Today I give a pretty sharp critique of modern marketing’s obsession with short-term metrics, and a call to restore creativity as a true strategic advantage.

I had a harsher title for this one and changed it at the last minute. Forgive me for hesitating to call it what it is.

Marketing lost its power. Not because the people are bad, or lack talent, or don't care. I've worked and spoken with some of the strongest marketers in advertising and ad tech — people who understand storytelling, positioning, timing, and how the right narrative can change the trajectory of a product or company. The talent is there. The problem lives somewhere else.

Most marketers didn't choose this career because they love dashboards. They chose it because they love stories and ideas — the feeling of seeing something they imagined land with real people. Many of the best marketers I know are creative at their core: writers, designers, strategists who care deeply about craft and emotional impact.

I know this because I'm one of them. I studied marketing because I loved advertising and I loved creative. That pull still exists for most people who enter this field.

Somewhere along the way, it got lost.

Over the past several years, marketing has been pushed into proving its value in the shortest possible window. Every dollar needs immediate ROI. Every campaign needs leads. Every piece of content needs clicks. Slowly, marketing shifted from shaping perception to defending itself internally.

The result is visible everywhere: safe messaging, campaigns that blur together, content that's optimized, gated, tracked, and reported on — yet rarely remembered. When lead generation and short-term metrics become the dominant goal, the work loses energy and edge.

Here's the first learning worth sitting with: when you optimize exclusively for what's easiest to measure, you quietly abandon what actually creates differentiation. Brand recognition, attention, recall, and emotional resonance take time. They rarely spike neatly on a weekly report. They compound in ways performance metrics alone can't capture.

The uncomfortable part for the immediacy crowd is that this argument isn't a creative's lament. It's one of the most empirically supported positions in marketing. Les Binet and Peter Field's analysis of nearly 1,000 advertising effectiveness case studies in the IPA Databank — the research behind the famous 60/40 rule — found that the most effective campaigns allocate roughly 60% of budget to long-term brand building and 40% to short-term activation, and concluded bluntly that short-termism is undermining advertising effectiveness. Binet himself has spent recent years arguing that the industry's obsession with efficiency, targeting, and short-term metrics has come at the expense of true brand-building effectiveness — he and Field literally coined the phrase "crisis in creativity."

The failure mode is predictable: teams that go all-in on activation get a strong first year, then watch acquisition costs climb as the brand erodes underneath them. The 60/40 ratio isn't an iron law — it flexes by category, brand size, and stage — but the direction of the finding is unambiguous. The thing organizations are starving is the thing the data says drives the most profit.

Here's the learning many teams miss: creativity often produces the very results leadership is demanding. It earns attention in saturated markets. It builds trust before a prospect ever fills out a form. It creates memory long before a buying cycle begins. In categories where products and pricing look identical, creativity and focused positioning are among the few durable advantages left.

Most marketing leaders already know this. They want to take creative swings, tell better stories, build better brands — but often at the risk of management's patience wearing thin, and ultimately their jobs. To be clear, this is not an argument against accountability. Measurement matters. The issue is priority. Creativity didn't stop working; it became harder to defend in organizations addicted to immediacy.

There's also a structural challenge most teams quietly accept. Marketing is brought in late — the product is locked, the pricing is set, the roadmap is finalized — and then asked to "tell the story." By that point, creativity is already constrained, and no amount of promotion can fix what's broken upstream in the mix. The strongest work happens when creative thinking shapes the narrative earlier — when marketing helps define how the offering is framed and why it matters.

The practical takeaway for leadership: if you want better marketing, involve marketing sooner. Invite creative perspectives upstream. Treat storytelling as part of strategy formation, not a layer added at the end.

Marketing reflects the environment it operates in. If teams are rewarded only for short-term wins, they'll chase short-term wins. If risk is punished, bold ideas never surface. If patience is absent, brand building never gets the time it needs to work.

If you lead marketing: protect space for creativity. Give teams permission to think beyond the quarter. Balance performance metrics with brand indicators — recall, engagement quality, narrative consistency. Accept that some of the most valuable work won't show immediate returns, even though it will influence everything that follows.

If you're a marketer: learn the numbers. Understand the business well enough to earn trust, then use that trust to advocate for better work. Bring data into the conversation, but don't let it replace judgment. Push for storytelling, originality, and long-term thinking — even when it feels uncomfortable. The 60/40 research is your ammunition; most rooms you'll argue this in have never heard of it.

Your marketing department doesn't actually suck. It's operating inside a system that no longer values the thing that made marketing powerful in the first place: creativity.

If you're looking for guidance on brand strategy, creative direction, content, or making the case for long-term marketing internally, you can contact me here.