Creative Data Is Getting Easier to Use

A new day is dawning

Every time the sun rises, it’s a miracle.  You know it’s going to happen, but that doesn’t take away the joy you feel when it peeks over the horizon and another day begins.  Creative data’s miracle moment is happening now.  For those of us in the trenches, it has been obvious that this day would come for 5+ years, but it’s happening now, and for marketers around the globe, a new day is certainly beginning – one with a lot less guessing and waste across their creative operations, resulting in much more effective marketing.

So how do we know the moment is here?  In the last 12 months, we’ve received RFPs from three of the largest global marketers for what I would call a Creative Data Platform.  In the last 30 days, two agencies have told us that they are preparing an RFP as well.  While the specific requests differ, the overarching need is clear.  They are all looking for a scalable platform to help build an ownable first-party creative data asset from all possible digital marketing channels (combining rich understanding of creative decisions with continuously updated performance information), and then the ability to operationalize that data to improve their entire marketing workflow—across planning, production, media-decisioning and measurement.  We expect this trend to accelerate in 2025.

Another proof point was Forrester’s Q4 2024 Creative AdTech Wave report in October.  The breadth of the Wave was somewhat confusing, as it grouped companies with widely different offerings, but there was a sub-section on Creative Analytics and Measurement for the first time, furthering interest in the growing category

This growing interest makes sense when you see the results.  We now know that it is possible to move beyond generic platform best practices to understand what works uniquely for each marketer, by brand, by platform, by audience and by format.  This is creative data.  Think of it as the recipe for successful communication.  And once marketers build this understanding, it can be used to improve practically every aspect of marketing.  In fact, as the impact of AI expands across marketing, it is becoming imperative to have robust creative data to compete effectively. As Publicis’ CEO, Arthur Sadoun said recently, “You can talk all you want about AI. If you don’t have the data, the AI is useless.”

The Quality of the Data Matters

Arthur is right.  But as has always been the case, the quality of the data matters.  Let’s consider customer and audience data. For the past 15 years, this has been an essential asset for every marketer.  Understanding your customer enabled better targeting, segmentation, pricing strategies, channel allocations, and so much more.  It’s what led to the rise of Facebook and Google, and the explosion of digital marketing, in general.  One marketer’s “audience data” might be a simple list of email addresses, while a competitor’s includes geography, spending patterns, media habits, and interests.  The latter company will win and the former will lose. They both had “audience data,” but one was richer.  Make no mistake about it, the richness and quality of a marketer’s creative data will be every bit important as the example above.  This is why Vidmob is so focused on building the most robust end-to-end creative data platform in the world.  It is our promise to our customers.  We will help them build the most powerful first-party creative data asset possible.  And then help them operationalize that everywhere it can be used.

From Analytics to Automation

The “using it” part is where things are really getting interesting.  While we have consistently seen improvements to clients’ target KPIs of 30-150% over the years from the utilization of creative data, it has often required a trained expert to get at the value.  Vidmob provides these services, and more recently, we have been very successfully partnering with agencies to do it even better than us, but it is still friction to initial value attainment.

All of this is changing rapidly.  The service layer will never go away, as it will remain imperative to maximize the learnings.  But in the last 12 months, we have made substantial progress on automating the initial path to value in each of these buckets.  First, we launched a single-click data export, enabling clients to send creative quality data to MMM providers to properly account for creative quality in MMM results.  This simple feature dramatically improves MMM attribution accuracy by addressing the historical inability to factor in creative quality—a major oversight when all marketers agree that creative accounts for ~50-70% of results.

Second, we launched an API for our creative scoring functionality.  With this, media teams and media agencies can now call the scoring API in their media workflow, and automatically filter out assets that do not adhere to a brand’s data-driven, custom golden rules.  The performance of these rules can be monitored continuously over time, so that the filter is constantly tuned to what’s happening in the market.  While this requires no additional work on the part of any client or agency employee, the impact of systematically not spending money on non-performant assets is staggering.

Third, we can now automatically pipe in a client’s creative data as a prompt enhancement to any generative model (or collection of models) in our Adobe Plugin.  A simple demo with creative data toggled on and off, using the same prompt, shows just how valuable this feature is.  Generated content is automatically informed by recent performance data, current golden rules, and other useful information that ensures brand consistency and leads to an improved resultant asset.  We are kicking off a study of this impact with MIT now and will have more to report on this in 2025.

Finally, our beta version of a conversational brand co-pilot allows clients and agencies to interact seamlessly with their creative data, pulling out powerful insights (and the non-hallucinated data to support them) with ease.

With these additions, it’s now easier than ever for marketers and their agencies to start experiencing the power of creative data.

I know it’s not 2025 yet, but I’m already excited for the year ahead.  With many of the world’s leading marketers and their agencies driving us to innovate daily—and a team thriving under the challenge—the impact of creative data is about to explode.  A new day is most certainly dawning.