One view of every marketing dollar, from trade shows to channel spend
A precision equipment manufacturer consolidates its marketing budget and campaign planning in Airtable: trade show, media, web, and channel spend tracked by product line, media plans with vendors and asset links, and rollups that feed executive interfaces. Marketing, Finance, and Legal replaced manual monthly chart building and scattered spreadsheets with one consolidated source of truth.
The problem
Marketing spend across trade shows, media placements, web, and channel programs lived in fragmented bases and scattered spreadsheets, so leadership questions about total spend took a slow, manual pull to answer. Every monthly report meant rebuilding charts by hand.
Legal and Finance needed clean answers to spend questions on demand, but the underlying budget data had no consolidated view. Product-line breakdowns required cross-referencing multiple files before anyone could report a number with confidence.
What they built
Marketing, Finance, and Legal stood up a shared base that tracks budget by campaign and product line, manages media plans with vendor, date, and asset details, and rolls spend up into breakdowns leadership and Legal can query directly.
Executive interfaces pull from the same base to produce a monthly, presentation-ready view for CMO reporting, replacing the manual graph-building that used to precede every review.
The outcome
Marketing spend now consolidates into one base instead of scattered spreadsheets, and leadership or Legal spend questions get a same-day answer instead of a multi-file pull.
The presentation-ready executive interface eliminated manual chart building ahead of every CMO review, giving the team back time that used to go into reformatting the same numbers month after month.
Inside the solution
Marketing Budget and Campaign Planning
Marketing & Communications
- Budget tracking by campaign and product line
- Media plan management with vendor, dates, and assets
- Spend rollups and breakdowns for Legal and leadership queries
- Executive interfaces for monthly CMO reporting
- Manual monthly rollups and chart building
- Fragmented bases and scattered spend data
- Slow response to leadership and Legal spend questions
- Lack of consolidated budget visibility
- Consolidated budget rollups across all marketing spend
- Faster answers to leadership queries
- Improved visibility for CMO reviews
- Cleaner, presentation-ready formats
- Marketing
- Finance
- Legal
- Salesforce
Marketing Budget & Campaign Planning
Track every marketing dollar in one base: budget lines tagged by campaign and product line, media plans with vendor, flight dates and asset links, and rollups that answer a Legal or leadership spend question as a filtered view instead of a multi-file pull. Published interface pages give the CMO review a live, presentation-ready spend picture, while automations open creative slots and Legal spend questions on their own and AI columns draft the campaign, product-line and executive-review summaries.
From scattered spreadsheets to one consolidated budget view
Copy the templates
Roll up by product line
Publish the executive view
FAQ
Frequently asked questions
Every budget line, media plan, and asset link is a record in a shared base, so a rollup by campaign or product line is a view, not a manual export from multiple files.
Because every dollar is tagged and linked in the same base, a spend breakdown that used to take a multi-file pull is now a filtered view anyone with access can run.
An executive interface built on top of the same base that pulls the current rollup into a presentation-ready view, so nobody rebuilds the same graph by hand every month.
Product-line tagging lets the same base answer both a department-level question and a product-level question without maintaining two separate trackers.
Not yet for the budget workflow itself. The team is exploring AI-assisted copy generation and field translation for other marketing workflows, and this consolidated spend data is the kind of structured foundation those efforts would build on.