Back late last year, during that little stretch of calendar with 5 o'clock-ish sunsets, fallowing landscapes and my personal energy matching mother nature's, I caught up with a client-side friend. Fella is one of "those"...kind, measured, always ready to lend a hand or an open ear.

The point of our conversation was to vent a bit about the state of the world and trade ideas on better ways. We made our way to a series of volleys regarding client outcomes. I stood with an earnest pride, shoulders up: "When we start creative, your KPIs are in front of us. We work to them."

What I got back was one of those humbling, distinctly productive mic drop moments:

He was 10000% correct. Not only am I not plugged directly into a client's idiosyncratic pipeline strategy,  I'll be transparent: I don't really care to be. I emphatically want the work to support it, but I know a windmill when I see one. I'm happy to leave the dark arts of enterprise pipeline to the pros inside.

The Pressure Doesn't Go Away

And yet the call to prove impact won’t disappear just because the tools for measuring it honestly don't exist.

The metrics of the day are built to measure delivery, not meaning. Clicks confirm the content was seen. Views confirm it started playing. Impressions confirm it appeared in a feed. Audience retention tells us where people stopped watching. None of them answer the only question worth asking: did this change how someone feels about this brand?

As my Jedi friend put it:

We're Not Alone In This

Yet most of us in the video production community have felt compelled to provide data that our work moves the needle. A totally understandable ask given how deeply direct response advertising has seeped into every corner of the marketing world. I've spent many a late evening of proposal prep scouring a previous project's brief and comparing it against the post mortem notes.

For me, the current scorecard is measuring the wrong thing.

So what's the alternative?

In the past year or so I've read with increasing interest the pointed dispatches of fellow Phillie Phan, Evan Shapiro. A self-proclaimed "media cartographer", Shapiro writes incisively about the emerging future of streaming, media distribution and the creator economy. A red thread throughout is how one world is dying out, just as another is born. His thinking goes: the old metrics (reach, frequency, CPMs, audience size) are a dead end. What's replacing them is what he calls the Affinity Economy: content measured not by how many people saw it, but by how many people cared. Engagement. Loyalty. Love.

That shift is already happening in media. It just hasn't fully arrived in brand video yet. In the meantime we live in an uncomfortable in-between: held accountable for outcomes the current scorecard can't honestly measure, and without a widely accepted alternative to replace it.

The result? When you can't measure whether the work mattered, you can't improve it. You can't defend it. You can't learn from it. You repeat the same guesses with the same scorecard and call it optimization. The budget goes in. The content goes out. The affinity question goes unanswered.

Yet I am an optimist by nature. I believe we can both create the right kind of work and evaluate its impact honestly. Spurred on by solid advice from my friend and Shapiro's clear-eyed thinking, I believe those of us who start with the audience have a real opportunity to demonstrate that kind of credibility — the kind that actually supports a client's success.

The Better Scorecard

This means asking different questions. Not whether the video was seen or how long it played. But whether it educated, informed, entertained or better yet, helped the audience act on something they already care about. Did it make them feel seen and understood by the brand? Would they share it? Do they trust the brand more as a result?

It's more than just changing questions, though. You can't measure affinity after the fact if you never understood what would create it in the first place. That understanding has to happen before the brief is written. More on that next.

Thanks for reading thus far, y’all!