How a CMO thinks when making million-dollar decisions
VP Team Live | Guest: Yulia Kuznetsova, ex-CMO Rozetka
Watch the full session →Vika Prydatko, founder of vpteam.io, spoke with Yulia Kuznetsova — CMO with 10+ years in large-scale e-commerce and platform business, 10 years at Rozetka. They covered how to manage large marketing budgets, where marketers spend money, and how to optimize costs in uncertain conditions.
A large marketing budget is a sum of small ones
Any million consists of dozens or hundreds of small line items. 10 × 10 = 100, 100 × 10 = 1,000,000. If you can't manage a thousand well, you won't manage a million.
Employers require experience with large budgets not because the approaches differ, but because of accountability: the person already knows what it means to have a million in their area of responsibility.
How to allocate a marketing budget: where to start
- Define the goal.
- Map out the steps.
- Estimate the cost of each step.
- Define how to measure effectiveness.
The total budget is assembled from line items tied to specific goals.
Performance and brand: two directions of marketing spend
Performance drives sales now. Direct funnel, transparent ROI. You balance efficiency and scale: a channel can have a strong ROAS but not deliver the volume you need.
Budget approaches:
- Fixed — the CEO sets the amount, the marketer allocates it toward the target result.
- Open — as long as ROAS holds, the budget grows. Requires an accurate attribution model, otherwise money disappears.
Brand has no direct funnel, but builds revenue over years. Reaching a large audience costs a lot.
What to measure in brand:
- Reach and frequency from ad platforms
- Brand Health Tracker — awareness, trust, perception over time
- Retrospective analysis: overlay brand activities on business metrics, look for correlation
Research on brand impact:
- Kantar: brand accounts for ~30% of company value among large global brands
- Deloitte: customers spend 37%, almost 40% more with brands they trust
- Nielsen: 59% buy from a familiar brand vs. 20% willing to try an unknown one
- WARC: shifting from Performance Only to Performance + Brand increases ROI by 25% to 100%
How to optimize marketing spend
Stay close to the numbers yourself. Even with a delegated team, the director sees the full picture and finds line items that can be cut without affecting results.
Ask «why» before every action. What will this deliver? How will we measure it? If there's no answer and the action isn't part of a broader brand effort — it's up for review.
Inhouse first. Start with your own team. If it doesn't work — bring in a vetted agency. Build internal capability in parallel.
Reserve a budget percentage for experiments. Some channels won't pay off — that's expected and accounted for. The ones that do, you scale. Work your existing base through direct marketing: a repeat customer via email costs less than one acquired through paid ads.
New marketing channels in 2025
LLM traffic (ChatGPT, Claude, etc.) is now tracked in Similarweb under AI Traffic. SEO optimization partly works for LLM visibility too. Early movers pay less per click.
TikTok Ads in Ukraine launched in 2025. Low competition at the start, higher ROI.
New tools have a window: early clients pay less and face fewer competitors.
What to do when a competitor pulls ahead
Start with a diagnosis: did you slip somewhere, or did the competitor do something new? Then build a plan for the specific cause. You react to the mechanism, not the gap.
The approach to marketing budget management
Plan for the optimistic scenario, but keep several alternatives in your head from the start. When something goes wrong, you shift budget between channels. Flexibility is built in at the beginning, not figured out in a crisis.
Nobody started with millions. One channel first, then another, then more. The approach stays the same — only the number scales.