The Creative Premium
Why ideas lost their price tag. And how they get it back.
The creative premium that agencies have lost over the past 30 years. Michael Farmer's ScopeMetric research tracks it precisely: the price of an idea, measured as a 30-second spot or equivalent, has been in freefall for three decades.
Not inflation-adjusted. Not relative. In real terms.
A conversation happening right now
Michael Farmer has spent years quantifying what the industry felt but couldn't prove. Andrew Tindall put it bluntly: "media won the effectiveness battle" because it embraced measurement. Creative didn't. The LinkedIn thread that followed said out loud what agency corridors have whispered for a decade.
This deck is my take on why it happened, and what comes next.
How does an entire industry lose three quarters of its pricing power on the thing it supposedly does best?
The answer is simpler than you'd think.
Media won
Media agencies figured out something creative agencies never did. They learned to count. Reach, frequency, CPM, ROAS, attribution. Every pound spent could be traced to a result. Every result could justify the next pound.
When the CFO asks "what did we get for that?" media always had an answer. Creative had a mood board.
What gets measured gets funded
This isn't a mystery. Marketing budgets shifted toward media because media could prove its value in a spreadsheet. Creative couldn't. Not because creativity doesn't work. But because the industry never built the language to prove that it does.
Agencies started giving creative away for free.
Bundled with media buys. Thrown in to win pitches. Treated as the thing that sweetens the deal, not the thing that makes the deal work. Once you give something away often enough, the market decides that's what it's worth.
The pitch as confession
Competitive pitching is the industry telling on itself. Five agencies spend weeks producing their best strategic and creative thinking. Four of them do it for nothing. The winner does it at a discount.
No other professional services industry gives away its core product as a sales tactic. Lawyers don't litigate for free to prove they can litigate.
More formats, less money
A campaign used to be a TV spot, a press ad, and maybe outdoor. Now it's a TikTok, a Reel, a YouTube pre-roll, six banner sizes, a CRM sequence, an influencer brief, and a landing page. The number of deliverables exploded. The budgets didn't.
Creative agencies are doing ten times the work for a fraction of the fee. The big idea got sliced into a hundred small ones, and each slice got cheaper.
I watched it happen
15+ years in agencies. From R/GA, Poke and Dare to AnalogFolk and MediaMonks. I sat in rooms where brilliant creative ideas were valued less than the media plan that carried them. Where the strategy that shaped a campaign was treated as an overhead, not a deliverable.
The average lifespan of a creative campaign before it gets replaced. Brands invest in ideas and then abandon them before they've had time to compound.
We know that creative effectiveness grows over time. And yet the industry keeps hitting reset.
Creativity works
The research is overwhelming. Kantar, the IPA, System1, Analytic Partners. All of them say the same thing: creative quality is the single biggest driver of advertising effectiveness. Not targeting. Not channel mix. Not frequency. The idea.
The most valuable input to the marketing equation is the one being priced the lowest. That's not a market correction. That's a market failure.
The thing that drives the most business value has the least commercial value to the people who make it.
That tension can't hold forever. Something has to give.
AI changes the equation
Generative AI can produce B+ creative in seconds. If you were already struggling to prove why your ideas cost what they cost, a world where anyone can generate passable creative makes that argument harder, not easier.
But there's another reading. AI makes the gap between good creative and great creative more visible, not less. When B+ becomes free, the premium shifts to A+.
What needs to change
The creative industry doesn't need sympathy. It needs a new commercial model.
Make creativity count
Not "make creativity matter." It already matters. Make it count. Literally. Build the measurement infrastructure that creative has always lacked. Pre-test. Track. Attribute. Prove. Show the CFO what the idea did, not just what it looked like.
The agencies that survive the next decade will be the ones that can put a number next to an idea.
Stop selling creative as a service. Start pricing it as an asset.
A great creative platform isn't a campaign. It's a compounding asset that gets more valuable with time and consistency. Price it accordingly. Protect it accordingly. Invest in it accordingly.
The taste layer
In a world where everyone can generate, the value moves to curation. Knowing which idea to kill. Which reference to chase. Which insight is sharp and which is obvious. That editorial instinct, that creative judgement, is the premium now.
What brands should actually do
Pay for creative properly. Not because agencies deserve charity, but because underpaying for ideas is the most expensive thing you can do. Weak creative on a strong media plan is money burned at scale.
Commit to ideas for longer than a year. Build creative measurement into the brief, not the post-mortem. Treat the idea as the investment, not the cost.
The creative premium isn't gone. It's waiting to be rebuilt.
By agencies that can prove what their ideas are worth. By strategists who can connect creative to commercial outcomes. By an industry that finally learns to count its own value.
The best media plan in the world can't fix a bad idea.
But a great idea can make a modest plan punch way above its weight.
Everyone in the industry knows this. It's time the commercial model reflected it.
Thank you.
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