When Creative and Media Don't Speak the Same Language

Creative teams talk about brand lift, emotional resonance, and engagement depth. Media teams talk about CPMs, ROAS, and cost-per-acquisition. They're describing the same campaigns, but they might as well be speaking different languages.

This isn't a communication problem. It's a structural one. As so many have been talking about for decades.

When the industry unbundled in the late 1980s and early 90s, creative and media split into separate disciplines with separate compensation models, separate KPIs, and separate vocabularies. Creative became fee-based. Media kept performance-based pricing through platform CPMs and auction dynamics.

Three decades later, that split has calcified into a fundamental misalignment that affects every campaign, every budget discussion, and every attempt to prove creative's value.

Media has a financial language. Creative doesn't.

Walk into any media planning meeting and you'll hear precision:

• "Instagram CPMs are running $8.50 this quarter"
• "We're seeing a 2.3% CTR on video"
• "CPA for this audience is $42"
• "We're seeing 4x ROAS on this campaign"

Every outcome has a number. Every number has a cost. Every cost has a market rate.

Now walk into a creative review:

• "This concept tested well"
• "The engagement was strong"
• "Brand lift was positive"
• "It won an award"

These aren't bad metrics. But they're not economic ones. They don't translate to financial contribution. They can't be plugged into an ROI calculation. They don't speak the language that CFOs, media buyers, or performance marketers use to make decisions.

The consequence: creative gets valued as overhead, not as a multiplier.

When media buyers optimize campaigns, they're optimizing distribution costs against known outcome values. Lower the CPM, improve the CTR, reduce the CPA—every lever has a financial impact they can measure and defend.

When creative teams try to prove their value, they're showing awards, case studies, and qualitative feedback. All of which matter, but none of which translate to the financial language media teams (and finance teams) speak.

So when budgets get tight, what happens?

Creative gets cut. Not because it's unimportant—everyone will tell you creative is critical—but because it can't defend itself in financial terms. It's treated as a fixed cost, not as a variable that multiplies media performance.

And here's the brutal irony: everyone knows creative drives the outcomes media buys.

A brilliant creative with $500K of media can outperform mediocre creative with $1M of media. We've all seen it. The creative is the multiplier—it determines how much value you extract from every impression, every click, every view.

But we've never had a way to measure that multiplier effect with the same rigor media uses for distribution costs.

Distribution has performance pricing. Creative—both the idea and the execution—has fee pricing. And creative's contribution to outcomes has... nothing.

Today's platforms—Google, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok—all sell distribution with transparent, market-based performance pricing:

• You pay $X per thousand impressions
• You pay $Y per click
• You pay $Z per conversion

But creative? Both the concept and the production are paid as fees:

• Agencies charge for strategic ideation (the big idea, the concept)
• Agencies charge for production execution (making the assets)
• In-house teams draw salaries for both (allocated as overhead)
• Advertisers use platform templates (treated as "free" despite opportunity cost)

Sure, some agencies have tried performance incentives—5% or 10% of margin restored if the creative hits predetermined brand lift targets or sales goals. But these arrangements are random, inconsistent, and far from standard practice. And the incentives are too small to drive real investment, reward creative talent meaningfully, or change anyone's behavior.

Creative ideation and production are input costs. Distribution is a performance cost. And creative's contribution to performance outcomes remains unmeasured.

So we're left with a paradox:

Media teams know exactly what they're paying for distribution and exactly what outcomes they're getting. But they have no idea what value the creative idea and execution added to those outcomes. Was it 2x? 5x? Negative?

There's no shared metric. No common language. No way to have a conversation about creative and media contribution using the same financial framework.

This is why creative and media misalignment persists.

It's not about personality clashes or turf wars (though those happen). It's about fundamentally incompatible measurement systems:

• Media measures distribution costs (what you pay platforms)
• Creative measures production quality (awards, testing scores, engagement)
• Nobody measures creative's contribution to outcomes (the multiplier effect)

Without that third measurement, creative and media can't actually align. They're optimizing different things with different languages against different benchmarks.

What if creative outcomes had market-based values—just like media outcomes do?

Distribution works because outcomes have standardized market pricing. A thousand impressions costs $8. A click costs $2. A conversion costs $45. These prices fluctuate with supply and demand, but they're always grounded in what the market will bear.

What if creative-driven outcomes—brand lift, engagement depth, video completion, consideration shifts, conversion contribution—had the same thing?

Not predicted scores. Not qualitative assessments. Market-based valuations for the outcomes creative actually drives, priced using the same benchmark approach that makes CPMs work.

This is what we built Creative CPM to do.

It assigns market-based values to creative-driven outcomes across the entire brand journey—from first exposure through conversion, including every passive outcome in between. It uses benchmark data to price those outcomes the same way CPMs price distribution.

The result: a Creative Multiplier that tells you, in financial terms, how much value your creative message generated relative to what you spent on distribution.

Suddenly, creative and media speak the same language.

Instead of:

• Creative: "This ad drove strong brand lift"
• Media: "CPMs were $8.50 with 2.3% CTR"

You get:

• Creative + Media: "This creative generated $2.4M in valued outcomes against $800K in media spend—a 3x Creative Multiplier"

Now they're having the same conversation. Both sides can optimize against the same financial framework. Creative can prove its contribution. Media can see which creative multiplies their spend most efficiently.

This isn't just measurement. It's realignment.

For three decades, creative and media have been structurally separated with incompatible languages. Creative couldn't speak finance. Media couldn't value creative contribution. The result was misalignment, underinvestment, and creative treated as overhead.

Market-based creative valuation changes that. Not by forcing creative to think like media, but by giving both disciplines a shared economic language—one where creative outcomes have market values just like media outcomes do.

The commission era worked because creative and distribution were economically aligned. Unbundling broke that alignment. Platform CPMs gave distribution its performance language back.

Maybe it's time creative got one too.

What do you think?