If We Treat The Big Game Ads This Seriously, Why Don’t We Treat Training the Same Way?

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The Big Game Just Ended. So Did the Easy Part of the Debate.

The biggest football game of the year just wrapped up, which means we’re officially in the part of the year where people debate whether a 30-second ad was “worth it.” Millions of dollars. Endless opinions. And, a lot of behind-the-scenes analysis most of us never see. Brands don’t just throw that money at the screen and hope for the best. They model it, track it, argue about it, and dissect what worked and what didn’t.

If you’re at all curious how companies actually justify that kind of ad spend, this article does a great job walking through just how much thinking and analysis go into a Super Bowl advertising decision.

What’s interesting is how different that level of scrutiny looks when we shift from advertising to training.

Companies also invest real time and energy into developing their people, yet far fewer can clearly explain what that investment actually changed. We’re comfortable debating thirty seconds of attention for weeks, but often settle for vague answers when it comes to how learning impacts real work.

The Blind Spot: You’re Already Paying for Training, Just Not on Purpose

Many companies don’t view training as a major investment, especially in small- and mid-sized businesses. It rarely feels like a big, clean line item. But when you step back, it’s clear that training already carries a real cost, whether it’s labeled that way or not.

Some of that cost is obvious. Time spent onboarding new hires. Safety training. Shadowing. Certifications. The hours that managers and experienced employees spend explaining how things work. Other costs are easier to miss because they’re scattered across the day. A new hire who isn’t fully confident yet slows things down. A supervisor gets interrupted repeatedly to answer the same questions. Someone hesitates, guesses, or makes a small mistake that leads to rework or a callback.

None of this means companies are overspending on training. In fact, it usually means the opposite. Most SMBs would like their training to go further, but they don’t have the time, tools, or confidence that it will actually hold up once real work begins. So they front-load what they can, hope for the best, and accept the gaps as part of doing business.

That’s where the imbalance shows up. Training is treated as important, but once it’s delivered, there’s very little visibility into what it actually changes. People complete it. They pass the quiz. Feedback is generally positive. And then everyone moves on, even though the real test doesn’t happen until someone is standing in front of a customer, a piece of equipment, or a situation they haven’t seen before.

The issue isn’t that training costs too much. It’s that the time and effort already invested doesn’t consistently carry over into day-to-day work. And when that happens, the cost doesn’t disappear. It just shows up in slower ramp times, more interruptions, and avoidable mistakes that quietly add up.

Why Training Rarely Gets Measured Well

If training is clearly important and clearly costly, the obvious question is: why don’t more companies measure it better? The answer usually isn’t apathy. It’s a mix of practical friction and bad experiences that have taught leaders to keep expectations low.

First, training outcomes rarely show up right away. Someone can complete a course today and not encounter a real test of that knowledge for weeks or months. By the time the moment arrives, it’s hard to draw a straight line back to the training that happened earlier. Unlike advertising, where impact can appear quickly, learning tends to surface gradually through behavior, confidence, and fewer mistakes over time.

Second, attribution gets messy fast. Performance is influenced by far more than training alone. Experience, coaching, workload, tools, and team dynamics all play a role. When results improve, it’s hard to say how much credit training deserves. When they don’t, it’s just as hard to know what went wrong.

Third, most training tools were never designed to answer these questions. For years, the standard signals have been completions, attendance, and satisfaction surveys. Those metrics are easy to collect and easy to report, but they stop short of explaining whether anything actually changed once people went back to work.

Finally, there’s a quieter reason that rarely gets said out loud: leaders don’t want numbers they can’t explain or act on. A vague metric that raises more questions than it answers can create more discomfort than clarity. When that happens, intuition feels safer than data.

The problem isn’t that leaders don’t care about training. It’s that the systems they’ve inherited don’t make measurement feel safe or useful.

This disconnect between investment and measurable impact isn’t unique to your organization — only a third of companies report that they explicitly measure the impact of training on business outcomes, and even fewer can tie it back to productivity or financial results.

Rethinking Measurement as Risk Reduction

The comparison for advertising on significant sporting events is useful, not because training and advertising are the same. They’re not. It’s because advertising teams learned long ago that waiting for perfect answers isn’t realistic. Instead, they focus on reducing uncertainty enough to make better decisions.

No one expects a clean explanation for why an ad worked. Marketers know attribution is imperfect. They know some effects show up later. But they still measure what they can, because partial visibility is better than none.

Training doesn’t usually get that same grace. Measurement is often treated as all-or-nothing. Either you can prove a clear ROI, or you don’t measure much at all. That mindset turns measurement into a threat instead of a tool.

A more useful way to think about training metrics is as a way to reduce risk. Visibility into what people actually engage with, where they struggle, and what they return to helps leaders make better choices. It highlights gaps early, before they turn into bigger problems.

You’re not trying to explain everything. You’re trying to shrink the unknowns.

What Better Training Measurement Actually Looks Like

Better measurement doesn’t start with complex models or ROI spreadsheets. It starts with visibility.

Are people engaging with the material, or just clicking through it? Do they come back to certain topics? Where do they drop off? Which parts of training actually get used once real work starts?

These signals don’t tell you everything, but they tell you something important. Over time, patterns emerge. You can see what’s helping people move forward and what’s quietly failing to stick.

This is also where modern learning tools have changed the equation. It’s now possible to understand how training shows up in the flow of work, not just whether it was completed. That visibility gives teams a way to improve training incrementally, instead of guessing or starting over.

You don’t need perfect answers. You just need enough insight to make better decisions than you could yesterday.

The Question Worth Asking After the Big Game

Every year, companies accept uncertainty when they invest in advertising during the biggest football game of the year. They know measurement won’t be perfect. They know impact won’t be immediate. But they still demand visibility, because it reduces risk and improves decisions over time.

Training deserves the same treatment.

The real question isn’t whether learning can be measured as cleanly as advertising. It can’t. The question is whether we’re comfortable making decisions about our people with less visibility than we use for thirty seconds of attention.

After the party is over and the buzz fades, that’s a question worth sitting with.