About Creative CPM
Understanding creative communication value and performance
Why
Creative CPM exists to generate revenue and value for the marketers and agencies it serves far greater than the revenue created for itself. Potential of exponential return and a clearly agreed definition of value is what drives every successful creative industry, and creative communication should not be the exception to that. Creative CPM exists to help this fundamental truth become an expectation for all in the creative communication industry.
Without understanding creative communication value as clearly as media, it is impossible to understand total communication return. Or consistently improve it, let alone motivate people responsible to do so. Creative CPM's measurement and valuation provides immediate transparency, understanding and simplicity from enormous communication complexity.
A creative idea can be the most valuable asset of communication investment.
Why? Because it is the only investment with the potential to generate an exponential return. For this reason, some creative communication is indeed worth a great deal more, or a great deal less than others. Creative CPM exists to measure, value, understand, and harness the return of those ideas.
- Measure: Ensure its impact is defined with a relatable method to media for total communication return understanding.
- Value: Ensure its value is clear and financially defined for better investment allocation.
- Understand: Ensure communication teams know why various communication outcomes provide more impact than others, are worth more or less, and which should be focussed on.
- Harness: Ensure it quantifiably works with media investments for total return effectiveness, improvement, and corporate understanding.
What
Creative CPM is a performance based measurement and valuation tool for creative communication. It simplifies the complexity of creative communication performance, focussing investments on communication outcomes that are comparable to media. This allows creative and media investments too quantifiably relate and work harder together, with data driven analysis to improve overall investment performance. Performance that is attainable by the actual teams charged with conceiving the communication.
Creative CPM uses a proprietary method with benchmarked data from all Creative CPM cases, a wide range of precedents, and marketer and agency input providing a market value for creative outcomes. It can be applied across all consumer touch points and communication disciplines from pr to advertising, digital to physical communication or product experiences.
Creative CPM is an alternative or compliment to the creative communication industries current methods of performance measurement and valuation. By using Creative CPM, marketing and agency value exchanges and objectives can be transparently aligned, providing new ways of increasing return for both.
Creative CPM is an independent 3rd party company providing consultative services for access to the method while developing a platform to make its use as seamless, scalable and effective as possible for both marketers and agencies.
How
- We establish market-based CPMs for creative outcomes (not just media)
- You enter your campaign outcomes across paid, social, and owned channels
- We calculate your Creative Multiplier showing the financial value created
- Get comprehensive reports proving creative's contribution to total ROI
Want to understand our pricing methodology in detail? See our full methodology →
Who
For Agencies
- performance measurement
- compensation method
For Marketers
- performance measurement
- more accurate ROI modeling
- measuring total communication investment
For Agencies and Marketers
- common metric for performance based on outcomes
- third party validation
- objective benchmarks
About Creative CPM
Creative CPM gained proof of concept with the first use case commissioned for a retrospective analysis of a global campaign by Forsman Bodenfors. Recurring demand was confirmed for both live and retrospective use cases.
Creative CPM is founded on a method designed by Corey Mitchell who like many, spent a few years producing creative brand communication without what every other creative industry has—performance based creative valuation. He believes it to be the single greatest reason the creative communication industry has struggled while the media industry thrived using technology and performance analytics.
He began working on a spark of the idea in 2000 but it wasn't until 2012 after a deep induction into digital marketing that he understood how to design the approach.
7 more years was required to find the first customer who agreed it was time for creative communication valuation to be based on its performance and use. If the creative communication industry also agrees and applies this method, he believes they can thrive using the analysis to provide financial meaning to creative communication.
And with media, a clear understanding of total communication investment return.
About Corey Mitchell
Corey is a 3x Agency President, Strategic GTM Leader, and founder of Creative CPM. Born and raised in Australia, his advertising career began in Melbourne. Mastering integrated marketing communication, by 1997 he was leading global brands across Asia Pacific. In 2001 he immigrated to the US to lead global brands around the world before being named President of TBWA/Chiat/Day NY, leading it to become the world's most creatively awarded agency in the world. After running three NY agencies, including one of the world's largest digital, he founded Creative CPM to provide clear valuation to creative investments and change the industry's approach to creative valuation. He lives in San Diego.
Vision: The Future of Creative Compensation
As Creative CPM establishes market-rate benchmarks for creative outcomes, a transformative opportunity emerges: performance-based creative compensation.
This has become especially critical as AI-generated content tools like Adobe Firefly drive production costs toward zero. Creative CPM is uniquely positioned to prove what marketers need to know: that $0 production cost + $1M media spend often delivers a lower creative multiplier than $100k production + $500k media. Creative CPM defends the value of the idea with math—providing the only quantitative framework to compare low-cost/high-volume AI content against thoughtfully crafted creative with real strategic investment.
In the future, Creative CPM's outcome valuations could enable agencies and creative teams to work collaboratively with media teams during ideation—aligning creative concepts with measurable outcomes from the start. This creates the foundation for compensation models tied directly to performance.
What becomes possible:
- Creative CPM bonuses - Agencies receive additional compensation when campaigns exceed outcome benchmarks
- Performance-based fees - Total compensation tied to measurable creative impact, not just retainers or hours
- Efficiency incentives - Reward teams who achieve strong outcomes while minimizing paid media spend
- Shared success models - Marketers and creators align around proven outcome metrics, not assumptions
This vision requires Creative CPM to first establish itself as the trusted standard for creative outcome valuation—building the database, proving the methodology, and earning industry adoption. When creative teams, media buyers, and brand marketers all measure success the same way, performance-based compensation becomes not just possible, but inevitable.
Creative CPM aims to be the infrastructure that makes creative communication as measurably valuable as media investment—transforming how the industry compensates and rewards creative excellence.