By Federico Soto Roland – Strategy, AI & Digital Director, NSB Agency

There's an idea that took hold in marketing over the past decade and that today, with the data in hand, we know to be false: the idea that creativity is the "soft" part of a campaign, while targeting, media, data, analytics and optimization are the "hard" part, the one that actually moves the business.

The numbers say exactly the opposite. And it's worth looking at them before you keep spending budgets as if it were still 2015.

This article runs through ten truths that are rewriting the rules of modern marketing. They're not opinions. They're measurements from Meta, Nielsen, McKinsey, Google, Kantar and MIT. Together they tell a single story: that creativity has gone from being a decorative cost to being the most underrated financial asset companies have.

The multiplier nobody is looking at

  1. Creativity accounts for 56% of ROAS.

    More than targeting, more than the medium (more than anything!). (Meta, 2022)

Meta reported in 2022 that creativity accounts for more than half the return on an advertising investment, well above targeting. Nielsen, in independent research, reached a similar conclusion: creativity contributes 47% of a campaign's success, while reach contributes just 22%. And McKinsey, measuring publicly traded companies, showed that those in the top quartile for creativity generate 30% higher returns for their shareholders.

But the most compelling figure came from Hurman and Field, after analyzing two decades of effectiveness awards:

  1. A great campaign delivers 10x more than a mediocre one on the same budget.

    It's not marginal: it's exponential. (Hurman & Field)

This means one concrete thing: if two brands spend the same on media, the one with better creative can get up to ten times the result. Not 10% more. Ten times more. It's the difference between a business that scales and one that wears itself out trying to grow on budget alone.

The "Messy Middle" and why they choose you before they even look for you

Google, in its Decoding Decisions study, showed that consumers don't decide in a linear way. They enter a chaotic process of exploration and evaluation that they called the Messy Middle, and the brand that comes to mind first captures a disproportionate advantage: 28% more preference. The uncomfortable conclusion is that most of your sales aren't won at the moment of purchase. They're won months earlier, when someone heard about your brand, saw a memorable piece, or had your name recommended to them.

  1. 95% of your future customers aren't ready to buy today.

    Performance harvests them; the brand sows them. (LinkedIn B2B Institute)

This is probably the statistic that should most shake up the way companies plan their investment. The vast majority of the market you're talking to isn't in buying mode. It's in memory mode. If you don't build mental availability now, you won't be in the consideration set later, no matter how much budget you pour into performance.

And there's a metric that confirms it with unsettling precision:

  1. Share of Search predicts Market Share with 83% accuracy.

    How much people search for you today is how much they'll buy from you tomorrow. (James Hankins)

In other words: the future of your market share is being written right now, in how many people type your name into Google without any ad prompting them to. And that's only achieved by building brand.

The false dilemma between brand and performance

One of the most common objections to investing in branding is: "I need results now." The argument seems solid until you look at the data.

  1. Brands with high salience have a 40% lower CPA.

    Branding doesn't compete with performance: it makes it cheaper. (Nielsen)

Companies that invest in brand end up paying less for every conversion. The reason is simple: people already knew them. There's no need to convince from scratch, no distrust to overcome, no need to explain who you are. The brand pre-sold the click.

And if we look further out, the numbers from Binet and Field, validated over years by the IPA, are even clearer:

  1. Every $1 invested in brand returns $13 in long-term value.

    Binet & Field's 60/40 rule isn't theory, it's accounting. (IPA)

The rule states that 60% of the budget should go to brand building and 40% to activation. Most companies today have it flipped, which is why they see their CPA climb year after year. It's not that digital is broken: it's that they're buying traffic for a house no one remembers.

The new problem: the sameness tax

Until two years ago, looking like your category was a valid strategy. Today it's commercial suicide. With AI generating infinite, cheap content, the brands that adopt the algorithm's average aesthetic are paying a cost we're only just starting to measure.

  1. Brands that adopt AI's average aesthetic lose 40% of CTR in a year.

    The "sameness tax" is already on the books. (Analytic Data, 2024)

Consumers got tired. When everything looks the same, nothing grabs attention, and the algorithm ends up cannibalizing the very brands that feed it. The paradox of badly used AI is that, in its attempt to optimize, it flattens everything toward the average. And the average doesn't sell.

This fundamentally changes the role of the brand. It's no longer just a commercial differentiator: it becomes a mark of authenticity.

  1. 76% of Gen Z seeks out brands with a human fingerprint over synthetic content.

    Authenticity went from a value to a purchase filter. (Edelman)

The generation most native to technology is, paradoxically, the one that distrusts it most. 52% of consumers are outright afraid of AI, according to Pew Research. In that context, having a brand with judgment, with a human voice, with visible decisions, stopped being a nice-to-have. It's a credential of real existence.

How to use AI without becoming invisible

None of the above means rejecting AI. It means understanding what role to give it.

  1. AI supervised by expert judgment delivers 40% more than pure AI.

    The bottleneck isn't the tool: it's who decides. (MIT Sloan)

The MIT Sloan study is probably the most important data point of 2023 for anyone running a brand. What separates the companies that will win from the ones that will disappear isn't access to AI: that's already a commodity. It's the ability to decide what to do with it. AI lets you scale what human judgment decided. Not replace it.

That leads to the tenth and final truth, which works as a conclusion:

  1. AI is the engine, but judgment is the steering wheel.

    Without judgment, speed only gets you to oblivion faster. (NSB Agency)

Three practical moves

To close, three concrete decisions that follow from the data.

  1. Revisit the 60/40 rule. If your current investment is closer to 30/70, you're financing your own CPA increase year after year. Brands with high salience have a 40% lower CPA: branding is the most powerful lever for making performance profitable.
  2. Stop treating creativity as an expense and start treating it as infrastructure. Every dollar invested in brand returns thirteen in long-term value. Customers attracted by brand have an LTV twice as high as those attracted by offer. The brand doesn't compete with performance: it multiplies it.
  3. Use AI as the engine but not as the rudder. Speed without direction isn't efficiency: it's accelerated waste. The brands that will grow over the next five years are the ones that understood that the most powerful tool AI left untouched is the human judgment that decides what to do with it.

Creativity was never decoration.
Now, on top of that, it's the only advantage the algorithm can't copy.