Marketing Has a Measurement Problem. It's Called Finance.
And it has been quietly killing your most valuable work for years.
Rory Sutherland made a point recently that has been rattling around in my head ever since.
He said that in normal conversation, if something is priceless, we mean it is almost unbelievably valuable. The Mona Lisa is priceless. That is a good thing. It means the value is so large it almost cannot be comprehended.
But to someone with a finance mindset, priceless means something very different. If it cannot be calculated, it cannot count. If it does not fit on a spreadsheet or a balance sheet, it is treated as if it is zero.
Zero.
Not "hard to measure." Not "important but intangible." Not "we need a better framework." Just zero.
And that single piece of logic has quietly hollowed out the value of marketing inside more organisations than I can count.
How marketing got shrunk to fit the spreadsheet
Marketing did not lose its seat at the table because it stopped being important.
It lost its seat because it got forced into a language it was never designed to speak.
Over the past two decades, marketing has been progressively subordinated to finance. Not overtly. Nobody held a meeting and said "marketing matters less now." It happened through process. Through reporting structures. Through the slow, steady insistence that every activity must justify itself in narrow, short-term, financially quantifiable terms.
The brief does not get signed off until it has a projected ROI. The campaign does not get funded until someone has attached a number to the expected return. The brand investment does not get approved until someone can show what it will deliver this quarter.
On the surface, that sounds reasonable. Of course businesses should be financially disciplined. Of course marketing should demonstrate value. Nobody is arguing against accountability.
The things that matter most are the hardest to measure
Here is the problem.
The things that matter most in marketing are very often the things that are hardest to measure. Brand. Fame. Trust. Distinctiveness. Emotional resonance. Positioning. The feeling a customer has when they think of you versus when they think of your competitor.
These things are not unmeasurable because they are unimportant. They are hard to measure because they are complex, long-term, and compound in ways that do not fit neatly into a quarterly reporting cycle.
But finance needs a number. And if marketing cannot provide one, the investment gets questioned, reduced, or cut entirely. Not because anyone has evidence it does not work. But because nobody can prove, in the format finance requires, that it does.
The most valuable things get treated as zero. And the things that are easy to measure get treated as everything.
The spreadsheet ceiling: when measurable beats valuable
This is where it gets dangerous.
Once marketing is forced to justify itself entirely through short-term, measurable returns, it starts optimising for the wrong things.
The budget flows to performance channels because those are the ones with clean attribution. The investment goes to campaigns with trackable conversions because those are the ones that produce a number for the next board meeting. The brand work gets pushed to the margins because nobody can attach a precise ROI to it within a 90-day window.
And the organisation starts to believe, genuinely believe, that marketing is a cost to be managed rather than a growth lever to be invested in.
Green dashboards, flat revenue
This plays out in attention metrics every single day. Teams report CPMs, CTRs, views and reach. The dashboard is green. The engagement numbers look healthy. Everyone in the room can point to a chart that says the campaign is working.
But trace the line back to revenue, margin or lifetime value and nothing has moved.
The clicks went up. The commercial outcome did not. That gap between visible activity and actual business impact is exactly where the spreadsheet ceiling lives. The metrics that are easy to count get celebrated. The things that actually predict commercial movement, processed attention, salience, mental availability, get ignored because they are harder to quantify and slower to materialise.
Kantar's Media Reactions 2024 found that only 31% of people globally say social media ads capture their attention, down from 43% the year before. The inventory is there. The engagement is not. Yet brands keep pouring budget into the same channels because the dashboard says it is working.
This is a governance problem, not a marketing problem
That is the spreadsheet ceiling in action. The demand for financial precision actively prevents the business from doing the thing that would create the most value. And because the bias is built into the measurement process, nobody questions it. It just looks like rigour.
We have talked in previous editions about the precision trap. About how an obsession with measurability leads businesses to over-invest in the bottom of the funnel and starve the top. This is the structural reason why that happens. It is not a marketing problem. It is a governance problem.
Marketing is not a department, it is the weather
Sutherland makes another point that I think is even more important.
He says marketing is not a department. Marketing is the weather.
What he means is this. Marketing, properly understood, is not just the function that produces campaigns and manages channels. It is the discipline of understanding how value is created in the mind of the customer. That discipline does not sit inside one department. It touches everything. Product design. Pricing architecture. Customer experience. Proposition development. How the business communicates. What it stands for. How it makes people feel.
The most valuable marketing rarely happens in the marketing department
James Dyson's decision to make vacuum cleaners transparent was not a marketing decision. It was a design decision. But it was fundamentally a marketing act, because it was based on the idea of subjective value in the mind of the consumer. It changed the category. It built a brand.
Someone at Ogilvy suggested putting "Member Since" on the American Express card. That single idea has been worth billions to the organisation. Billions. Because it changed the relationship from transactional to relational. It introduced sunk cost. It made people reluctant to cancel, because they did not want to lose their membership date.
These are marketing acts. But they do not live inside the marketing department. They do not show up on a campaign dashboard. They cannot be attributed to a media channel or a content calendar.
If the business only measures marketing by what the marketing department produces, it will miss the most valuable marketing the organisation ever does.
That is what it means to say marketing is the weather. It is the environment in which the entire business operates. You can talk about how you steer the ship and how you fuel the engines, but the weather determines whether any of it matters.
And you cannot put the weather on a spreadsheet.
Marketing has a language problem at board level
There is a reason marketing struggles to be taken seriously in the boardroom. It is not entirely finance's fault.
Sutherland's colleague Alistair Graham put it perfectly. He said the language of marketing is a bit like the language of astrology. If you are talking to a fellow believer, it sounds fine. If you are talking to anybody else, you sound like a nut job.
Brand iconography. Emotional resonance. Distinctive memory structures. Share of voice. Mental availability.
Try saying any of that in a board meeting full of engineers, finance directors and operations people. Watch the room check their phones.
Marketing has a language problem, and that language problem has real consequences, because it means the discipline cannot sell its own value to the people who control the budget.
Stop selling outputs, start selling a way of seeing
Sutherland's own career is proof of what happens when you fix this. He stopped talking about what marketing does and started talking about how marketing thinks. He stopped describing campaigns and started describing decision-making. He stopped selling outputs and started selling a way of seeing the world.
The audience went from a room of marketers to venture capitalists, hedge fund managers, entrepreneurs and CEOs.
The product did not change. The packaging did.
There is a lesson in that for every marketing leader sitting in a boardroom trying to justify a brand investment to a CFO who only speaks in numbers. Stop talking about what you do. Start talking about what the business will lose without it. Frame it in terms of risk, not reach. Frame it in terms of competitive vulnerability, not campaign metrics. Frame it in terms the room already understands.
Because if marketing cannot make its own case in language the business respects, it will keep getting treated as a cost line. And the most valuable work it does will keep getting scored as zero.
The loose fitness function: why tight KPIs produce forgettable work
There is one more idea from Sutherland that deserves attention, because it has direct implications for how marketing teams are managed and measured.
He talks about the loose fitness function. It comes from evolutionary biology. The reason evolution works in nature is that the rules are simple and loose. Stay alive long enough to reproduce. That is it. Within those constraints, you are given enormous scope for interpretation. That looseness is what produces the extraordinary diversity and creativity of the natural world. Moss and sharks both exist because the fitness function is wide enough to allow for both.
Tighten the fitness function, narrow the rules of success to a very specific set of criteria, and you kill that diversity. You get more moss. You never get a shark.
This is exactly what happens when marketing is measured too tightly.
When every activity must justify itself against a narrow set of short-term KPIs, the team stops experimenting. It stops taking creative risks. It stops doing the things that might produce the 5% of outlier successes that generate disproportionately large amounts of value. Those outlier successes are, by definition, unpredictable. They cannot be planned for in a spreadsheet. They cannot be guaranteed in a brief. They happen because someone was given enough room to try something unexpected.
Tighten the fitness function and you get predictable, safe, unremarkable marketing that hits its KPIs and moves nothing. Loosen it and you create the conditions for something genuinely valuable to emerge.
Why founder-led businesses keep winning on effectiveness
The businesses that understand this tend to be founder-led. Sutherland points out that four out of five advertising effectiveness award winners in 2024 were family-owned companies. McCain. Yorkshire Tea. Laithwaites. Specsavers. The fifth was Guinness.
These are businesses that take a holistic view. They treat the business as a nested set of ecosystems rather than a set of separate departments to be optimised in isolation. They give their teams a clear objective and the freedom to find creative ways to achieve it. They do not strangle every decision with a spreadsheet.
And they outperform.
What this looks like in practice
If you recognise the problem, the fix starts in four places.
Separate the measurement horizon from the reporting cycle. Short-term activity can be judged in quarters. Brand investment cannot. Agreeing that distinction up front stops the long-term work being reassessed every 90 days against metrics it was never designed to move.
Change the unit of accountability. Stop reporting what marketing produced and start reporting what moved commercially. Revenue, margin, customer lifetime value, cost of acquisition over time. If the number on the slide is a CTR, you have already lost the argument.
Build a risk case, not a return case. Finance is comfortable with downside. Frame brand underinvestment as a competitive vulnerability that compounds, because that is exactly what it is, and you are speaking a language the board already uses.
Protect a slice of the budget from the fitness function. Ringfence a small percentage for work that does not have to justify itself in advance. That is where the outliers come from, and outliers are the only thing that ever changes a category.
Read next
Dave Angus, our Chief Strategy Officer, published a piece this week that sits right alongside this argument. While this edition looks at why the most valuable marketing gets scored as zero, Dave gets into the practical reality of what that looks like when it hits the media plan.
His central point is sharp. Better attention is not more attention. It is processed attention. The kind that creates memory, reduces friction, and moves people to the next meaningful step. He walks through the data on why vanity metrics are quietly bankrupting media budgets, why the gap between "served" and "seen" is where most spend goes to die, and why fixing the messy middle is worth more than buying more reach.
If this edition is the strategic argument for why marketing is undervalued, Dave's article is the operational proof of what happens when that undervaluation hits the plan.
Read next: Attention isn't the win, what happens after is
The bottom line
Curated Chaos exists to explore the gap between what marketing is doing and what is actually driving commercial movement.
This week's gap is existential. It is about how the discipline of marketing has been quietly devalued by the very system it operates inside. Not because marketing stopped working. But because the way businesses measure value has a blind spot the size of a cathedral, and marketing's most important contributions sit right in the middle of it.
The solution is not to abandon measurement. The solution is to stop pretending that the only things that matter are the things that fit on a spreadsheet.
Brand matters. Fame matters. Trust matters. Distinctiveness matters. The feeling someone has when they think of your business matters.
These things are not priceless because they are worthless.
They are priceless because the value is so large it almost cannot be comprehended.
And the businesses that treat them as zero will eventually discover what that zero actually costs.
Frequently asked questions
Why is marketing so hard to measure?
The most commercially valuable parts of marketing, including brand, trust, distinctiveness and mental availability, are complex, long-term and compound over time. They do not fit a quarterly reporting cycle or a clean attribution model. That makes them difficult to quantify, not unimportant. Difficulty of measurement is often mistaken for absence of value.
What is the spreadsheet ceiling in marketing?
The spreadsheet ceiling is the point at which the demand for financial precision starts preventing a business from doing the work that would create the most value. Budget flows to whatever attributes cleanly, brand investment gets squeezed to the margins, and the bias looks like rigour rather than a strategic error.
Why do finance teams treat brand investment as zero?
Because in a finance mindset, anything that cannot be calculated cannot count. If a value cannot be entered onto a spreadsheet or a balance sheet, it is functionally treated as nil. That logic is reasonable in accounting terms and damaging when applied to assets that build slowly and pay back over years.
How do you prove the value of brand marketing to a CFO?
Change the frame from return to risk. Instead of forecasting what a brand investment will deliver this quarter, set out what the business becomes exposed to without it: eroding pricing power, rising acquisition costs, weakening preference against competitors. Boards are already fluent in risk and competitive vulnerability, so use that vocabulary rather than marketing terminology.
What does "marketing is the weather" mean?
It is Rory Sutherland's argument that marketing is not a department but the environment the whole business operates in. Product design, pricing, customer experience and proposition are all marketing acts because they shape how value is perceived. If you only measure what the marketing department produces, you miss most of the marketing your business actually does.
Should budget go to brand or performance marketing?
Both, but they need different measurement horizons. Performance marketing can reasonably be judged in weeks and quarters. Brand work builds mental availability over years and should not be reassessed every 90 days against metrics it was never designed to move. Most businesses over-invest at the bottom of the funnel because that is where attribution is cleanest, not because that is where value is greatest.
What is a loose fitness function and why does it matter in marketing?
It is a concept from evolutionary biology. Simple, wide rules of success produce enormous diversity and creativity, while narrow rules produce sameness. Applied to marketing, tightly defined short-term KPIs remove the room to experiment, which removes the possibility of the small number of outlier successes that generate disproportionate value.
Why do founder-led businesses tend to win effectiveness awards?
They generally treat the business as a connected ecosystem rather than a set of departments to be optimised in isolation, and they give teams a clear objective with the freedom to find creative routes to it. Four of the five advertising effectiveness award winners in 2024 were family-owned companies.
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