Everyone who’s anyone knows that the world’s most disruptive and commercially successful brands are built on creativity. In every sector, pick a market leader and you’ll find a company with it in their DNA: adidas, Apple, A24, Athletic Brewing Co … and we’re only on ‘A’.

In fact (according to a recent report published by us at Ask Us For Ideas), the senior marketers, founders and brand leaders of the world attribute 60% of a company’s success purely to creativity, design and marketing – leaving a scant 40% to be steered by things like product, innovation or leadership. It’s something that’s echoed both by big consultants – McKinsey says it drives business innovation and growth – and consumers, who also love creatively well-executed brands.

So with more people being converted to creativity’s cause each year, you’d think budgets would be going up exponentially, right? Well no, that’s not exactly the story.

This year, AUFI was lucky enough to lay eyes on more than 500 creative briefs, and while recent weeks have shown some promising signs of things improving, the average project value across the last couple of years has been noticeably down. The actual number of brands looking for agencies hasn’t shrunk, but what they’re willing to spend has. Clients often want the same (or more) for less money, and it’s something our network of agencies has also reported.

Here’s where we get to a deep, dark, echoing chasm. While marketers, consultants and consumers are all standing on the cliff’s edge, shouting out their support for creativity, the purse-holders are sat at the bottom, squinting up into the light.

For us, success is defined in terms of client ROI and we fiercely tie all our work back to that metric. We win work because of it

“Many CEOs are focused on operational effectiveness and shorter-term growth, especially in uncertain economic times like these,” one, anonymous, CMO told us. “Whereas marketing, creative and design investments are typically longer lead and longer payoff timeline investments.”

There’s a few factors at play here: the economic conditions are bleak, venture money has been slow to deploy and consumers are facing an ongoing cost of living crisis. So you can understand why cautious money managers are justifying shrinking budgets, and why marketers are being forced to squeeze the orange to the pips.

But you could also argue that these factors need to be countered by smart business strategy. Time and again we see brand, design and marketing reviving companies and boosting flagging sales. So in lean times, doesn’t it make sense to invest more in those things? If brand leaders, consultants and consumers are all saying creativity wins, then shouldn’t we listen to them?

Maybe you can’t blame the people in charge of the budgets for remaining unconvinced when the most-used get out for creative ROI is: “It’s an incredibly hard thing to measure” or “You have to look at it more holistically”. Sounds pretty airy-fairy, right?

Obviously, it’s not black and white, and if creativity was immediately quantifiable, then those right-brained folk would be the ones making the ads. But it, arguably, feels like a lazy response, especially when we have so many ways of tracking the impact of actions we take and moves we make.

Executed well, brand is a multiplier on all your metrics. Yes, it’s more difficult to measure, but there’s no question around its impact

“It’s ridiculous to think that creativity can’t be measured or valued,” says Cameron Koczon, founder of digital agency Fictive Kin. “We measure it on every project. For us, success is defined in terms of client ROI and we fiercely tie all our work back to that metric. And we win work because of it.”

Does that mean the burden of persuasion falls on the shoulders of agencies and marketers? Do they all need to be doing a better job convincing CFOs and CEOs that reduced creative budgets ultimately equal reduced revenue? Some people certainly think so.

“There’s a lot that goes into brand-building, and unless you’re in that line of business, people don’t always understand the value and how much work goes into it,” one brand leader told us. “There’s a lot of internal groundwork that needs to be laid for the organisation to understand the benefits.”

Agencies love to talk about the big idea, but maybe there’s more to do to convince the budget masters what that ad campaign, or new website, or social media retainer might realistically achieve. Because when a brand buys an agency’s services they’re not buying into their creativity; they’re buying into what that creativity unlocks.

As Iona Carter, VP brand & marketing strategy at Wise, says: “Executed well, brand is a multiplier on all your metrics. Yes, it’s more difficult to measure with pinpoint accuracy versus pure performance marketing, but there’s no question around its impact.”

That doesn’t mean every single proposal has to come with a strict, numerical promise, but I believe agencies trying to win work would benefit from painting at least a blurry watercolour of what’s possible. One of the simplest ways to do that, and make a case for more budget, is by showing how valuable your previous work was. Potential clients want to see how an agency helped a brand in a similar sector, or with a similar challenge – and they want to know what the actual, real-life outcome of that partnership was.

The reality is that good creative work is effective work, and effective work should have real, indisputable commercial impact

Agencies should be ready to share that a six-figure rebrand boosted sales by 20%, or a redesigned ecommerce site created 30% less abandoned carts, or a social campaign landed a new Gen Z audience on TikTok. And they should also be prepared to push a client to provide KPIs at the brief stage to understand exactly how they plan to measure success, and how creative work will feed into that.

In return, brands need to do a better job of digging into the value agencies have created for past clients. Finding an agency should be less about judging a team on how ‘creative’ their ideas are, or how beautifully art-directed their case study is, and more about what the work accomplished. And if both parties use the filter of ‘value creation’ when selling or buying into a new partnership, the conversation shifts from ‘can we afford this?’ to ‘what does success look like?’

None of this takes away the magic, by the way. Creativity is and always should be a mix of well-rationalised ideas and mad moves into the unknown, and the best brand leaders are the ones prepared to take a risk on that. But the reality is that good creative work is effective work, and effective work should have real, indisputable commercial impact.

So gather the data, insist on it, and tell the story of how the work isn’t a luxury, but an essential part of the winning growth strategy. Talk to the C-suite in dollars and data points, and it might just unlock some more.

Nick Bell is the co-founder of Ask Us For Ideas; aufi.com