Creative is a critical component to a campaign’s success, and marketers know it.
A recent study from EMARKETER found that marketers believe real-time creative optimization could drive creative gains of 20% or more, yet only 3.6% say creative performance is well understood and actively optimized today.
There are several reasons why marketers don’t fully understand creative performance and aren’t optimizing it:
- Creative decisions happen in a silo.
- Platforms are disconnected, with different data and processes.
- Creative insights come back too late to influence campaign optimization.
Each of these challenges have become entrenched in advertising, to the point that many media buying teams have given up on trying to understand creative performance on any meaningful level. They have other levers that are much easier to manage, including audience and inventory, where data is more standardized and feedback loops already exist.
However, new technologies and systems driven by AI are changing the way creative is executed and measured. It’s time marketers and their agencies rethink the role of creative performance.
Bringing Creative Decisions to the Forefront
Creative decisions happen separately from the rest of a media strategy, even dynamic digital creative. Creative is either designed before a campaign is planned, or it is executed inside disconnected platforms.
High-quality video creative is often conceptualized and developed with a separate creative agency, shot well in advance of a campaign. The assets are packaged and shared with the media team to then activate. Because of this monolithic approach, media teams lack the processes and tools to optimize creative in-flight. They tend to get creative insights well after a campaign has run, making it impossible to improve or optimize creative during a campaign.
On the other hand, performance-based digital creative is often automated within a social or programmatic platform with DCO, living entirely within that particular siloed system. Creative might be optimized within that silo, but insights or improvements can’t across channels or platforms, creating a fragmented picture.
In both cases, the true value of creative optimization is dramatically under-leveraged. Media teams remain focused on audience and inventory optimization and creative potential remains sidelined.
Consider a high-end cosmetics company that has premium TV commercials including well-known influencers. Then, they have their entire product catalog of hundreds of SKUs. For CTV and video, the brand has a media team that can only resize or cut the video assets, and get little to no feedback about the performance. For retail media, social and display, product and brand assets are fed into various siloed systems, each with different templates, optimizations and reports.
The top and bottom of the funnel look completely different to the consumer, creative optimization is haphazard, and the audience experience suffers as a result.
Marketers need a more holistic, cohesive creative performance strategy. By allowing creative to be fragmented and underutilized, they are leaving performance opportunities on the table and delivering fractured brand experiences to audiences.
Better Creative Intelligence, Sooner
Marketers need to drive creative optimization from the center, tying insights together across channels and platforms. Without a unified execution layer, insights stay siloed and action lags behind performance.
Technology is at a point where it can support multichannel creative optimization. That means creative can finally learn, improving performance across channels and platforms as part of a cohesive strategy. AI not only enables multichannel optimization, it can break down creative intelligence so media buyers have richer, more granular insights.
Creative is the most valuable lever marketers have to drive higher performance. The optimization capabilities that have lived in silos can be elevated and connected so insights stop living on islands.
The end state: both brand and performance creative becomes part of one optimization process, with a real-time feedback loop that informs and improves the creative process itself, not media buying.
