CEO
“Why did you spend that much on creative? Couldn’t it have been done more cheaply?”
CMO
“It would look bad.”
We hand you the ammunition for every internal debate about creative — before you spend a single crown.
now see marketing purely as a cost to be cut.
see CMOs and marketing leaders as a pair of “hands”, not strategic partners.
Source: Boathouse 2026 CEO Study
CEO
“Why did you spend that much on creative? Couldn’t it have been done more cheaply?”
CMO
“It would look bad.”
You end up on the defensive because you lack arguments for business-minded leaders — whether that’s procurement or the CEO. We give you those arguments up front.
A few examples we worked through with our clients.
A client wanted the logo to appear only at the end of their social videos. The data shows that most people never watch that far, costing the brand valuable association. So we moved the logo into the first few seconds.
“Why does the whole scene take place in a studio rather than across several locations?” We apply a clear checklist of principles to every output, scripts included, and score them. Switching between locations reduces how well an ad is remembered.
The team wanted a new claim for the new campaign — the old one “bored everyone”. But the data shows that consistency dramatically increases the likelihood of incremental profit (2.9× the average), and that a claim starts coming to mind for customers just as the internal team is ready to drop it. So we kept the claim and changed only the creative around it.
Top-performing creative delivers 3× the ROI of average creative. We know how to increase the odds
01
Most agencies hand over the creative and leave the defence to you. With us, every part comes with clear reasoning — from storyboard to final cut — before you approve anything.
02
We want your brand to grow through creative. That’s why we recommend the metrics that actually reveal brand growth — typically salience, brand attributes and price sensitivity — along with researchers who can measure and interpret them properly, such as Kantar, Behavio or Ipsos.
03
We score every script against a checklist of research-backed principles. But a senior creative always has the final word: they know when to depart from a principle on purpose — and how to defend that decision. Gen Alpha sees the world differently from Millennials, after all.
All of this applies to brand building. We don’t do performance marketing. We’ll tell you what to track and how, but we won’t measure campaign results for you.
We draw mainly on research from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute and System1, backed by decades of data.
Like it or not, every brand naturally loses customers: large brands lose 20–40 % a year, small ones 60–80 %. A brand’s first job is to offset that loss. Only then can it grow.
On TikTok, people give an ad roughly one fourteenth of the attention they give a TV spot. Using the same creative on both platforms means wasting money.
„Boring, ineffective advertising is often the result of gut-feel decisions. The evidence-based approach has been around for decades. You just have to start following it.“
Nothing big yet. We’ll show you how Creative Intelligence works and help solve a few things that are bothering you right now.
30 minutes · free · online
01
Write down what you most need to solve in your brand communication right now.
02
We’ll spend half an hour on your questions and show you how we’d tackle them using Creative Intelligence.
03
For each question, you’ll get a concrete recommendation on what to do next. If it makes sense, we’ll agree on how to continue.