Where this shows up in the work
This is the exact argument behind our Bravery Workshop, for teams who already know something needs to change.
Marketing has KPIs for everything.
Reach.
Impressions.
CPM.
CTR.
CPC.
CPA.
ROAS.
Engagement.
Completion rate.
Brand awareness.
Share of voice.
Purchase intent.
Consideration.
Conversion.
Lovely.
Open the dashboard and you can find out exactly how your marketing is performing across approximately 700 different dimensions.
Except one.
Is this fucking interesting?
Hmm.
No column for that.
Imagine If We Actually Measured It
Campaign review.
“How did we go?”
Reach: 112% of target.
Excellent.
“CPM?”
8% below benchmark.
Beautiful.
“Brand lift?”
Positive.
Wonderful.
“And did the work have a pulse?”
Silence.
“Sorry?”
Did anyone actually feel anything when they saw it?
Ah.
We don't currently report on that.
Of course we don't.
Bit subjective.
Anyway, here's the frequency chart.
Marketing Loves Things That Fit in Cells
This is understandable.
Businesses need measurement.
If we're spending millions of dollars, someone should probably know what happened.
Numbers create accountability.
They help us compare.
Optimise.
Learn.
Make decisions.
Good.
The problem starts when what can be easily measured becomes what matters.
Because some incredibly important things are messy.
Was it funny?
Did it feel fresh?
Did someone send it to their mate?
Did it make the brand feel more interesting?
Did it create a story?
Did it surprise anyone?
Did people start repeating the line?
Would anyone notice if this campaign disappeared tomorrow?
Not quite as neat as CPM.
Potentially quite important.
The Dashboard Has No Taste
This isn't an insult to dashboards.
They've had a difficult morning.
But dashboards don't know if something is cool.
They don't know if the joke is brilliant.
They don't know if the creator feels completely wrong for the brand.
They don't know whether the beautifully produced film somehow feels dead behind the eyes.
They don't know if the idea has cultural energy.
They know what happened after you put it into the world.
Useful.
But there is still a human judgement sitting before, around and after those numbers.
Is this good?
Marketing has spent years trying to avoid that question because it sounds subjective.
Unfortunately, customers remain stubbornly subjective.
You Can Hit Every KPI and Still Make Shit Marketing
This is the uncomfortable bit.
A campaign can deliver.
Reach target?
Yep.
CPM?
Good.
Views?
Excellent.
Clicks?
Fine.
Engagement?
Above benchmark.
And still be something absolutely nobody remembers next Tuesday.
We've confused successful distribution with successful marketing.
The media did its job.
The ad appeared.
The customer was technically exposed.
The dashboard has receipts.
But if nothing remained afterwards, what exactly did we achieve?
Sometimes a campaign can be operationally successful, statistically acceptable and creatively fucking dead.
There isn't usually a red warning light for that.
We Need a Pulse Check
Not literally another fucking metric.
Please.
Nobody needs:
Creative Pulse™: 73.4
followed by a 19-slide methodology explaining how we calculated it.
The point is simpler.
We need to bring human judgement back into how we evaluate marketing.
Alongside the data, ask:
Did this feel alive?
Did it have an idea?
Did it have tension?
Did it have personality?
Did it surprise us?
Did it sound like a human made it?
Was there something people could remember?
Would we recognise the brand without the logo?
Would anyone voluntarily watch it?
Would anyone voluntarily share it?
Would anyone on the team proudly put it in their portfolio?
These aren't perfect measures.
Neither are half the things we pretend are.
“Would Anyone Voluntarily Watch This?” Is a Brutal KPI
Try it.
Before you spend the media money.
Put the work up.
Then remove the brand name.
Remove the campaign context.
Remove the explanation from the agency.
Now ask:
If this appeared in my feed and nobody was paying me to watch it, would I stay?
Dangerous question.
Because suddenly:
“But the product benefit appears in second four”
feels slightly less impressive.
People voluntarily consume extraordinary amounts of content every day.
So perhaps voluntary attention is worth thinking about.
Not because every ad needs to masquerade as entertainment.
Because the audience always has the option to leave.
“Would Anyone Send This to Someone?”
Another one.
Not:
Could they?
There is a share button.
Excellent.
Would they?
What would they say?
“Look at this.”
“That's you.”
“Hahahaha.”
“What the fuck.”
“I need this.”
“This is actually clever.”
“This is so us.”
“This made me cry.”
Whatever.
Sharing tells you something interesting happened.
Not necessarily something good.
People also share catastrophes.
Context remains important.
But when marketing becomes a thing people voluntarily move between each other, you've crossed a very interesting line.
You've stopped paying for every centimetre it travels.
“Would Anyone Notice If We Stopped?”
This one is worse.
Imagine your brand stops posting tomorrow.
No Instagram.
No TikTok.
No LinkedIn.
No campaign.
Nothing.
How long before anyone notices?
A day?
A week?
Six months?
Never?
Would anyone miss it?
Would customers ask where you went?
Would your social content leave a hole in anyone's day?
Or would the content calendar simply stop producing Tuesdays?
That's a pretty brutal test of whether you're creating value or fulfilling an internal publishing requirement.
We’ve Optimised for Proving Value Instead of Creating It
This happens naturally.
Marketing needs to justify investment.
So we find measurable outputs.
Then teams become responsible for those outputs.
Then agencies optimise towards them.
Then platforms optimise towards them.
Eventually everyone is extremely good at producing numbers that demonstrate marketing activity.
But the customer never sees the report.
They don't know your engagement rate.
They don't know you beat the category benchmark.
They don't care that the campaign drove a statistically significant uplift in unaided awareness among Segment B.
They saw something.
Did it do anything to them?
That's the whole fucking game.
The Best Creative Metrics Are Often Behavioural
This is where social gives us something incredibly useful.
People can leave.
Immediately.
Brutal.
But useful.
They can stay.
Rewatch.
Share.
Save.
Comment.
Click.
Buy.
Search.
Follow.
Those behaviours don't perfectly measure creativity.
Nothing does.
But they give us clues.
A piece holds attention far longer than everything else?
Interesting.
A creator gets shared disproportionately?
Interesting.
One joke drives comments every time?
Interesting.
A particular opening repeatedly stops people?
Interesting.
Creative isn't an unknowable magical force anymore.
We can see signals.
The mistake is turning those signals into rigid rules instead of using them to develop better judgement.
Not Everything Alive Will “Perform”
Important.
Because otherwise we end up right back where we started.
A strange, brilliant piece might not get the best CTR.
A brand-building idea might not produce immediate sales.
A piece that creates enormous cultural conversation might have an expensive CPM.
A beautiful film might be worth making even if nobody clicks SHOP NOW underneath it.
Objectives matter.
Context matters.
The pulse isn't the only thing.
It's the thing we're in danger of forgetting while measuring everything else.
“But Interesting Is Subjective”
Yep.
So is almost everything involving humans.
Funny is subjective.
Beautiful is subjective.
Cool is subjective.
Annoying is subjective.
Sexy is subjective.
Trustworthy is subjective.
Premium is subjective.
And yet brands spend billions trying to create these exact feelings.
We can't suddenly hide behind objectivity when it's time to judge the work.
The answer isn't abandoning data.
It's getting better at combining:
Evidence + taste.
What did people do?
What does the data tell us?
What are we learning?
And:
Is the fucking thing any good?
We need both.
AI Is Going to Make Dead Marketing Much Easier to Produce
This is where the pulse question becomes urgent.
We're entering an era of infinite content.
Need 100 posts?
Done.
Fifty ads?
Done.
Twenty scripts?
Easy.
Need to personalise them across 40 audience segments?
Sure.
We can generate more marketing than humanity has ever experienced.
Which sounds amazing.
Until you realise:
Humanity wasn't exactly asking for more marketing.
The bottleneck isn't content production anymore.
The bottleneck is giving people a reason to care.
AI can help us make extraordinary things.
It can help analyse what works.
Explore ideas.
Generate possibilities.
Accelerate craft.
Brilliant.
It can also help companies fill every available surface with competent, optimised, completely fucking lifeless content.
At unprecedented speed.
Efficiency Without Taste Is Going to Be Horrific
Imagine the future.
Every brand publishes 50 times more.
Every ad personalised.
Every email optimised.
Every headline tested.
Every asset generated instantly.
Every campaign perfectly on-brand.
Every piece hitting its benchmark.
And the entire internet feels like being trapped inside an airport duty-free store.
That's the danger.
We don't need marketing machines that can simply produce more.
We need humans capable of asking:
Should this exist?
Does it have something?
Would anyone care?
Could we make it better?
Could we make fewer things that are much more interesting?
Efficiency is brilliant.
But efficiently producing shit is still producing shit.
Just faster.
Put “Pulse” in the Creative Review
Seriously.
Next time you're reviewing work, alongside the normal questions:
Is it on strategy?
Is the product clear?
Is it branded?
Is it legally okay?
Does it work across formats?
Ask:
Where's the pulse?
What is the thing that makes this alive?
Maybe it's the writing.
The casting.
The creator.
The visual.
The tension.
The story.
The joke.
The honesty.
The weirdness.
The craft.
The idea.
If nobody can answer?
That's useful information.
Maybe you've made a perfectly functional piece of marketing.
And nothing more.
Your Team Knows When the Work Is Dead
This is the funny thing.
They know.
The agency knows.
The Marketing Manager knows.
The social team definitely knows.
You can feel it in the presentation.
Good work goes up and people lean forward.
They laugh.
Talk.
Argue.
Start imagining what it could become.
Dead work goes up.
Pause.
Then:
“Yep. That definitely answers the brief.”
Oh dear.
Someone asks whether the product could be 10% bigger.
Someone else asks about deliverables.
Meeting ends seven minutes early.
Everyone knows.
Then we make it anyway.
Because nobody has a KPI for:
THIS HAS NO FUCKING SOUL.
Maybe We Don’t Need Another KPI
Actually, we definitely don't.
We've got enough.
What we need is permission to value the things that don't fit neatly into the dashboard.
Taste.
Energy.
Originality.
Personality.
Emotion.
Surprise.
Craft.
Cultural instinct.
A point of view.
The things that make someone stop.
The things that make someone remember.
The things that make marketing feel like it was made by people rather than produced by a system.
Measure the business outcome.
Measure the media.
Measure the behaviour.
Measure everything useful.
Then look up from the spreadsheet for a second.
Look at the actual thing you're spending all that money putting into the world.
And ask the question no dashboard is going to answer for you:
Does this thing have a fucking pulse?
Because if it doesn't, I'm not sure another green arrow is going to save it.