When money gets tight, the creative line goes first. I have watched it happen too many times to call it an accident. It goes first because it is the hardest part of the business to manage, and the easiest to cut without anyone feeling it that quarter. So it gets trimmed, and the company quietly lowers the ceiling on everything it kept.

Here's the part that's easy to miss. The media budget is a fixed number. What you run through it is not. Spend a dollar behind a forgettable idea and it is gone by Tuesday. Spend the same dollar behind a great one and it keeps getting remembered, repeated, and bought long after the campaign stops running. The money was identical. The idea was the only thing that changed.

A line item is linear: you spend it, you get something back, it is done. A multiplier compounds instead. The same idea keeps paying next quarter with no new money behind it, because a strong brand is a memory that does its work while you are not in the room. Which is exactly why it looks free to cut and turns out to be the most expensive thing to lose.

I have watched this compound on both sides of my career, with real numbers each time. At Smartly, I built the creative studio from zero to more than 20 people across 6 cities, made some of the best-performing ads for Uber, Spotify, and KLM, and helped shape the positioning behind a €200M round. At Miro, I led brand and campaign production through the run from 20M to 50M users on the way to a $17.5B valuation. Neither is one clever line of copy. Both are the multiplier built as a system, pointed at money that was already being spent.

And those numbers are not the ceiling, they are the floor. The widest study of this, run by NCSolutions and Nielsen across roughly 450 campaigns, found creative quality drives about half of the sales a campaign produces, more than targeting, reach and recency combined. The same study asked marketers and media agencies what they thought the number was. They guessed around 19%. Read that again. The single biggest driver of return is valued by the people spending the money at a fifth of what it actually does. That is the whole essay in one statistic, and it is exactly why the creative line goes first.

There is an honest catch, and leaving it out would make this a pitch instead of an argument. A multiplier amplifies whatever you point it at. Point it at a broken product, the wrong price, or no distribution, and a brilliant idea still multiplies to nothing. It does not rescue a weak business. It exposes one faster. The multiple only compounds when there is something true underneath it.

The clearest proof is the most boring product on earth. Water. Liquid Death sells mountain water in a tallboy can with a skull on it and the line "Murder Your Thirst." Same liquid as the bottle next to it on the shelf. The first ad cost 1,500 dollars and did three million views, the brand grew mostly through stuff people wanted to watch rather than media they were forced to see, and the company crossed 333 million in revenue and a $1.4B valuation. Nothing about the water changed. The idea wrapped around it was worth more than a billion dollars.

That is the version a CFO should care about. A strong brand is the only thing that lowers what it costs to acquire a customer while raising what that customer is worth over time. Lower acquisition cost, higher lifetime value, same spend. People who buy the story buy more of it, for longer, and tell other people for free. That is the multiplier stated in money.

Which is why creativity is a leadership problem, not a decoration problem. If the idea sets the multiple on everything else, it cannot sit at the end of the line waiting for a brief. It has to be in the room where the money gets decided, before the number is set, not after.

Cut the creative budget and you have not saved money. You have capped the return on every dollar you kept.