Is Marketing’s Creative Soul Lost?

In my early marketing days and then entering the height of the dot com boom, metrics and analytics for marketing communications were, to say the least, quite slim. When I lead a major startup that had gone public in the late 90s, one of our biggest measures was how much earned media we got. Largely driven by press clippings we hired a firm to collect for us. We had this massive binder, then binders, of clips. Sometimes I’d haul them along to senior management meetings. Not fun. But a common measure for tech startups at the time.

Then Website analytics tools started to pop up, before Google Analytics stirred the pot years later. That main metric? How many “hits” did a site get? Cookies weren’t a thing. Except for the real ones in the snack room. The marketing industry soon discovered just how much and what and who could be tracked. Never why, and that still hasn’t changed, but dashboards, beautiful ones in Excel or some SaaS tool, bedazzled the marketers brain. Suddenly, marketing could sit in the C-Suite and hold up a spreadsheet and say things about data. But marketing was speaking a language it was never created to speak.

And for the past 20 plus years, marketing communications has become ever more data driven. It’s been a boon for the profession. And a bane. Increasingly, a bane. Today we talk about “outcome-driven”, “performance creative” and “metric first.” Creative briefs have shifted from aspirational alignment to hypotheses for business outcomes. Marketing has always been, and still is, a mix of art and science. It is a wonderful profession for discovering what it means to be human in commerce terms. And increasingly, more.

I think though, marketing is, well has, lost a large chunk of its creative soul, the artistic part. CMOs have to deliver budgets with pre-determined success metrics, in some organizations they must declare how much they’ll contribute to gross or even net, revenues. If they don’t, they’re out the door. Small wonder that the CMO tenure is one of the shortest in the C-Suite.

I’m all for metrics. I love analytics tools. But after 30 years in marketing and my work advising brands on cultural shifts as a cultural anthropologist, I also know where data has it’s limits and I see many a marketing team lost in swamps of data. Lovely dashboards, little meaningful insights. Remember, data tells you what, never why.

As social media platforms grew and Google became the most powerful ad platform the world has ever seen, suddenly marketers could become ever more granular. And that was the pitch of these platforms. And it was good. Until it wasn’t. But they gave a way for marketing to justify ad budgets. Creativity died a little bit more. That’s when metrics began to lead creative briefs. Instead of asking “what do we want people to feel or think?” Marketing asked “what metric are we moving, and what hypotheses will drive it?”

And now the ad platforms and the digital advertising system has become polluted with scams and a plethora of middle-men all taking a cut along the way, each selling some shiny new golden metric sure to woo the CMO, CFO and CEO. It’s become so bad, so corrupt that the marketing profession dreads to talk about it, despite the evidence. Marketers suddenly fear the analytics rug they’ve come to love so much, being pulled out from under. That’s perhaps harsh. But it again is another wound in the loss of creativity in the marketing soul.

Then there’s creative director John Long’s recent, timely and poignant book called “Zombie Brands”, which is another reminder of the slipping away of marketing’s creative soul. A wakeup call to the profession. And Geoffrey Colon has waxed and waned quite elegantly in his Transmission series on the creative dirty in marketing today.

Can Marketing Get It’s Creative Soul Back?

Absolutely. I think we’ve reached the inflection point of that happening. Over the past few weeks LinkedIn for marketers has been filled with posts talking about McKinsey’s recent report on the State of Marketing in 2026. The big thing everyone was nattering on about is that CMOs now see “brand” as their number one priority (and pointing out AI was #17 on the list, but marketing spend on AI is actually high, a point neglected in their proclamations.) I think that is a signal, because as we marketers know, brand is emotional. Human to its core. And there are no metrics for human emotions, desires, feelings. Those rest in culture. We can fairly well measure and intuit buyer psychology, but culture comes first and underlies the very basis of how people make buying decisions.

It’s heartening too, to see many articles and posts about strategists and junior marketing consultants suddenly discovering the concept of “culture” like they found the Holy Grail. It’s been there all along. I used my education in cultural anthropology heavily through 30 years of marketing. But these posts are wonderful because they’re a signal of a profession doing some serious navel gazing and arriving at nadir in a time of analytical overwhelm when the numbers are no longer jiving.

My next article will look at how marketing can get its soul back. The signals and shifts underway. How marketing can find a balance between creativity and science, which is where it should be. And how it can get the CFO and CEO onside. At least, I hope so.