Creativity in marketing teams is always a hot-topic. It’s always the leading topic on the stages of marketing events, the central conversation of marketing podcasts, and the one thing that every single marketing brief comes back to. But what is often missing from these conversations is creative judgement.
Marketing teams are in the midst of a creativity conundrum. They know and believe in the importance of creative work, but they are not consistently producing it. That’s often due to the lack of creative judgement within teams. Ideas get pitched, discussed, tweaked and eventually approved – but the decisions along the way are rarely made against any objective standard. One stakeholder wants the idea to be safer. Another wants it to be more premium. Someone else just doesn’t personally like it. And somewhere in that process, the thing that made the idea distinctive in the first place quietly disappears.
This is the real cost of weak creative judgement. Not one dramatic rejection, but dozens of small compromises that add up to forgettable work.
The good news is that creative judgement isn’t a talent some marketers are born with and others aren’t. It’s a skill which can be built and learnt over time.
What is creative judgement, really?
Creative judgement is the ability to evaluate an idea against what it needs to achieve commercially, rather than against personal taste. It’s the difference between “I like this” and “this will work.”
Teams with strong creative judgement understand a few things instinctively:
- How emotion builds memory
- How distinctiveness drives salience
- Why consistency compounds value over time
- The difference between work that’s safe and work that’s effective
Without that shared understanding, creative reviews drift towards opinion. And personal opinion rarely builds distinctive brands.
Why judgement gets lost in the process
Creative ideas rarely get squashed on purpose. Most dilution happens gradually, through small, reasonable-sounding requests: an extra message added to the ad, a sharp line removed because it feels uncomfortable, a distinctive visual softened “just to be safe.”
Each individual change feels harmless. Collectively, they strip the work of everything that made it worth remembering. Teams end up mistaking alignment for effectiveness – the work becomes comfortable for everyone internally, and forgettable for everyone externally.
AB InBev, the only three-time winner of the Cannes Lions Creative Marketer of the Year award, tackled this head-on. At Cannes 2026, their CMO, Marcel Marcondes shared their system designed to build creative judgement into the organisation:
- Senior leaders trained in how to brief and judge creativity
- Ideas challenged by an external “Brain Trust”
- Work assessed quarterly by outside experts to avoid complacency
The standard for AB InBev is never “do we like it?” It’s always “does this solve a real business or consumer problem?”
That’s the shift most organisations need to make – from subjective taste to shared, commercial criteria. This is exactly where the creativity conundrum often plays out in practice. It’s rarely a lack of belief in creativity that holds teams back – it’s the absence of the capability needed to judge it consistently. Fix the judgement, and you remove one of the biggest reasons strong ideas get watered down before they ever reach the market.
How to build stronger creative judgement in your team
- Create a shared standard, not a shared opinion.
Agree, as a team, what “effective” looks like for your organisation before you get to the creative review stage. If everyone is working from the same definition of success, feedback will come through and improve the output, no matter who’s in the room.
- Judge ideas against the brief, not against preference.
Every tweak should be traceable back to the strategic problem the work is meant to solve. If a comment can’t be linked to the brief, it’s probably personal taste dressed up as feedback, and can be dismissed.
- Learn to spot dilution as it happens.
Watch for the small, “reasonable” changes that chip away at distinctiveness. Ask whether each note is making the work more effective, or simply more comfortable for a wider audience. Stop this quickly, and you’ll maintain creativity.
- Practise “disagree and commit.”
Not every idea will be to your taste, and that’s fine. As Adam Morgan and Orlando Wood discussed at Cannes 2026, if an idea stands up to objective scrutiny, the healthiest response to personal discomfort is to disagree, commit, and “get on the bus anyway”.
- Bring in outside perspective occasionally, if you can.
Internal teams can become too close to the work to judge it clearly. External challenge – whether that’s an agency partner, an expert panel, or a structured review process – helps keep standards honest.
The commercial case for better creative judgement
Creative judgement isn’t just about more creative ideas hitting the market, although that’s undoubtedly a very beneficial output. Developing strong creative judgement in your team will boost your marketing performance. Paul Dyson’s Advertising profitability research shows us that high-quality creative advertising can increase profitability by up to 12 times. Weak creative judgement doesn’t just produce underwhelming campaigns – it quietly erodes your marketing ROI, campaign after campaign.
It’s strong creative judgement that separates teams that produce occasional good work from teams that produce consistently effective work. It’s not about being harsher, or slower, or more difficult to please. It’s about having a clear, shared, commercially grounded standard – and having the confidence to hold the work to it.
Creative judgement is the commercial multiplier
None of this requires a bigger budget, a braver creative director, or a lucky year of pitches. It requires teams that know how to evaluate an idea properly – against the brief, against the commercial problem, and against evidence rather than preference. That’s the whole shift: from “do we like it?” to “does it work?”
Get that right, and the rest tends to follow. Briefs get sharper because you know what you’re actually judging ideas against. Feedback gets more useful because it has somewhere to point. And distinctive work survives longer, because there’s a standard defending it that isn’t just one person’s mood on a Tuesday. Creative judgement won’t solve the entire creativity conundrum. But it fixes one of the most common, and most costly, reasons creative ideas are held back.
Creative judgement is only one piece of the puzzle
Creative judgement is just one skill needed to overcome the creativity conundrum. If you want to explore the rest, download our whitepaper, Marketing’s Creativity Conundrum: And how it’s impacting your bottom line.
