Cheap Views Don’t Tell You Who Will Buy
If you judge creator partnerships on CPM alone, here is what you actually get: a clean number to compare and almost no evidence of what the campaign will produce.
Brad Hoos joined Dylan Conroy on The Ad Podcast at POSSIBLE Miami to explain why reach and business performance are not the same thing. The conversation covers Outloud’s proprietary performance library, the measurement gap holding creator marketing back and how historical conversion data can move creator selection from hoping to predicting. They also discuss the shift of enterprise budgets toward creators and why a flood of synthetic content may make genuine human credibility more valuable.
“There’s actually literally zero correlation between the CPM that brands are paying and the cost-per-acquisition score.”
CPM Is Easy to Measure. That Doesn’t Make It Meaningful.
A low CPM tells you the views were cheap. It does not tell you the right people watched, trusted the creator or bought anything.
Creators are not standardized media units. Performance depends on audience fit, genuine advocacy and what that creator has historically been able to make people do. A premium creator with a real connection can outperform cheaper reach by a mile. The CPM only tells you what the attention cost. It does not tell you what the attention was worth.
