round number off the internet and paste it into your board paper. An average is a coat rack, not a tailored suit.
And mind what hides under that average: half of the CMOs surveyed report a budget of 6% or less. The average is pulled up by a group of big spenders, the way the average savings account in a bar rises the moment a millionaire walks in.
Across sectors, budget as a percentage of revenue varies considerably. Below the Gartner figures for 2025. Read them as the height of the bar in your sector, not as an instruction.
Source: Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2025. The top three are confirmed by several independent trade publications Measured; the remaining values come from a secondary published Gartner document and are not independently verified Estimate. International, not Benelux-specific.
Note the IT sector at the bottom: it dropped from 9.0% to 5.8% in a single year. Not because tech companies suddenly believe marketing is redundant, but because they hit the brakes after the growth years. Budgets move, sometimes hard. Which brings us to the mood for next year, and it is cautious.
of marketers expect a lower budget this year. Last year that was 22%. The pessimist has company.
WARC Voice of the Marketer · Measured
of CMOs find the budget too tight to execute the strategy. The classic that never goes out of fashion.
Gartner 2025 · Measured
feel more pressure from the CFO to justify marketing than two years ago, when it was 52%. The calculator is watching.
The CMO Survey 2025 · Measured
Plan defensively. The figures do not say "it is collapsing", they say "hold on". Anchor your budget on your sector above, not on the general average. And make sure every large amount has a story for the CFO, because they will ask. Three in five marketers already feel that pressure.
Once you know how much goes into marketing, the real question arrives: what do you divide it over? There is exactly one source that measures the full four-way split. And it also shows which way things are tilting.
A marketing budget splits on average into 30.6% paid media, 22.4% martech, 21.9% internal staff and 20.7% agencies (Gartner 2025). Media is growing, the other three are shrinking in share. Only media can be benchmarked reliably in the Benelux.
The four buckets are: media (what you pay to be seen), agencies (what outsiders make for you), people (your own team) and tools (the software keeping it all running). Gartner measures all four. Below the split, with a direction for each bucket for the years ahead.
← external · internal →
Growing. The only bucket that rises.
Share falls, but AI pushes back.
Under pressure. 39% plan to cut.
Shrinking hardest of all.
Source: Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2025 · Measured for today, Estimate for the direction.
The four buckets are almost the same size today. That is changing. Gartner sees three of the four shrinking in share and only media growing. The logic behind it: media inflation makes advertising more expensive, so money shifts there purely to hold the same reach. At the same time CMOs cut agencies and their own people to pay for it. 39% plan to cut agencies, 39% plan to cut staff.
22% of CMOs say generative AI already lets them be less dependent on agencies for creative and strategy. One in five. That is no longer future music, that is this financial year. The tools bucket shrinks on paper, but the AI inside it does work that used to sit in the agency and people buckets. The buckets run into one another.
Source: Gartner 2025 · Measured
For your planning this means: do not look at the four buckets as separate pots, but as communicating vessels. If you cut your agency budget and think you are saving, check whether that work has not simply moved to your tools bucket or your own team. Saved money that changes box is not saved. It is hidden.
This is the only quadrant where Belgium and the Netherlands have real, local, sector-specific data. No extrapolation needed. Here you can look a marketing director in the eye and say: these are the facts.
In Belgium digital reached 41.9% of net media spend in 2024, with TV above 27% and radio above 15%. In the Netherlands the net media market is €6.8bn, of which 63% is digital. Globally, media is shifting towards 82% digital in 2026.
UMA-UBA Benchmark Media Investments 2025 · net spend
Digital broke through the symbolic 40% line in 2024, reaching 41.9% of net media investment, up from 37.2% in 2023. And 79% of media spend went to Belgian media.
Nielsen and Deloitte/VIA 2025 · net spend
Net media market: €6.8bn (+6.1%). The digital market alone accounts for €4.4bn. Television fell for the third year running.
Globally towards 82.4% of all adspend in 2026. The Benelux lags slightly but moves the same way. The question is not whether, but how fast.
WARC Global Ad Forecast · Measured
The fastest grower worldwide, already 14.7% of adspend. Advertising on retailers' own channels. Still young in the Benelux, so early movers hold an advantage.
WARC 2025 · Measured
Three years of decline in both countries. Not dead, but structurally smaller. Still strong for broad brand awareness, but the share keeps eroding.
Nielsen and UMA-UBA · Measured
In the Netherlands 83% of every digital advertising euro goes to the international platforms: Meta, Google, Amazon and friends. In 2015 that was 54%. In other words: most of your media budget leaves the local economy faster than a tourist in Belgian rain. That has a consequence which returns later: companies increasingly buy those platforms themselves, bypassing the agency. And with that, money quietly shifts from the agency bucket to the people bucket.
Planning to compare this media data year after year? Note that in Belgium, from 1 July 2026, NeuroMedia takes over measurement from Nielsen. That can create a break in your series. Good to know now, not next year when your chart suddenly kinks and you spend an hour hunting an error that is not there.
For these two buckets no public Benelux benchmark exists. Not a disaster, but an assignment: what the market does not measure for you, you measure yourself. And that happens to be very doable.
There is no public Benelux benchmark of internal marketing salary cost by sector. And the biggest problem: most companies do not even count their own team as marketing budget. Which makes internal work look free. It is the most expensive thing you have, it simply has no invoice.
No local benchmark, and a notorious measurement problem: companies report what they buy, not what they use. A good part of the martech stack is gathering dust. You are paying the membership of a gym you enter twice a year, except in software.
What the market does not measure, you measure yourself. And precisely there, for the agency and people buckets, local data does exist: not from a research institute but from real transactions. At IKAg we measure through PitchPoint what agencies in the Benelux actually charge. We capture that in one unit: the PAR.
The PAR as a yardstick
One fixed unit of account for agency work, built from a catalogue of deliverables that each carry their own weight. Not a survey where somebody guesses what they pay, but what is actually invoiced. That is the difference between a weather forecast and looking out of the window.
That lets you express your scope in the same language as your budget, and hold a quote against the market instead of against your gut.
If you do not know your agency cost, you cannot decide whether insourcing is cheaper. You are comparing a quote to a gut feeling.
PAR · own IKAg and PitchPoint data · Own measurement
Three forces push the same way. The global platforms swallow the media budget, and you can buy them yourself easily. AI makes production cheaper, so more work fits in house. And CFOs press on external costs. Result: the agency bucket shrinks and the people bucket swells. It is the most important budget shift of the coming years, and whoever measures it themselves sees it coming first.
The four buckets say where your money goes: internal, agency, media, tools. The disciplines say what for: brand, performance, content, social, search, PR. That is a second layer on top of the buckets, not a replacement. And it is the worst-measured part of the whole story. We are honest about that, because it is exactly where the internet lies to you hardest.
Before we divide the disciplines, an honest word up front: there is no reliable Benelux benchmark of budget per discipline. What there is, is a swamp of figures that contradict each other.
While researching this report we came across dozens of "benchmarks" for the split per discipline. Half of them contradicted the other half. Two examples we ran into live, so you know why we are careful.
A widely shared blog quoted the "Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2026". It does not exist. The most recent is from 2025, fielded in February and March 2025. Sticking an invented year onto a real source: it happens more often than you would like.
Another pasted the Gartner figure of 7.7% onto The CMO Survey, which itself reports 9.4%. Two different studies, muddled into one falsely precise number. Whoever repeats it builds on sand.
The best-known example: the figure that social media accounts for 11.3% of the marketing budget circulates everywhere as hard fact. In reality that is a projection from The CMO Survey. The actual figure was 12.1%, and the expectation 11.3%. And that same survey warns: in spring 2023 marketers predicted 20.3% social. It became 11%. Marketers forecast their social spend with as much realism as a teenager forecasts their savings: plenty of ambition, little follow-through.
Every discipline below gets an honest label. Almost none is hard for the Benelux, because that data simply is not there. We give you the direction and the certainty, not a falsely precise pie chart. A direction you can steer on is worth more than a percentage you cannot build on.
This is the most important allocation question in your whole budget. And the good part: here there is a hard figure, because the gap between the ideal and reality has been measured.
Marketers call 50/50 ideal, but in reality 31.2% goes to the long term (brand) and 68.8% to the short term (performance), according to The CMO Survey 2025. Budget pressure pushes that ratio even further towards performance.
Asked about the ideal split, marketers say: fifty-fifty. Nicely in line with the effectiveness work of Binet and Field, which argues for around 60/40 in favour of brand.
Reality: 31.2% brand, 68.8% performance. Almost everyone knows it should be different and does it anyway. The short term simply shouts louder than the long term.
Source: The CMO Survey 2025 · Measured (US data, but the gap is universal) · framework: Binet and Field / IPA.
Those expecting a budget cut shift even harder to performance. Those expecting growth dare to invest in brand. With 42% expecting a decline, the mood pushes the whole market towards the short term, precisely when the effectiveness evidence says you should be protecting your brand. Cutting brand is like switching off the heating to save fuel: it feels thrifty until you realise the house is cold.
Per discipline: the direction for the coming years and how certain it is. No false pie slices. Read the arrow, read the label, and weigh it against your own situation.
Now the largest advertising medium worldwide, good for over a quarter of all adspend. Creator and influencer marketing is growing fast. In the Benelux digital social grew 14%. Careful: marketers systematically overestimate their own social budget, so plan on data, not on enthusiasm.
WARC and Deloitte/VIA · Measured direction, Estimate share
The engine of short-term thinking, and that engine is running at full speed. Paid search grew 11% in the Netherlands. It works in any economic climate, which is exactly why shrinking budgets flee towards it. Risk: over-investment at the expense of the brand.
Deloitte/VIA and Gartner · Measured direction
The fastest grower of all: from almost nothing to 14.7% of global adspend. Advertising on retailers' channels, with purchase data as fuel. Still young in the Benelux. Whoever enters now learns it while the competition hesitates.
WARC 2025 · Measured direction
Classic search engine optimisation is tilting towards visibility in AI answers. Consumers search through ChatGPT, Gemini and Google's AI overviews, which pass on less traffic. Whoever lays no foundation today pays more tomorrow for less visibility. A new discipline, barely budgeted yet.
Deloitte/VIA and IKAg analysis · Estimate
Remains a large line item, around 10% in the US figures, but it changes shape. AI makes production cheaper and faster, so the budget shifts from making a lot to making it better and more distinctive. Volume becomes free, meaning becomes expensive.
The CMO Survey · Estimate (US, no Benelux)
Stable to slightly rising. Gets a second life through AI visibility: being mentioned in trusted sources helps determine whether an AI names your brand. PR measurement shifts from media value to AI findability. Small budget, growing importance.
Sopro and industry data · Estimate
AI now sits in 17.2% of all marketing activities, a doubling since 2022, with an expected 44.2% within three years. That pushes the tools and data discipline up. Trap: buying is not using. Budget for adoption, not only for licences.
The CMO Survey 2025 · Measured direction
Stable, but strategically more important. Now that the global platforms filter traffic and AI positions itself between you and your customer, your own website, newsletter and app become the only channel you truly own. Maintenance is not a cost, it is keeping what is yours.
Market analysis · Estimate
Four disciplines point unmistakably up: social, performance, retail media and data with AI. Two stay flat but grow in importance: content and web. Two need attention because they are tilting: SEO into GEO, and PR into AI visibility. And the big undercurrent running through all of it: AI lowers the production cost of nearly every discipline, which shifts the question from "how much can you make" to "what is it worth". Good news for those who dare to choose, bad news for those who only sold volume.
Enough figures. Now the work: build your own split for next year. A step plan, a worked example you will recognise, and three scenarios for 2027 so you are prepared for more than one future.
No more theory. This is the order in which you build next year's budget without falling into the traps in this report.
Mini case · Vermeersch Verpakkingen
Marc, owner of Vermeersch Verpakkingen, a Flemish B2B packaging company with €12m in revenue, asks the question every owner asks at some point. Marketer Sofie does the exercise following this report.
Gartner says 9.5% for manufacturing. That would be €1.14m. Sofie knows better: that figure comes from large manufacturers. A B2B SME realistically sits at 2 to 3% of revenue. She anchors at 2.5%, or €300,000. Marc breathes out.
Sofie herself plus half a colleague cost some €110,000 all-in. That is not overhead that can stay out of sight, that is 37% of the budget. Suddenly the split looks very different.
Vermeersch expresses its agency work in PAR and lands at some €150,000 a year. Marc asks: can we not do that ourselves? Sofie calculates honestly: an extra internal hire costs €70,000, but does not deliver anything like the same volume of output. For peak work and creative, the agency stays cheaper per unit. For recurring, predictable work, insourcing does pay off.
Insourcing is not a switch you flip. It is a slider. The predictable work moves in, the peak and creative work stays out.
Result: Sofie moves a quarter of the volume in house, keeps the rest external, and saves on balance without losing quality. Marc has their answer, evidenced instead of felt.
One forecast is gambling. Three scenarios is planning. Do not choose which scenario is right, make sure your budget survives all three.
The move: cut experiments, not your brand. Shift predictable work in house. Hold brand at 30% minimum, or you pay double for it later.
The move: close the brand-performance gap towards 40/60. Test retail media with a small budget. Lay a GEO foundation before it gets more expensive.
The move: build internal capacity and AI skills. Dare to invest in brand while you can. Whoever grows and puts everything into performance buys revenue that will be gone again next year.
Choose your base scenario today, but write the other two alongside it as "what do we do if". Fix the thresholds: at what revenue figure do you switch to defensive, on what signal to growth. Then you do not have to panic-plan halfway through the year, because you already thought it through while your head was cool. That is the difference between steering and skidding.
Every figure in this report comes from here. We say honestly how hard each source is, because that is the whole point.
| Source | What it measures | Hardness for the Benelux |
|---|---|---|
| Gartner CMO Spend Survey 2025 | Budget as a percentage of revenue, the four buckets, by sector. 402 CMOs, mostly companies above $1bn | Measured internationally, not locally |
| The CMO Survey 2025 (Duke / Deloitte / AMA) | Budget as a percentage of revenue, brand versus performance, social, AI adoption. US data | Measured US, indicative here |
| WARC Global Ad Forecast | Global adspend growth, digital share, retail media, social | Measured globally |
| UMA-UBA Benchmark Media Investments 2025 | Net media spend in Belgium by channel and sector | Measured Belgium |
| Nielsen Annual Media Spend Report 2025 | Net and gross media spend in the Netherlands by medium | Measured Netherlands |
| Deloitte / VIA Digital Ad Spend Study 2025 | Digital advertising market in the Netherlands, share of the global platforms | Measured Netherlands |
| WARC Voice of the Marketer | Budget expectations, the mood around brand versus performance | Measured globally |
| IKAg PitchPoint / PAR | Actual agency cost in the Benelux, expressed in PAR | Own measurement |
| Discipline split Benelux | Budget per discipline (brand, content, PR and the rest) | No public data, own measurement needed |
| In-house salary cost and martech Benelux, by sector | Internal cost and tool budget by sector | No public data, own measurement needed |
IKAg (2026). Your marketing budget in 2027: a compass, not a crystal ball. IKAg Sector Report Benelux, 2026 edition. www.ikag.be/budgetkompas/?lang=en
For internal salary cost and martech spend there is no public, sector-specific Benelux benchmark. The directions given rest on international sources and IKAg's own measurement.
An honest closing confession: gross and net media spend are not the same thing. Gross is the rate card, net is what is actually paid, and the difference is roughly that between the menu and your bill after three bottles of wine. All media figures in this report are net, unless stated otherwise.
Free tool
The Budgetkompas turns the six steps in this report into a tool. Enter your sector and revenue, pick your scenario, and drag the four buckets until they match your reality. The benchmark recalculates live, and so do the footnotes.
The tool asks for your email address, because we keep your split so we can have the conversation about the buckets where it pinches for you. This report you read without filling anything in.