Expert Mode: Your Marketing Spend is Up, But Your Impact is Down. Here’s How to Fix It.
This article was based on the interview with Allison Sitzman, Vice President of Brand Strategy at Shutterstock by Greg Kihlström, AI and MarTech keynote speaker for The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström podcast. Listen to the original episode here:
Let’s start with a scenario that might feel uncomfortably familiar. You’ve successfully secured a larger marketing budget for the year. You’ve allocated it across a sophisticated mix of channels, optimized your performance campaigns, and scaled your content production. Yet, when you look at the actual impact—the tangible shift in customer behavior and purchase intent—the numbers don’t quite add up. It feels like you’re pushing the accelerator harder, but the car is somehow losing speed. This isn’t just a feeling; it’s a measurable phenomenon. According to recent research from Shutterstock, while global ad spend has surged by 33%, the resulting impact on customers has actually declined by 20%. They call it the “impact gap,” and it’s a multi-billion dollar problem.
This growing chasm between investment and return isn’t a simple matter of ad fatigue or a crowded marketplace, though those are certainly contributing factors. It signals a fundamental breakdown in the old marketing playbook. The muscle memory of simply spending more to reach more people is now yielding diminishing, and in some cases negative, returns. To close this gap, we as leaders must move beyond the mechanics of media buying and into the more nuanced, and frankly more challenging, realms of cultural intelligence, emotional resonance, and a more strategic application of AI. This isn’t about finding a new silver bullet; it’s about re-calibrating our entire approach to creativity and connection in an era of profound consumer skepticism.
The Tightrope Walk of Cultural Relevance
One of the most potent—and perilous—levers for impact today is cultural relevance. The data is clear: brands that understand and reflect the world their customers live in forge stronger connections. Yet, the same data shows that 66% of businesses have faced boycotts, often for fumbling an attempt to be relevant. This leaves many leaders in a state of paralysis, caught between the risk of being ignored and the risk of being vilified. The solution, however, isn’t to retreat into a safe, neutral corner. It’s to develop a new competency: cultural intelligence. This isn’t about taking a declarative “stance” on every issue, but about possessing the awareness to operate authentically within the current cultural context.
As Alison Sitzman notes, the key is shifting the focus from the brand’s agenda to the audience’s reality.
“I think there’s not necessarily an obligation for brands in all cases to take a stance against a culturally relevant moment, but I think the intelligence—the cultural intelligence, kind of EQ and then CQ, if you will—I think is important for all brands to remember. They really, really need to hyper-focus on what their audiences care about and are focused on… when you do that in a little bit of a way that can come off as inauthentic… or, worse, tone-deaf because you’re myopically focused on what your brand wants to communicate—that’s when you’re seeing that you’ve got the 65.5% of brands saying they’ve faced a backlash.”
Sitzman’s point underscores a critical distinction. Cultural relevance isn’t a tactic to be deployed; it’s a lens through which all communications must be viewed. It requires listening more than speaking and understanding that your brand is a guest in your customer’s world, not the center of it. The brands that get this right don’t just avoid backlash; they build resilience and trust by demonstrating that they see their customers as people living through complex times, not just as targets in a demographic profile.
The Uncomfortable, Necessary Power of Emotion
In a landscape saturated with generic, AI-assisted content and relentless performance marketing messages, making a customer feel something is perhaps the ultimate competitive advantage. While we often prioritize rational appeals—features, benefits, price—the research shows that emotions are the true drivers of believability and loyalty. Specifically, feelings of pride and belonging are powerful catalysts for trust, while anger, for better or worse, drives virality. For leaders, the challenge is to translate these insights into a creative brief without the process feeling cynical or formulaic. The goal isn’t to reverse-engineer an emotion, but to find the authentic intersection between your brand’s purpose and a fundamental human need.
This requires a willingness to embrace a degree of risk. Emotionally resonant creative is, by its nature, not neutral. But in the attention economy, neutrality is invisibility. Sitzman frames it as a necessary leap for any brand hoping to stand out.
“As a brand or as a marketer… if you can put something out there and get someone to feel something, I think that that’s really a standout effort, especially in today’s market… when someone feels something for your brand and with your brand, then of course that’s really what helps us promote this sense of deep loyalty.”
This is where brand building, often sacrificed at the altar of short-term metrics, proves its long-term value. A deep understanding of your brand’s core identity allows you to evoke emotions like pride or belonging in a way that feels earned and true. It’s the difference between a campaign that makes someone feel part of a community and one that simply tells them they should be. Forging that genuine connection is what transforms a transaction into a relationship and closes the impact gap one customer at a time.
AI’s Surprising New Role: A Catalyst for Courage
When we discuss AI in marketing, the conversation almost invariably turns to efficiency, personalization at scale, and cost reduction. These are all valid and valuable applications. However, a more profound, and perhaps more important, role for AI is emerging: as a catalyst for creative bravery. According to Shutterstock’s research, 59% of creatives see AI’s greatest value not in doing the work faster, but in making the work bolder. This seemingly counterintuitive finding points to a powerful dynamic within our organizations. Often, the most impactful ideas are watered down through a gauntlet of approvals, risk assessments, and stakeholder feedback.
AI can serve as a data-driven partner to de-risk the very boldness required to make an impact. It can be used as a real-time feedback mechanism, a “gut check” to gauge emotional resonance or simulate how a specific audience might react to a daring concept. This provides the creative team with confidence and the leadership team with the justification needed to approve work that breaks from the safety of the status quo.
“I love this insight because I think there’s an insight actually an insight behind the insight… 59% of creatives are hoping that AI is going to help make creative bolder, I have to imagine some of that insight is: they’re hoping that the boldness that they are bringing to life through their creative is approved to go out the door by the powers that be… I do think it’s a real-time kind of a real-time feedback and gut check that you can implement and use along the way that then can at least tell you as an early indicator or gauge: how bold is this creative, is the emotion coming through, is it coming through strongly enough?”
This reframes AI from a mere production tool to a strategic asset for creative development. For leaders, this means empowering your teams to use these technologies not just to optimize the old playbook, but to write a new, more audacious one. It’s about using data not to find the safest possible average, but to validate the courageous outlier that will actually earn a moment of genuine attention.
Speaking the Language of Business
Ultimately, closing the impact gap requires us to articulate the value of creativity in the language of the C-suite. Initiatives rooted in cultural intelligence and emotional resonance can feel “soft” compared to the hard metrics of a performance campaign. The final piece of the puzzle is to connect these seemingly intangible concepts directly to bottom-line results. The introduction of metrics like a “Creative Impact Score” is a step in this direction, aiming to quantify creativity’s direct influence on purchase intent.
As leaders, our role is to translate these efforts into a compelling business case. It’s about showing, not just telling, how great creative is a primary strategic growth lever.
“I smile because I think the CFOs and CMOs—we’re not on different sides of the team. We just sometimes speak different languages… creative is a strategic growth lever for businesses… where if your creative impact is strong… you’re increasing your demand… That in turn is going to help lead to things like lower acquisition costs which drive higher revenue efficiency, or higher retention, which of course is going to drive revenue in the form of lifetime value.”
When a culturally intelligent campaign helps you avoid a costly backlash, that impacts margin. When an emotionally resonant ad drives higher intent, that lowers customer acquisition cost. By framing our work in these terms, we move the conversation from defending a budget to demonstrating a return, proving that investing in high-impact creative isn’t an expense, but one of the most efficient drivers of growth available.
The impact gap is a warning sign that our old models are breaking under the weight of a new reality. Continuing to pour money into a broken system is no longer a viable strategy. The way forward demands a more sophisticated approach—one that balances the art of human connection with the science of modern technology. It requires us to build teams with high cultural IQ, to have the courage to create work that makes people feel something, and to use AI as a tool for bravery, not just efficiency.
Looking ahead to the “marketing gauntlet” of major global events in 2026, the temptation will be to default to bigger budgets and louder messages. But the brands that truly succeed will be those that choose a different path. They will focus on delivering fewer, more resonant messages rather than a high volume of forgettable ones. They will zig where others zag, finding clever ways to show up that earn attention rather than just buying it. The impact gap is not an inevitability; it is a choice. And for the leaders in our field, the choice is whether to continue feeding the gap with more of the same, or to begin closing it with smarter, braver, and fundamentally more human work.
