Does Creative Communication Need a Performance Standard?

Every creative industry has a performance-based mechanism for valuing outcomes. Music has streams. Film has box office. Publishing has sales. Design has licensing. Media has CPMs.

Creative communication has... nothing.

For 30 years, since the commission system collapsed, creative's contribution to business outcomes has had no in-market performance-based value language. Media measures itself in CPMs—cost per thousand impressions. That single metric creates accountability, comparability, and a shared language for value. Creative has no equivalent.

We've built Creative CPM because this missing piece has cost the industry dearly—in talent, in credibility, and in the ability to prove what should be obvious: that great creative is a business multiplier, not just a cost.

But here's the uncomfortable question we can't avoid: Does anyone actually care?

The first principles case is clear.

Performance-based valuation works when three conditions are met:

1. Outcomes are measurable - You can track what happened
2. Outcomes have economic impact - They drive business results
3. Participants need a shared language - Buyers and sellers benefit from knowing what things are worth, relative to each other

Creative-driven outcomes meet all three criteria:

• They're measurable (brand lift, engagement, video completion, consideration, conversion)
• They have economic impact (they multiply the value of distribution spend)
• Participants need a shared language (agencies need to prove value, marketers need to allocate budgets)

By first principles logic, creative outcomes should have performance-based pricing—just like media does. The question is whether that logic matters when faced with three decades of apathy.

The uncomfortable truth: no one's been asking for this.

If the pain were acute, someone would have built this already. Venture capital would have funded it. Platforms would have integrated it. The industry would have demanded it.

Instead, we've had 30 years of:

• CMOs saying creative is important while paying for it as overhead
• Agencies unable to prove value in financial terms
• Creative and media teams speaking different languages
• No standard method for measuring creative's contribution to outcomes

Everyone agrees the status quo is broken. Almost no one has tried to fix it.

That could mean three things:

Option 1: The pain isn't real enough to motivate change. People have adapted. Fee-based pricing works well enough. Creative doesn't need performance-based valuation because no one actually wants to measure it that precisely.

Option 2: This is learned helplessness. The problem seems unsolvable, so people stopped trying. Like asking "why doesn't anyone build a personal computer for individuals?" in 1976. The IBM mainframes work fine. Why would regular people need computing power at home?

Option 3: It benefited the major players not to have one. If 90% of creative work performs somewhere between average and poor, why would the holding companies producing it—or the marketers approving it—want that made visible? The absence of a performance standard wasn't an oversight. It was convenient.

Until the Apple II shipped in 1977, nobody knew they wanted it. The market didn't exist until someone built it.

So which is it? Apathy, learned helplessness, or quiet convenience?

We don't know. And that's the honest answer.

We've built Creative CPM because the logic is sound—creative outcomes should have performance-based values, just like media does. We're testing it with agencies like Forsman & Bodenfors, one of the most creative shops in the world. Early data suggests it's illuminating in ways that are hard to articulate until you see it.

It's like making the invisible visible.

Here's what will become visible and proven, and most have long known: there is dramatically more bad creative in the world than good. And it all gets paid the same.

Under fee-based pricing, that's invisible. A campaign that drives 10X outcomes and one that barely moves the needle both get billed as "creative services rendered." And this is the accepted yet unacknowledged and unpublished agreement between the holding companies and the marketing buyers driving the bulk of the creative market these past 40 or so years.

But when you see creative's contribution in financial terms—when you see one concept generated $2.4M in valued outcomes and another generated $600K with the same media spend—you can't unsee it.

The question isn't whether the insight is valuable. It clearly is. The question is whether enough people care enough to adopt the standard that makes that insight the norm, not the exception.

It's also true that independent agencies, creators, and smaller networks—those happy to have the performance of their work be accountable—may find this measurement model advantageous. The massive holding companies producing the majority of creative work with very average results? They probably won't. But wouldn't marketers, rewarded for efficiency and effectiveness, find this appealing? Illuminating? Helpful in harnessing their media budgets and teams cohesively?

Why now might be different.

The commission era ended in the late 1980s and early 90s. For three decades, the industry operated without performance-based value for creative. So why would anyone care now?

Three reasons:

1. Production costs just hit zero. AI tools have made creative production essentially free. That forces a question the industry could avoid before: If making the creative costs nothing, what is the creative idea actually worth? You can't answer that with fees—fees measure production effort, not outcome value. When effort approaches zero, so does the fee, regardless of whether the idea is brilliant or mediocre. You need performance-based outcome valuation.

2. Creative and media misalignment has real costs. Creative gets cut first in budget squeezes because it can't defend itself financially. Media teams optimize distribution without knowing which creative multiplies their spend most effectively. The structural separation isn't just awkward—it's expensive.

3. The infrastructure exists now. Building a performance standard for creative wasn't technically feasible in 1995. Platforms didn't have comprehensive outcome data. Benchmark databases didn't exist at scale. Computing power was expensive. Today, all of that exists. The question isn't "Can this be built?" It's "Will anyone use it?"

Standards emerge through adoption, not declaration.

CPM pricing didn't come from one media company deciding how much impressions should cost. It became a standard through collective adoption—an industry agreeing that this is how we measure and compare value.

Creative valuation needs the same thing. No single agency or marketer can declare what creative outcomes are worth. But a governed standard—a shared methodology for pricing creative outcomes the way CPMs price media outcomes—can create the common language that's been missing.

Creative CPM provides that infrastructure: a benchmark database that prices creative-driven outcomes the same way CPMs price distribution outcomes. The standard becomes real as people use it and participate in building the shared understanding of what creative is worth.

This is an experiment in whether the industry is ready.

We think the logic is sound. We think the timing is right. We think the pain is real, even if people have stopped articulating it.

But more importantly: you don't adopt a performance standard because the industry is broken. You adopt it because it leads to better outcomes.

Better creative. Better crafted. Better nurtured—whether by human hands or AI tools. Let the performance decide what's worth rewarding. Let brands, businesses, and creators share in the upside when ideas actually work. Allow for exponential return instead of capped fees. Allow for growth instead of stifling it.

A performance standard doesn't just fix what's broken. It unlocks what's possible.

So here's the question we're asking—and the invitation.

Does creative communication need a performance standard for outcome valuation? Is this something the industry is ready for, or is it a solution to a problem no one actually wants solved?

We think it's worth finding out. Not because we're certain it will work, but because the logic is sound and the question deserves an answer.

This only works if people adopt it. Not in a "join our revolution" sense—there's no revolution here, just infrastructure. But in the sense that standards require collective agreement. One agency using Creative CPM is interesting. A hundred marketers, creators, and agencies contributing benchmark data creates the standard.

If you think creative should have performance-based value, try it. If you're skeptical, challenge it. If you're curious whether anyone really cares about this, help us find out.

Because after 30 years of living without performance-based value for creative, it's worth asking: Is this just how it is, or is this something we can finally fix?

What do you think?