ADWEEK and NewtonX launch a new B2B brand tracker to measure industry change as it happens

NewtonX and Adweek have formed a strategic partnership that sets a new benchmark for the marketing community. The quarterly B2B Brand Tracker is designed in partnership with the Adweek team and NewtonX Strategic Insights team to capture what’s actually changing inside brands and agencies, quarter by quarter.

The collaboration pairs ADWEEK’s industry lens with NewtonX’s industry-leading B2B insights to deliver timely perspectives on the topics shaping marketing’s next era: shifting expectations of the CMO, evolving growth mandates, AI-driven operating models, and the changing mechanics of how work gets valued and measured.

At the core of the series is a quarterly survey of 500 advertising decision-makers across the U.S. and Canada with a two-fold objective: track the industry’s longer-term trends and get a pulse on current events as they unfold. 

The first release of the B2B Brand Tracker informed a set of articles focused on AI’s impact, surfacing themes that will echo across the year’s reporting.

The AI productivity squeeze: Why your job just got harder

AI Isn’t Cutting Marketing Jobs—But It Is Making Them Harder moves beyond the “AI replaces jobs” headline and surfaces a more useful signal: AI is increasing output, but also raising expectations. The result is a shift in how marketing work gets done, with time savings often reallocated into more complex, higher-stakes work. A key theme the tracker will continue to follow: productivity gains do not always translate into less pressure.

The revenue mandate: What CMOs are being asked to prioritize

CMOs Are More Focused On Growing Revenue Than Brand Awareness broadens the signal beyond AI operations to leadership priorities inside the marketing function. It points to a growing mandate for marketers to prove business impact in financial terms, not just brand outcomes. This is exactly the kind of shift the tracker is built to monitor over time: how expectations of marketing leadership are changing, and what that means for strategy, measurement, and decision-making.

The governance gap: AI is moving faster than the paperwork

AI Is Moving Faster Than Agency Contracts expands the focus from team workflows to the systems around the work. As AI becomes embedded in production, many of the frameworks that govern agency-client relationships (contracts, policies, and commercial models) are struggling to keep pace. The tracker surfaces a growing industry tension: if AI changes how work is produced, the definition of value may need to change too.

This is just the beginning

These first two stories make the broader point this series will keep tracking: the next era of marketing isn’t just about adopting new tools. It’s about adapting the systems around the work—how teams operate, how agencies get paid, how impact gets proven, and how trust is built.

Over the coming year, ADWEEK and NewtonX will continue following these shifts and the forces driving them, delivering a consistent benchmark for marketing leaders who want to understand not just what’s happening—but what it means.

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