The Creative Math Your CMO Does Not Do
Scott Schnaars
Your CMO is looking at a rolled-up media efficiency number and probably sees CPM up 18% quarter-over-quarter. Your agency is also looking at that number, and the story they are telling your CMO is "rising platform costs." Everyone involved is partially right and partially wrong, and you, the person actually running the account, are the one who can bring the missing chart into the room.
The missing chart is the creative-to-CPM correlation. Nobody at the leadership level runs this chart, because it does not roll up cleanly and because nobody has the incentive to run it, since the agency does not want to find creative fatigue and the CMO does not want to fight the CFO for more creative budget. That leaves you.
The three-chart exercise takes an hour and is worth putting on your calendar for next Friday:
- Chart one: CPM by channel, weekly, last 90 days, plotted as a line
- Chart two: Unique creatives in rotation by channel, weekly, last 90 days, plotted as a second line on the same axis
- Chart three: Days since last creative launch by channel, weekly, last 90 days, plotted as a bar chart
What you are looking for is whether CPM climbs when unique creatives in rotation drops, and whether CPM spikes correlate with long stretches of no new creative launches. Nine times out of ten, the correlation is so obvious you do not need statistics, you just need the chart.
How to present it without being the jerk in the room. Do not walk into a meeting and say "CPM is up because creative is stale." That is a blaming move, and blaming moves do not get you promoted, they get you assigned to a cross-functional task force nobody wants to be on. Instead, walk in with the three charts and a single question: "It looks like our CPM rises when creative refresh slows. Should we test a monthly refresh cadence in Q3 to see if we can get CPM back in line?"
That is a proposal, not an accusation. It puts the CMO in a position to say yes, and it gives the agency a way to participate in the solution rather than defend against the problem. HubSpot's State of Marketing research has documented repeatedly that creative refresh velocity correlates with media efficiency (HubSpot State of Marketing), and the data is on your side.
What you get if the charts show what you expect:
- Credibility in the next QBR, because you brought a view nobody else brought
- Probable budget movement toward the iteration work you have been asking for
- A second meeting you are invited to by default, the creative strategy one
What you get if the charts do not show what you expect: honest feedback that the CPM story is really a platform story, which is useful data too, because now you can stop blaming creative and look somewhere else.
Either way you come out ahead. Running the analysis is the win, not the specific answer.
Block 60 minutes next Friday. Build the three charts. See what they say. For context on the broader discipline this ladders into, our decision log piece walks through the adjacent habit that makes these moves land with leadership.
The practitioner who brings the chart nobody else runs gets the seat at the table nobody else is holding. That is the whole game.
