THE PROBLEM
Search for "creative intelligence platform," and the pitches start to blur together. Scoring. Analytics. AI-powered insights. Every vendor uses roughly the same four words to describe roughly the same category of tool.
The differences that actually matter don't show up on a features page. They show up six months into implementation: whether your creative team logs into the tool at all, whether the scoring model reflects your brand's guidelines or someone else's generic best-practice list, whether the data connects back to media spend or dead-ends at a grade nobody acts on.
Seven questions to run against any tool you're evaluating, plus a scorecard at the end so you can compare answers side by side once the demos are done.
SEVEN KEY QUESTIONS
Generic best-practice checklists work fine for a first pass. But a brand with its own visual identity, tone, and category rules needs scoring that reflects that, not a checklist built for the category average. Other questions to ask: can you weight your own guidelines by importance? Can you build custom criteria from scratch, not just toggle a preset list on and off?
A tool that scores Meta creative well and stops there leaves gaps everywhere else the media plan runs. Ask for the full integration list, not just the logos on the homepage. Look for direct API integrations across paid social, DSPs, and search Meta, TikTok, Snapchat, Pinterest, Reddit, LinkedIn, Google Ads, DV360, Amazon Ads, and X, at minimum.
A score of "74%" means nothing without context. Ask whether the tool can show how that score compares to your own historical performance, your industry's average, or a specific platform's best practices, and whether that benchmark updates with more data.
If scoring only happens after an asset is finished, feedback comes too late to change anything. Ask whether the tool has an MCP or an API that plugs directly into production software, so a creator can check an asset against brand guidelines while still building it, not after it ships to review.
Your creative performance data shouldn't be locked inside one vendor's dashboard. Ask whether the platform offers scheduled data exports, a documented API, or MCP access so your own BI tools, AI assistants, production tools, and measurement systems can pull from it directly.
If every question requires a request to the data team, the tool won't get used enough to matter. Ask to see how someone without analytics training gets an answer: through a natural-language query, a pre-built executive dashboard, or something else that doesn't require SQL.
A high creative score is not the same as proof the creative is worth the media spend behind it. Ask whether the tool can show which assets are winning at the media level where spend is being wasted on low-adhering creative, and where reallocating it would improve return.
Don't take a vendor's word for any of the above. Ask them to show it live.
If a vendor can't do most of these live, that's the answer.
WHAT IMPLEMENTATION ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE
Case studies from vendor websites tend to show best-case results. Here's what a real rollout looked like end to end, across a full enterprise portfolio rather than a single test campaign.
Kellanova ran this framework across 10 brands over 13 months, covering 443 assets and about 9% of total US media investment.
100 to 10 hrs
Setup time per brand
11%
ROI improvement on Meta
13
Months across the brand's actual working library, not a pilot
THE HEADLINE NUMBER
11% ROI improvement on Meta, tied directly to creative that followed the model's guidelines versus creative that didn't.
None of this happened in a pilot with hand-picked assets. It ran across the brand's actual working library, at the scale a Fortune 500 marketing org operates at day-to-day.
SCORECARD TEMPLATE
Score 1 (poor) to 5 (strong) on each row, then compare totals.
| Criterion | Vendor A | Vendor B | Vendor C |
|---|---|---|---|
| Custom guideline weighting | ? Unclear | × No | × No |
| Platform/channel coverage | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | × No |
| Benchmarking against real norms | ? Unclear | ✓ Yes | × No |
| Embedded in production workflow | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | × No |
| Data portability (export/API) | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes | ? Unclear |
| Usable without an analyst | ? Unclear | ? Unclear | ✓ Yes |
| Connects to media ROI | × No | ✓ Yes | ✓ Yes |
| Total |
A tool that scores well across all seven tends to hold up past the first quarter. A tool that scores well on one or two and is thin everywhere else usually turns into a dashboard nobody opens by month four.
SEE HOW VIDMOB STACKS UP
If you want to run this scorecard against Vidmob directly, Vidmob's team can walk through each of the seven criteria live, using your own brand's creative library instead of a demo account.
Schedule a walkthrough →