The Zero-Cost Creative Inflection Point

For over a century, creative agencies had a performance-based value system. From the 1880s through the mid-1990s, agencies operated on a commission model—the traditional 15% of media spend, plus the related 17.65% production markup. The system was elegant in its simplicity: if your creative worked, clients ran it more. More media spend meant more commission. Good creative was directly rewarded with revenue.

It wasn't perfect, but it created a natural alignment between creative quality and financial outcomes. Agencies invested in big ideas because big ideas generated bigger media budgets. Creative had a language of value that everyone understood.

Then, starting in the late 1980s, that system began to collapse. Over the course of a decade, corporate consolidation and the "unbundling" of services broke the model's back. By the mid-90s, commissions had largely shifted to fees. Creative became a line item. Media planning split off. And for the first time in the industry's modern history, there was no direct connection between creative performance and agency compensation.

Creative communication became the only creative industry without a performance-value metric.

Think about that for a moment. Music has streams and sales. Film has box office and viewership. Publishing has copies sold. Design has usage and licensing. Even fine art has auction prices and gallery sales.

Every creative industry has units consumed that translate to financial value. A shared language that helps creators learn, grow, and evolve based on what works.

Except creative communication.

For nearly 30 years now, we've had awards (judged by peers, not markets). We have pre-testing (predicted performance, not actual value). We have case studies (anecdotes, not benchmarks). We have gut feel, creative intuition, and persuasive presentations.

But we don't have market-based performance metrics that translate creative outcomes into financial value. We lost that when unbundling killed the commission system.

And here's the strange part: everyone agrees creative is valuable. No one knows how to value it.

Ask any CMO and they'll tell you creative is critical. That it's a competitive advantage. That great creative drives results. They've been saying this for 15 years, and they mean it.

But none of them pay for creative based on performance. Not because they don't want to—but because there's no method that makes sense. No shared framework. No market-based benchmarks. Just fee negotiations and cost-plus models that treat creative as an input, not a multiplier.

The words say creative matters. The payment structure says it's overhead. And that gap isn't malice—it's apathy born from three decades without a solution.

Meanwhile, distribution has performance pricing, but creative doesn't.

Today's platforms—Google, Meta, LinkedIn, TikTok—all sell distribution with performance-based pricing. You pay for clicks (CPC), impressions (CPM), video views (CPV), engagement (CPE). The cost of reaching people is directly tied to measurable outcomes.

But the creative itself? That's produced and paid for separately. Agencies charge fees. In-house teams draw salaries. Advertisers use platform templates on their own time. Creative production has become an input cost, disconnected from the performance outcomes it generates.

So we're left with a strange paradox: distribution has performance pricing, creative production has fee pricing, and creative's contribution to performance has... nothing.

Platforms will tell you how much a click costs. But they won't tell you how much value your creative added to that click. You can measure the cost of distribution and the cost of creative production, but you can't measure the multiplicative effect creative has on the performance you're buying.

With production costs now hitting zero, this gap has become impossible to ignore.

AI tools like Adobe Firefly, Midjourney, and ChatGPT have driven production costs to essentially nothing. This isn't a crisis—it's an inflection point. It's the moment when creative communication has to mature, to finally develop the value language it's been missing for three decades.

Because here's what we all know but rarely say out loud: a $0 creative with a $1M media spend often underperforms a $100K creative with $500K of media. The multiplier effect is real. We've just never had a way to measure it with the same rigor platforms use for distribution outcomes.

So what if we went back to first principles?

Distribution has market-based pricing because outcomes—impressions, clicks, reach—have standardized values that fluctuate based on supply and demand. CPMs exist because the market made them exist through collective participation.

What if creative outcomes—brand lift, engagement, video completions, conversions, intent shifts—had the same thing? Not predicted performance scores. Not post-campaign anecdotes. Market-based valuations for the outcomes creative actually drives.

Pre-testing tools like Adverteye and System1 do valuable work—they predict whether creative will perform before you invest in distribution. That's important. But prediction isn't valuation. Knowing something will work doesn't tell you what it's worth.

Distribution pricing works because outcomes have market rates. Creative needs the same.

We've built something. It works, and it's surprisingly illuminating.

It's a tool that assigns market-based values to creative-driven outcomes across the entire brand journey—from first exposure through conversion, including every passive outcome in between (brand intent, dwell time, engagement depth, consideration shifts). It uses benchmark data to price those outcomes the same way CPMs price distribution.

The result is a Creative Multiplier—a financial and outcomes-based measure of how much value your creative message generates relative to what you spend on distribution.

Forsman & Bodenfors, one of the most creative agencies in the world for the past 25 years, was our first customer. They get it.

This is about bringing creative and distribution back together—economically.

The commission era worked because creative and distribution were economically aligned. When unbundling split them apart in the late 80s and early 90s, distribution kept its performance-based pricing model through platforms. Creative became a fee-for-service cost with no way to measure its performance contribution.

At zero production cost, the question becomes even sharper: if making the creative costs nothing, what is the creative idea actually worth?

Individually, this tool helps marketers and agencies speak the language of finance. It turns "this creative is better" into "this creative drove X outcomes valued at $Y in the current market."

But the real opportunity is collective. CPM pricing didn't come from one media buyer. It emerged through marketplace participation. Creative valuation needs the same thing—a shared benchmark database, built through use, that becomes the oracle for what creative outcomes are worth.

Maybe this is creative communication's second inflection point.

The first was the commission era—over a century of performance-based value in a world where distribution was controlled and one-way.

This could be the second—market-based value in the digital age, where distribution is infinite but attention is scarce, and the quality of the message matters more than ever.

Three decades after unbundling broke the old system, the industry finally has a chance to build a new one. Not because we're in crisis, but because we're ready to mature.

What do you think?