Advertising Has No Unit of Account. That's a Problem We Can Solve.

Creativity is to Media what Marketing is to Sales.

Media has a clear, In-Market Unit of Account: impressions, engagements. Creativity doesn't.

Sales has a clear, In-Market Unit of Account: units. Marketing doesn't.

Is it any wonder Creativity isn't accepted as a growth driver? Or Marketing? Two practices central to business growth, yet neither has a standardized financial metric to define its contribution.

The latest CEO survey from BoatHouse dropped Marketing from 65% to 30%, categorizing it as a cost centre, not a growth driver. And that is reasonable. Marketing has never defined its In-Market Unit of Account—a metric of value exchanged or outcome achieved—so how can a CEO see it as anything else? The same applies to Brand Creativity. Without a financial definition of what it delivers, the perception of it as a cost centre is reasonable. If Marketing or Brand Creativity is central to growth, it needs an In-Market Unit of Account to be perceived as one.

The Missing Metric

Advertising has never had an In-Market Unit of Account. Media does. Platforms do. Hyperscalers do. But advertising—the symbiotic combination of media and creativity—does not.

We're in an attention economy where engagements are accepted as more valuable than impressions. So why isn't advertising—specifically brand creativity agencies and creators—selling validated outcomes, just as Media and Platforms have for decades?

Why aren't advertisers tracking these outcomes and proving their relationship to commercial results—proving the isolated strengths and weaknesses of every standard of brand creativity?

Why aren't they financially incentivizing Brand Creativity to multiply the fixed costs of a campaign, especially when its own leaders and advocates universally agree that this is exactly what it does?

Without this metric, there is no In-Market financial representation for Creativity. Only Media.

And after three decades of this—trillions spent on Performance over Brand, on Media over Creativity—is Marketing proven a financially credible growth driver?

It is not.

Why Hasn't This Been Solved?

After decades of industry discussion, the reasons are stale but still true. There are two: incentives and a Catch-22.

Incentives kept the status quo for 30 years. Don't rock the Holding Company money boat while media inflation keeps rising, and Advertisers—Procurement-led—get a great short-term deal on more for less, until the margin is gone.

Catch-22, because in a pressured, timesheet-driven business, there is literally no job code for innovating the fundamental business model.

Shouldn't the lack of an In-Market Unit of Account be shocking to those practicing brand creativity? Every other creative industry has one. Not this one.

Most advertising and marketing professionals haven't had the time to see that a fundamental metric has been missing. They just know something is missing—something that has long prevented what should be a clearly understood, highly valued business exchange.

It took me quite a while to figure it out myself.

The stale reasons above have literally prevented the industries themselves from solving it. The efficacy of Marketing and Brand Creativity—the demand and supply of the business model—is discussed in very limited terms. Limited engineering terms. Because that is what this is: a fundamental engineering issue, preventing Creativity and Marketing from being represented accurately in industry-wide and global financial ROI modeling.

The Solution

Advertising is the symbiotic combination of media and creativity.

The most reputable industry research institutions and strategic leaders have proven, time and again, that the highest forms of creativity multiply the costs of paid media and production. Full stop.

Accepting this truth and the industry's constraints, we've defined Advertising's Unit of Account.

It is Communication Outcomes.

Never heard of Communication Outcomes? That's because this is the beginning of a new standard. You have seen them—you just haven't priced them.

Communication Outcomes are all consumer touchpoints between awareness and conversion, across paid, owned, earned, and shared channels. They include validated results from impressions to engagements, to brand measures, to time spent—even conversion, where relevant.

Some matter more than others. Some depend on quantity, some on quality. Many are already tracked.

The point is that Communication Outcomes are results fully within the control of the marketing, brand, creator, and agency teams. They are directly achievable from their efforts alone.

The combinations of these outcomes—the portion of paid vs. earned, engagements from certain channels vs. others—can then be priced, valued, and studied for causation or correlation.

This allows direct comparison of accurately measured outcomes to action. By isolating Brand Creativity with an In-Market Unit of Account, we can confirm that deeper engagement and more efficient outcomes from greater creativity—and less paid media—lead to greater consideration and conversion.

As research has proven. But never before priced financially using outcomes.

The Path Forward

Commercial Outcomes may be the destination. Communication Outcomes are the path.

Using the Outcome Calculator to reveal your Outcome Multiple, you can measure your strength and your progress. Initial cases prove you can multiply your communication investment—and prove it financially.

But you can't do it with paid media alone. Paid media will only ever deliver what you spend. It seeds ideas and campaigns, but it can't multiply the investment. For financial multiplication, you fundamentally require Brand Creativity and creativity in Marketing.

The logic is sound. The method works. It provides a growth-oriented conversation, and agreement, between buyer and seller—between Advertiser and Creativity Agent.

The question now is whether you want to explore a transition to this framework.

I'd welcome your thoughts. Have you experienced this gap in your own work? What would change if Creativity had a clear Unit of Account?