Measuring momentum: the human side of licensing effectiveness

This is the third and final part in our series on how to measure licensing effectiveness.

Part one looked at marketing power — how to measure the fame your brand earns through its extensions.

Part two explored your transmedia footprint — the formats and channels that carry your IP into new spaces.

This one looks at something less tangible but just as powerful, how your team actually works.

Because licensing doesn’t fail for lack of ideas. It fails when people stop trusting the process. When partners feel unheard. When creative work takes twice as long as it should. Operational excellence isn’t about spreadsheets. It’s about people, clarity and flow.

How to stop ghosting your licensees before the next quarterly review

When we interviewed 25 clients back in 2021, one theme came up again and again. The biggest driver of creative success wasn’t sales or marketing muscle. It was relationships. How well the licensee felt supported. How clear the guidance was. How constructive the feedback felt. Not one of those things appears in a standard creative brief. Yet you tell us that they make or break the outcome.

Imagine if relationship quality was tracked alongside revenue. Imagine if it was discussed in project reviews and written into creative objectives. How would we make different choices? Would projects would move faster as a result?

You don’t need a consultancy to measure it. Just ask. A single NPS or short pulse-style does the job. Send three short questions at key stages — after concept, after handover, after launch. Ask how likely they are to recommend working with you, what helped most and what slowed them down. Then read the responses, act on them, and tell people what you changed.

Partnerships thrive when people feel heard. And the measure of a good system isn’t how often you survey — it’s how often you improve.

CSI: Calendar — uncovering who killed your productivity

If you’ve ever been surprised by how long something took, this part is for you. Most teams think they know where their time goes. Few actually check.

A light-touch view of time spent per project phase will tell you a lot. It’s not about micromanagement — it’s about pattern recognition. Are certain stages always slow? Do amends pile up at the same point? Is feedback too vague to move the work forward?

When you can see the data, it becomes easier to have adult conversations about process. Maybe the brief needs rewriting to include clearer outcomes. Maybe approvals sit too far from the work. Maybe everyone’s stuck in meetings when they should be in concept.

Small changes add up. One shorter check-in each week. One fewer round of amends. A tighter template. You get the same volume of creative energy — it just lands where it matters.And if you lead a team, this is where you earn your stripes: by protecting people’s time and focusing it where it creates value.

One design to rule them all — or a reason to pick up the phone

If relationship quality is one of your best indicators of creative effectiveness, then asset use is an underrated signal. Feedback about assets is great because it tells you who’s engaged.

Every studio has seen it. A rich, considered asset pack is delivered. The partner pulls two files, skips the rest, and comes back next season asking for more of the same. Not because they’re lazy but because something’s not lining up.

That’s a prompt to pick up the phone. Ask what actually helped. Learn what landed in the first round and what got stuck. Look at how their internal teams work. See where guidance was clear and where it got diluted.

Then bring them into the process earlier. Invite their creatives to share constraints and timelines. Let them see draft ideas. Build the pack together, based on real use rather than assumption.

Asset use is relationship data. It shows you where energy flows and where it stops. And when you treat it as part of the feedback loop your creative gets sharper, your partners get faster, and your system gets smarter every time.

Building a loop that learns

These small measures — relationship satisfaction, time-in-phase, asset use — don’t work in isolation. The value comes from the rhythm. Set a monthly habit: review the data, spot one thing to change, test it on the next project. Share the learning. Keep it light and honest.

Quarterly, step back and ask: what’s actually improved? Which templates are helping? Which rules are getting in the way? Kill one, refine one, add one. Annually, feed it all back into your playbook. Your briefs, style guides, onboarding and reviews. By then, you’ll have a creative system that improves itself without drama.

Fast, neat, and slightly obsessed: a field guide for licensing pros

If you’re leading licensing you already live with pressure. You need to move fast, win trust and prove results — often all at once. You’re judged by what ships, but success depends on how teams work together along the way.

That’s why operational measures matter. They give you visibility into the parts of the system you actually control. You can’t force a hit product, but you can build a process that gives your partners a better shot at making one.

And when you can show that your creative pipeline is learning and improving, you earn credibility. Deals move faster. Teams stop firefighting. Confidence grows on both sides.

What have we learned?

If you only measure the outcome, you’ll never know why something worked. Measure the making, and you can improve every part of it.

Start with three simple steps:

• Ask partners if they’d recommend you to other using NPS scoring
• Track where time goes for three months. Act on the findings.
• See which assets get used — and use that insight to ask better questions, strengthen briefs, and deepen trust

Do that for one quarter. Watch how fast the conversation changes. At Skew, we build systems that help brands work this way — evidence-led, creatively confident, and human at the core. If you’d like to move from hit-and-hope launches to a more measured, more rewarding rhythm, we’d love to show you how.