The Drum caught up with CEO Adrian Tuck and CMO Marie Bahl at the ANA Masters of Marketing Conference 2025 in Orlando to learn why marketing was the last department in the enterprise without an operating system – and how their platform might finally change that.
CEO Adrian Tuck and CMO Marie Bahl
For years, marketing has been the messy backroom of big business. Finance had its ERP. Sales had its CRM. But marketing? Just spreadsheets, consultants and endless decks explaining where the money went.
That’s the blind spot Adrian Tuck, CEO of Uptempo, and Marie Bahl, its CMO, are attacking. Their software promises to give CMOs and CFOs something they’ve never had before: a single, universal source of financial truth for marketing.
“Every other part of the business has enterprise software,” says Tuck. “Marketing doesn’t. It’s been treated as a cost center, not a controllable system of value.”
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Uptempo’s pitch sounds obvious in hindsight: a unified platform that connects plans, budgets and performance in one place. But until now, no one had built it. “Our job,” says Tuck, “is to give visibility into every dollar spent in marketing - so leaders can finally defend, adjust and prove its value.”
The company’s clients already include IBM, AT&T, Estee Lauder, Porsche, Dell and Ikea, all managing nine-figure budgets through Uptempo’s system. Their spend starts at $50m a year – a threshold that narrows the potential customer base to around 1,200 companies in the US and 8,000 worldwide, but they can account for a lot of individuals.
Ikea, for instance, now has more than 10,000 users on Uptempo’s system. “It was running thousands of spreadsheets,” says Bahl. “Now it has a single source of truth across markets and teams.”
Despite its scale, Uptempo’s pitch is almost charmingly unglamorous. “We want to be the least sexy part of marketing,” Tuck laughs. “The boring bit that makes everything else work.”
Once a business gets a complete view of its marketing spend, the effect is immediate. “Every time we give a CMO full visibility, they reallocate between 23% and 28% of their budget,” says Tuck. “It doesn’t matter if they’re a CPG brand or a tech firm; they all find waste they didn’t know existed.”
He points to IBM, which used the platform to assess its global marketing outlay. “When it could see it all in one place, it moved $240m of spend - including pulling sponsorships like the Kentucky Derby so it could reinvest in higher-return priorities. Before, that kind of realignment was almost impossible.”
Bahl says that shift isn’t just about savings, but status. “For the first time, CMOs can walk into the CFO’s office with numbers that hold up. It’s giving marketing the credibility it’s always lacked.”
That credibility could make life uncomfortable for others in the marketing ecosystem, including the holding companies.
“For a long time, people have said to agencies, ‘Hey, go do this thing for me and report on your own performance,’” says Tuck. “This moves that needle back a little bit and gives the marketing team visibility across all these different things… we’re the only place where you can see all that stuff side by side.”
And for consultancies, it cuts into a lucrative sideline. For years, the complexity of global marketing systems – thousands of spreadsheets, disconnected data and inconsistent reporting - created a steady stream of transformation projects. Uptempo’s platform threatens to automate much of that consulting work.
Bahl acknowledges the shift: “When you give clients a single operating system, you eliminate the dependency on armies of analysts and consultants to reconcile the mess. That’s the point - you make marketing self-sufficient.”
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Uptempo used the ANA conference to launch Uptempo 2.0, its AI-powered upgrade. “Most AI in marketing is about generating content,” says Tuck. “But the C-suite doesn’t care about how many ads you can make - they care about how efficiently you spend.”
The new system allows executives to ask natural-language questions like, ‘How much did we spend on CTV last year versus the year before?’ and get instant answers, without a finance team on call. “It’s not about creative automation,” says Bahl. “It’s about decision intelligence.”
Tuck jokes that Uptempo aims to be “the least sexy bit of marketing software,” but its implications are huge. By connecting marketing with the financial systems that govern the rest of the enterprise, it effectively pulls the discipline out of the shadows.
“The ideological gap between the CMO and CFO has always been the biggest in the C-suite,” says Tuck. “One side talks emotion; the other speaks spreadsheets. Uptempo finally gives them a common language.”
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