Only a Hammer and a Nail: Why Outcomes Give Agencies the Full Toolkit Again

I've worked across media, marketing and creative advertising for three decades. Ian Whittaker's observations always cut to the core of what it has actually felt like to work in these industries since the '90s.

That's coming from someone who travelled from the outer regions of Asia Pac to the so-called centre in New York, naively thinking the leaders had it all under control. I thought they'd steer this extraordinary service into a golden age of connected communication and value creation. An extraordinary service of system and story design for commercial enterprise, organized into brands for customers. Instead, not so much.

Here in 2026, global ad spend is set to grow another 5%. Meanwhile the revenue of those navigating it, and responsible for its future, keeps shrinking, like so many industries before it.

And it's not only creative fees. It's media fees too.

Overhead, Not Return

Ian's point is not a small one. These fees were labelled overhead rather than measured return, the way working media is. Thirty years ago that was the expedient choice for the people who categorized them, and it delivered at least 10 to 15 years of consistent growth. Fair enough. We'd probably all have done the same. Blame the public market structure, not the people incentivized to maintain and grow a share price.

Ian is right: outcomes are the answer for marketing and agencies alike.

But not only commercial outcomes. We also need communication, marketing and product outcomes, covering every part of the total brand experience a customer has, from communication to product. None of that is overhead. All of it is measurable return.

Clients, or as Ian points out, procurement, will keep resisting. They've had the deal of the century for 30 years, so why stop now?

Because marketing needs this financial credibility as much as advertising and agencies do. They both need the same ruler, and it has to be auditable. That's what Creativecpm is designed to enable.

“I wrote a while back that the move from commission to cost-plus was one of the industry's strategic mistakes. Outcome-based fees are commission coming back in a new costume and the obstacle is not the CMO, it is procurement.”

Media Spend Alone Will Never Do It

Brands will only grow again with a clear move to outcomes, because that's the only way the total brand experience can be valued and audited.

Media spend alone will never do it, as Microsoft and Google proved back in 2014 (read the white paper). It hasn't done it for 12 years.

So it should be no surprise that without a way to audit and value the total brand experience, media spend will keep rising and fees will keep being cut.

They only have this hammer and this nail. And nearly all are public companies.

They used to have the full toolkit, but 30 years of cuts and no auditable ‘outcome ruler’ took it away.

Outcomes will give them the full set again.

Communication, marketing, product, and commercial outcomes.