From clicks to cash flow: bridging the CMO–CFO gap

Your CFO doesn’t care about clicks. Your CMO doesn’t dream in contribution margin. That’s why marketing plans often don’t make it to the boardroom—unless you give them a shared language.

Bringing two different lenses to business growth

In the betting and gaming industry, both the CMO and CFO are working toward growth, but the way they operate in the world couldn’t be more different. Marketers live in the immediacy of campaigns, constantly adjusting tactics by the hour or even by the minute during peak seasons. Their dashboards are full of leading indicators—clicks, sign-ups, deposits, customer acquisition costs (CAC). Finance leaders, on the other hand, view the business on much longer horizons. They focus on contribution margin, profitability, and cash flow across quarters or years. Because customer lifetime value in this industry can take months or even years to realize, the gap between leading and lagging indicators is especially wide.

This isn’t a matter of one side being right and the other wrong. It’s about translation. Marketing speaks in signals, while finance speaks in outcomes. And when those outputs don’t line up, the result is back-and-forth debates, hesitation, and too often, missed opportunities.

The hidden costs of misalignment

When CMOs and CFOs aren’t aligned, the inefficiencies compound across the business. The most obvious is wasted spend. Marketers scale up campaigns that appear successful in the short term without clarity on their true downstream value. At the same time, campaigns that are actually profitable over the long run can be shut down because they don’t meet short-term thresholds. One customer learned this the hard way when their campaign manager pulled the plug on a key campaign because it wasn’t “profitable enough” against his immediate KPIs. Within 24 hours, the CMO was back on the phone asking why their most profitable campaign had gone dark.

The misalignment also eats away at human capital. Teams burn countless hours translating marketing data into finance-ready decks and financial reporting into marketing-friendly scorecards. I’ve even seen customers where more energy went into reconciling metrics than into making actual performance decisions.

And then there’s the opportunity cost—the hardest to measure but perhaps the most damaging. When teams are bogged down in translation and firefighting, they’re not capitalizing on new growth opportunities. They’re not testing innovative channels or doubling down on tactics that could change the trajectory of the business. The cost of misalignment is not just inefficiency; it’s the innovation you never pursued.

Why CAC and LTV metrics don’t cut it alone

For marketers at brands that are focused on growth at all costs, CAC serves as the top leading indicator and even an organizational mantra. It’s all about acquiring as many players as possible while lowering CAC. In other organizations where the longer-term finance metrics dominate, it’s all about lifetime value (LTV). They may focus so narrowly on profitability that they choke off growth. In my experience, most companies lean too heavily in one of these two directions.

Both approaches eventually hit a wall. And from my own experience working with operators, I can tell you those walls are real.

Growth in betting and gaming comes in phases, and there are natural plateaus that appear as you scale. At first, increasing spend naturally drives equivalent results. But eventually, you reach a point where simply doubling your budget no longer doubles your growth. The reality is, these plateaus exist whether you’re focused on CAC or LTV. The key is how you navigate them—because breaking through requires acting differently, not just pushing harder with the same playbook.

The new language of value: CAC:LTV

The bridge between marketing and finance is the ratio that connects the two: CAC:LTV.

This shared metric allows both sides to measure outcomes in terms of revenue, margin, payback, and ultimately profit. It transforms marketing spend from a cost line item into an investment narrative that CFOs can support—and it gives everyone the right way to make decisions that grow the business.

What does it take to build a decision framework around CAC:LTV?

So why don’t we see CAC:LTV across the industry? What’s the catch? It’s simple: the complex economics within betting and gaming made it too difficult to predict lifetime value with enough accuracy and in the time frame in which marketers need to make decisions and commit spend. 

Predictive lifetime value (pLTV), made possible with big datasets and AI technologies, changes the game. With a reliable means of forecasting player value within days of acquisition, you finally have a common yardstick both sides can trust. Marketing can see which campaigns are likely to produce high-value players before wasted spend builds up. Finance can model cash flow and profitability with confidence, even as peak season is flying by.

Accurate, timely insights serve as the legs of a shared language of value; but consistent approaches to every marketing channel are the heart. There are nuances within each channel, but everything works better when the different teams are held to similar metrics. 

Even retention and reactivation campaigns can follow a CAC:LTV approach. You may not be investing in partner spend, but you do have people and creative costs in addition to any bonus points you offer your players.  Looking at the return on that investment through the same CAC:LTV lens helps companies see whether the dollars spent on re-engagement are producing value, instead of treating them as separate from acquisition economics.

And then there’s the brain of our shared language: true top-down planning. Media mix models built on pLTV can give you a realistic view of how today’s spend will impact tomorrow’s profit. Instead of reacting to snapshots in time, you can build strategies that balance short-term performance with long-term value.

CMO-CFO alignment can’t wait

Betting and gaming is a competitive industry with growth plateaus that can hit you before you know it. And as I like to remind our customers, you can’t fight physics. Players will behave the way they behave. The only lever you truly control is how quickly you understand their value and act on it.

Clicks alone won’t win you buy-in from the boardroom. Contribution margin alone won’t scale your business. The winners will be the companies where marketing and finance speak the same language, align on the same metrics, and drive cash flow together.

Want to see how Intelitics helps CMOs and CFOs align around predictive LTV? Let’s talk.