Tunnl CEO Sara Fagen Exposes the "Hidden Tax" Wasting Millions in Enterprise Marketing Budgets

Tunnl, the AI-powered audience intelligence platform serving enterprise brands and Fortune 500 marketers, today called attention to what its CEO describes as one of the largest sources of avoidable waste in enterprise marketing: budgets being spent against audiences that were never real to begin with.

The claim is backed by recent industry data. DemandScience's 2026 State of Performance Marketing report, which surveyed 750 senior marketing leaders at companies with revenues between $100 million and $5 billion, found that 87% of organizations say their marketing investments produce unreliable or inflated intent signals, clicks, downloads, and behavioral scores that don't translate to actual purchase intent.

The company says marketers have never had more ways to build audiences, but many of those audiences are assembled from synthetic sources, proxies, assumptions, and platform signals rather than direct understanding of the people brands are trying to reach. As a result, campaigns can become highly optimized against segments that bear only a loose relationship to the original research and strategy, creating hidden inefficiencies that compound across media spend. 

The Hidden Tax on Every Marketing Budget

"Millions in marketing spend are going to the wrong audiences" said Sara Fagen, CEO and co-founder of Tunnl. "Most enterprise marketing budgets carry a hidden tax: the gap between what your research told you and what your media team can actually act on. That's where the money goes, when you spend on audiences that aren’t who you actually intend to reach."

Fagen, who spent more than two decades in data-driven persuasion in campaign politics and as a co-founder of Resonate and Deep Root Analytics before co-founding Tunnl in 2021, says enterprise marketers are increasingly running into a structural problem that fragmented technology has made worse.

Why the Problem Is Accelerating

The company points to some of the drivers behind the acceleration. The market research industry is racing to layer AI on top of legacy approaches, often producing audience descriptions that sound credible but aren't grounded in verified data. And CMOs are under harder ROI pressure than at any point in the past decade.

Gartner's 2026 CMO Spend Survey shows the pressure is mounting. CMO confidence in delivering ROI dropped to 43% this year, down from 56% in 2025, the steepest year-over-year drop in any confidence measure the survey tracks.

"Marketing doesn't usually fail because people choose the wrong channels," Fagen said. "It fails because somewhere between insight and execution, the audience changes. Teams end up optimizing campaigns against assumptions instead of the people they originally set out to reach." 

Tunnl's Approach

Tunnl's platform connects survey research, audience targeting, activation, and campaign measurement in a single pipeline. The company's audience modeling is built on real human survey respondents matched to a proprietary identity graph that verifies each respondent is a real person, not a bot.

Tunnl now serves multiple Fortune 500 brands and works on business challenges across sectors including technology, software, cpg, marketing, and others.

"You can't reduce waste by adding more vendors," Fagen said. "You reduce it by closing the gap between what you learn and what you do with what you learn."

What CMOs Can Do Now 

Fagen says enterprise marketers can address the waste problem by auditing three things to start: how much of their research is actually tied to real addressable audiences, how many sources of truth their teams are working from, and whether the channels they rely on for impact are being selected and balanced through an audience-informed media mix before dollars are committed. 

"If the answer to any of those three is 'we don't really know,' that's where the budget is leaking," she said.

About Tunnl

Tunnl is an AI-powered audience intelligence platform that connects survey research, audience targeting, insights, activation, and campaign measurement all in one closed loop experience. Founded in 2021 by data and political strategy veterans Sara Fagen, Brent Seaborn, and Alex Lundry, Tunnl serves Fortune 500 brands, media agencies, trade associations, and advocacy organizations navigating high-stakes communications environments. The company is headquartered in Arlington, VA. For more information, visit www.tunnldata.com.

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