Does Creative Communication Need a Marketplace?

Every creative industry has a market-based mechanism for valuing outcomes. Music has streams. Film has box office. Publishing has sales. Design has licensing. Even fine art has auction prices.

Creative communication has... nothing.

For 30 years, since the commission system collapsed, creative's contribution to business outcomes has had no market-based value language. We've argued that this should exist. We've built Creative CPM to test whether it can exist. But here's the uncomfortable question we can't avoid:

Does anyone actually care?

The first principles case is clear.

Markets assign value to outcomes when three conditions are met:

Outcomes are measurable - You can track what happened
Outcomes have economic impact - They drive business results
Participants need pricing signals - Buyers and sellers benefit from knowing what things are worth

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 pricing signals (agencies need to prove value, marketers need to allocate budgets)

By first principles logic, creative outcomes should have market-based pricing. 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 two 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 market-based value 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?

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 or latent demand?

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

We've built Creative CPM because the logic is sound—creative outcomes should have market-based values. 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 becomes visible: there is more bad creative in the world than good. It's just that they get 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." 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 participate in building the marketplace that makes that insight standard, not exceptional.

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. You need market-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 creative outcomes marketplace 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?"

Markets emerge through participation, not permission.

CPM pricing didn't come from one media company deciding how much impressions should cost. It emerged through collective participation—thousands of buyers and sellers negotiating until prices stabilized around market consensus.

Creative valuation needs the same thing. No single agency or marketer can declare what creative outcomes are worth. The value has to emerge from market activity.

Creative CPM provides the infrastructure: a benchmark database that prices creative-driven outcomes the same way CPMs price distribution outcomes. But the marketplace only becomes real if people use it, contribute data, 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 we could be wrong.

Maybe creative communication doesn't need market-based valuation. Maybe fee-based pricing works well enough. Maybe the apathy is justified because the problem isn't actually worth solving.

Or maybe this is like asking people in 1976 whether they need a personal computer. They don't know they need it until it exists. And once it exists, the idea that it didn't exist before seems absurd.

Creative value might find its way back with or without this.

There's a cyclical nature to these things. Industries swing between efficiency and creativity, between measurement and intuition, between science and art. Right now, creative communication is in an efficiency phase—production costs dropping to zero, platforms optimizing for performance, everything measured in CPA and ROAS.

But history suggests the pendulum swings back. Once the technology becomes infrastructure, once everyone has access to the same tools, creative differentiation matters again. Quality becomes the competitive advantage. And when that happens, the industry will need a way to value quality in economic terms.

Maybe Creative CPM is the catalyst for that shift. Maybe it's just early evidence of an inevitable change that would happen anyway. Maybe it's both.

The only certainty is this: if creative communication is going to have market-based value, someone has to build the marketplace.

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

Does creative communication need a marketplace 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 participate. Not in a "join our revolution" sense—there's no revolution here, just infrastructure. But in the sense that markets require collective activity. One agency using Creative CPM is interesting. A hundred agencies contributing benchmark data creates the oracle.

If you think creative should have market-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?