Here is a paradox at the heart of modern marketing.

Creativity can account for between 50 and 70 per cent of a campaign’s sales uplift. Most senior marketers believe it. The data support it. Yet almost nobody is measuring it properly.

A new Global CMO Survey by Gain Theory, which surveyed 115 senior marketing leaders from Fortune 500 companies across North Amserica, Europe, Asia and beyond between May and June 2026, has put hard numbers to what many in the industry have long suspected. Sixty-two per cent of marketing leaders admit they are investing media budgets behind creative assets without knowing their full business value. Forty-nine per cent cannot confidently justify creative expenditure to their CFO or C-suite. And only 36 per cent apply the same level of measurement rigour to creative as they do to media, despite 81 per cent believing both contribute equally to business performance.

The gap between belief and practice is striking. Marketers know creative matters. They simply cannot prove it.

The reasons are structural rather than motivational. Sixty-eight per cent of senior marketers cite inadequate creative data as the primary barrier. Fifty-six per cent lack the appropriate measurement tools altogether. Financial and strategic barriers rank far lower, suggesting that the willingness and budget to solve the problem exist, but the infrastructure does not.

What fills that vacuum is media metrics. Eighty per cent of marketing leaders currently assess creative performance using reach and impressions, measurements designed to evaluate distribution rather than quality. It is the equivalent of judging a restaurant by how many people walked past it rather than how many returned.

The consequences are predictable. When creative cannot be measured in commercial terms, it cannot be defended in commercial terms. Budgets get cut. Agencies get blamed. And the most powerful lever available to any marketing department, the quality of the idea, remains the one least understood by the people responsible for it.

The survey also reveals an uncomfortable truth about AI’s role in this gap. Eighty-seven per cent of respondents are already using or piloting AI for creative production. Only 56 per cent are using it for creative measurement. The industry is accelerating content production through AI without building the corresponding infrastructure to evaluate whether any of it is working. More creative, less accountability.

For Nigerian marketing and advertising professionals, the findings are particularly relevant. In a market where marketing budgets are under constant pressure, and every naira of investment must be justified to increasingly sceptical executives, the inability to measure creative effectiveness is not just a methodological inconvenience. It is a commercial vulnerability.

The industry has spent decades building sophisticated tools to measure where an ad is seen. The next decade belongs to those who can measure whether it was worth seeing.

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