Disciplined Budget Planning Leaves Marketers Ready For Cuts and Surprise Wins

The views and opinions expressed are those of Joel Paulino and do not represent the official policy or position of any organization.

Many marketing budgets arrive as a single annual number, and the plan built around that number rarely survives the year untouched. Budgets have stayed flat as a share of revenue for several years, while cuts and new investment can arrive at any point in the cycle. A plan that commits every dollar up front can force a team to pull working media the moment a cut comes through. A more durable plan separates what a team can prove from what it's testing and what it holds in reserve.

Joel Paulino is Senior Director of Marketing, Growth, and Go-to-Market, at Verizon, where he leads go-to-market planning across a portfolio of consumer brands. He previously led brands at Anheuser-Busch, Bacardi, and Pernod Ricard and served as VP of Marketing at whiskey startup Duke & Dame. A former CPA, Paulino started his career at Ernst & Young and in finance at Johnson & Johnson before moving into brand management there. His finance background still shapes how he builds a marketing budget.

"I like to think about it first and foremost as, how can I deliver the business goals with 70% of the budget? I want to set up the budget in a way where there's full confidence that 70% of it is going to get me really close to or achieving that goal," says Paulino. The remainder goes to low-risk bets with room to outperform, along with a reserve of about 10% that he leaves unplanned for changes in the business. The structure keeps an answer ready when finance asks what each part of the spend is delivering.

Budget follows the business

Paulino's plans start from what the business has to accomplish and how it can get there. He once led a brand coming out of a year of supply chain constraints, with a growth goal of 10% for the year ahead. With those constraints resolved, reliable supply alone looked capable of delivering 10% to 15% growth. "My marketing budget that is currently X number doesn't actually have to drive a lot of the growth. Now I can focus this year on building brand equity, for example," Paulino explains.

The proven 70% rests on historical results, marketing mix modeling, and channels with measured performance. Paulino builds the plan on what has and hasn't worked before, and he's deliberate about which bets the budget makes. His start in finance also shapes when he plans, since a budget has to hold up in the meetings where the company reviews its numbers. "I think it's important to align the budget and the plan to the business cycle. This business operates in a quarterly way. That's when the CFO looks at things and makes decisions," he says.

Low risk, high reward

Paulino treats much of the remaining budget as low risk, high reward. An influencer campaign can qualify when the creator's average reach, once costed out, comes to about the same price as running a paid ad. At minimum, the brand gets the output it would have bought anyway, and the rest depends on how well the team briefs the creator and fits into their world. The goal is content that adds value for the creator's audience, so more people want to share it. "You're banking on something that's guaranteed and you're not overpaying for it. But then there's so much upside," Paulino notes.

He illustrates the layering with a hypothetical beer brand heading into NFL season, when fantasy football fans are preparing for their drafts. Working with a creator who already talks about football adds relevance on top of impressions the brand was paying for regardless. When finance asks what the spend delivered, each bet reaches as many people as a paid ad while drawing more engagement. "You do 20 of these and let's say one of them catches fire. Now you're in a space where you can't plan for something going viral or getting earned media out of something interesting that you do," he explains.

Paulino leaves roughly 10% of the budget unplanned, knowing that cuts and new investment come and go. Budgets move during the year as the company's financials change, and budget cuts can force a team to pull a high-reach TV investment and absorb a short-term hit. He builds the plan to deliver its goals without that 10%, and if no cut arrives, the money goes to whatever is working best. "I know that this is in the cards, so I'm going to actively plan for it," says Paulino.

The next best dollar

Leftover budget from a campaign that has already hit its goals is money Paulino would redeploy into long-term investments outside marketing, not spend down. On Aveeno Baby at Johnson & Johnson, pediatrician recommendations delivered the strongest long-term return in his experience, though new sales reps and samples were slow to show results. "You're put in a position where it's a lot stronger to operate from than a position of, 'Oh man, this next year is a really tough challenge. I don't have the long-tail momentum that I can bank on. I have to do a lot of stuff using short-term tactics,' which isn't the best place to operate from," he explains.

Day to day, real-time dashboards show quickly whether a social post or email campaign is working, but Paulino finds the numbers often leave out part of the story. He works from hypotheses about the offer or the copy before deciding what to change. Discounts reliably lift opens, clicks and sales, but running high offers all the time isn't the answer. An email with an offer might open at 5% or 6% while one without opens at 2%, so the harder work is taking that 2% to 2.1% or 2.2%. "If over time you're able to get a team and an organization focused on those incremental optimizations, then it's compounding infinitely," Paulino concludes. "It's just the mindset of better, better, better versus the mindset of this worked, that didn't."