The Holy Grail

The Straight Line That Doesn't Exist

Creative and design have always been treated as cost centers. A necessary expense. A line item to be managed, trimmed, and - lately - automated. The reason is simple and maddening: you can't draw a straight line from a single asset to a business outcome. And any budget that can't draw that line is the first one under the knife.

It's not that we don't measure. Traditional measurement gives you funnel metrics - impressions, click-throughs, purchases online, same-period sales lift in store. What it never gives you is why the funnel behaved the way it did. The numbers describe the outcome. They don't explain it.

But the inability to measure doesn't mean the value isn't there. It means we've been asking the wrong question. A principle I've built my whole product career on: how you solve the problem is never more important than discovering the right problem to solve. For decades, the problem we've tried to solve is "did this asset work?" That question has no answer. The right question is "why did this work?" This question has an answer.

Those sound like the same question. They aren't. "Did it work" produces a report. "Why did it work" produces a principle you can carry into the next campaign, and the one after that. One is a receipt. The other is an asset.

Atoms, Elements, Compounds

Think about brand creative the way a chemist thinks about matter.

An atom is a single asset - a product image, a headline, a 15-second video. An element is an experience - a landing page, an email blast, a product launch. A compound is the full campaign - multiple experiences working together across channels and time.

You can measure the compound. Nike's Kaepernick campaign drove a 31% spike in online sales the week it launched. Patagonia told people not to buy their jacket and sales jumped 30% over the following nine months. Those bets were measurable because each was one loud event with a date on it - a clear before, a clear after, and a result too big to credit to anything else.

The atom is different. Water is two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen. Add one more oxygen and you get hydrogen peroxide - same elements, completely different compound. The properties don't live in the parts; they live in the combination. Creative works the same way. You can't isolate what a single product image contributed to the campaign it lived in, because its contribution only exists in combination. The value is real. The contribution is real. The measurement doesn't exist.

That designer in the all-hands is asking the atom's question: what am I bringing to the element and the compound I'm part of? Nobody can answer it - and that's where the "creative is a cost center" argument gets all of its ammunition.

Every designer who ever received aggregate campaign data as their only feedback knows their work mattered. They just can't prove it. Neither can their CMO. And a CFO can't fund what nobody can prove.

Doomed to Re-create

The problem gets more expensive the moment you add reuse. Hold that word.

You can't take the top-performing assets from summer 2026 and drop them into winter 2026. Different products, different seasons, a cultural moment that has passed. But suppose you understood why they performed. The composition. The color temperature. The emotions they evoked. The cultural references they touched. Extract the formula instead of just the assets, and next winter's brief starts three steps ahead - less iteration, faster time to what works, and an institutional memory of why things land, not just that they did.

Almost nobody does this. Part of it is a problem I spent a decade on, and it's the unglamorous kind - remodel work. Anyone who's remodeled an old house knows the most expensive money is the money you never see: the wiring, the plumbing, the foundation. Skip it and everything above sits on shaky ground. Content has the same hidden layer: if you can't find your content, you are doomed to re-create. And re-creation is expensive. But even organizations with excellent asset management aren't realizing the full value yet. They still pay twice. Once for the asset. And once for the thing nothing in the stack was built to keep: the why.

Here's what that misses. The asset is the harvest. The why is the seed. We have built entire technology stacks to store the harvest - and almost nothing to save the seeds.

There's a name I've used for the complete version of this, going back more than a decade: asset lineage. Every asset has a history - the feedback that shaped it, the versions it moved through, the decision that made it zig when it should have zagged, where it ran, how it performed. Captured, that history reads like DNA: how the asset was born, how it was used, how it evolved. Lost - feedback in a hallway, versions overwritten, comments orphaned from the version they were about - and the why goes with it. Lineage is what turns reuse into repurposing: not recycling an asset, evolving it. And years from now, when a strand of that asset's DNA shows up in work it helped inform, lineage is what predicted the success.

It's also why content provenance work like the Content Authenticity Initiative matters more than the attention it gets. Provenance isn't just about proving what's real. It's the beginning of lineage.

The Better Ambition

We've spent decades trying to count what creative contributes, failing, and concluding the value must not be provable. That was the wrong ambition. Counting the atom was never the goal. Understanding it is.

The designer in that all-hands doesn't need a dashboard that says their image drove 2.4% of revenue. They need an organization that can say: we know why your work landed, we've captured the principle, and we're building next season on it. That's attribution that matters - not a number, an understanding.

I opened by saying this matters more right now than it ever has. Here's why. The fear that AI is coming for creative jobs rests on one assumption - that the work is only output. Output is the half AI can increasingly do. The why is the half it can't. Capture the why, and creative stops being the easiest budget line to cut and becomes the hardest. Everyone with a place in the creative cycle should be shouting this. It isn't a defense against the machines. It's the strongest case the work has ever had.

Their work was never the cost. Losing what it taught you is.

From The Holy Grail of Brand: Quantifying What You Can't Count (opens in a new tab), July 15, 2026.