Somewhere on planet Earth at this very moment, a junior advertising executive is staring up at the ceiling after having been told by his superior to change the total number of impressions in the campaign case-study video from 8 million to 18 million. This wonderfully fictional statistic would accompany several others that claim to cause a 47% uplift in something or the other. Later, this elaborate, fictional math would be widely understood (and tolerated) as what it is: nonsense. The judges will mostly ignore it and, when asked, grudgingly pretend it's all true, just because they have made many such exaggerations themselves early on in their careers. 

Last week, I was on a call, judging one of the categories at the Good Ads Matter Awards 2026 Awards. Of course, the work was brilliant; there's no doubt about that. The problem remained that we have stuffed each and every case award submission with inflated impact mathematics. By the seventh video, I said to myself, "If I see one more entry which says 'the internet went bonkers' or an obviously paid reaction shot to a mall activation, or one more junior executive unconvincingly pretending to be shocked by the brilliance of a hoarding, I am out." 

Why do all of us have this obsession with over-attribution, when the agencies know, the marketers know, the juries know?

Everybody knows that all the numbers that we report are generously inflated and manufactured for the awards. What will it take for us to stop pretending?

Somewhere down the line, some MBA sitting somewhere convinced us that without writing 'XX% increase in sales' or 'XX million impressions', the work stands orphaned. We've all unconsciously entered a very small and very sad arms race to retroactively attach big numbers to the work's posterior to make it seem more 'legit'. 

Here is something that I know to be true: the best way to guarantee mediocrity from your marketing team is to force them to measure everything. An obsession with measurement starts rewarding measurement over the actual bloody thing that moves people. 

Bernbach's print ads for Volkswagen did not need to yell 'We increased test drives by 19% and dealerships' in their award entries to make them seem great. The work was great, without all of this tomfoolery. It got the job done, and we're still talking about it half a century later, not because of the number of impressions or walk-ins it generated. But the immeasurable magic it contained. 

Why are we fooling ourselves? The grey matter between human ears makes hundreds of irrational (and largely subconscious) micro-decisions when it encounters a piece of work. The only way to convincingly measure its impact is to jam two electrodes into someone's brain, a procedure which, I suspect, would be seen as deeply inconvenient by the freshly deceased consumer on whom it’s done. Short of that level of measurement, we are just guessing what the campaign did, guessing in an educated way, but yes, guessing. 

So I'd like to put forward a case. In all future award entries, let's remove all the fictional and forced math and keep it as real and pure as we can. Let the work be judged purely on its ability to isolate a meaty problem and then solve it in a fresh and convincing way. If we free ourselves from the crutches of trying to impress the fake number Gods, we’ll start judging the work for what it is meant to be judged on: an abstract yet difficult-to-quantify construct called creativity. 

No amount of over-attribution makes the work great. What we do is inherently magic. When did we start forgetting that? When did we start getting uncomfortable with the word magic?

Somebody told us that subjectivity is a weakness that we must apologise for by borrowing some kind of objectivity from these stuffed-in numbers. I think it's the wrong kind of borrowing. We need to go back to embracing the fact that magic cannot be measured, and that its immeasurability is a feature, not a bug.

The job of great campaigns is to move people and solve problems. Let other people who crave numbers go find a calculator. We need to protect the craft from this desperation. Soon. 

The author is founder, 10Xer Club and Talent Labs, and has led marketing teams at Amazon and Ajio Luxe.