Half of Your Ad Budget Could Be Behind Low-Converting Creative. Here's How One Brand Found Out

Most marketing teams have squeezed all the efficiencies they can out of media, harnessing the ability to target and optimize for channel-specific performance in real time. Creative is the one input that still tends to get picked on “gut feeling.”

In the retail vertical, competition for in-store visits is fierce: Shoppers visit more than five retailers in an average three-month period, as e-commerce drives double-digit gains in order volume. But most aren’t tapping into creative as a direct performance lever; instead they’re disproportionately focused on channel, audience targeting and other media decisions.

At Vidmob, we’re giving retailers the tools they need to make their creative more measurable and adaptive. Our work with Kroger is an example of that in action: We partnered with the retailer to identify which spend was being wasted on underperforming assets—and which creative choices not only drive ROI in the short-term, but reinforce its brand ethos to Feed the Human Spirit.

A breakthrough study

Kroger, Vidmob and MMA Global teamed up to measure how AI-powered predictive creative scoring can improve ecommerce performance.

Using Vidmob’s proprietary tech, we analyzed live Kroger campaign data from January 2025 to January 2026, with conversions as the KPI. This included:

As creative output accelerates, the ability to learn and act quickly becomes more valuable, but only when teams know what deserves to scale.

In Kroger’s case, the analysis was channel-specific to capture the nuances between which messaging converts on different platforms. We scored each asset against 30 creative attributes, from message and emotion to craft and characters, testing to see which drove higher conversions.

Half of Kroger’s media spend went to underperforming creative

Vidmob’s predictive scoring tool analyzed 1,934 pieces of creative from Kroger’s asset library and marked them as either high or low performers. The results were clear: Roughly half of Kroger’s media budget was going to low-performing creative.

The study also uncovered which levers to pull for winning creative:

Creative testing scores hold up under scrutiny

To validate the test, we trained the models on 2025 data, then tested them against a separate period in Q1 2026. The results revealed that by adopting AI-powered predictive creative scoring, retailers can accurately forecast which of two assets will drive better e-commerce conversions 81% of the time while driving insights that ground brand building investments in outcomes.

Briefing for better creative

Adjusting existing creative to higher-performing standards is one lever, but what happens when you brief from the start based on proven guidelines?

For Kroger, building creative against the guidelines we validated from the start produced a 4X average improvement in conversion rate across DV360 and Meta—at up to 70% lower costs per conversion.

What it means for your marketing budget

Our study proves that you don’t need a bigger budget to drive better ROI. You just need to identify which existing assets are already winning and shift spend toward them. Better yet, understand which creative guidelines move the needle and brief against those from the start.

The study gives marketers a practical way to get there:

To drive real efficiencies, bake scoring into your process before campaign launch so teams can catch a low-scoring ad before any media spend is wasted, and use what they learn to sharpen the next brief. Used in conjunction with media mix modeling, which shows which channels drive results, creative scoring can explain why the creative in those channels performed the way it did.

For Kroger, this transformation is well underway. Kroger now builds the above guidelines into every creative brief, scoring new creative before it launches. An in-market forward test will pit high-scoring against low-scoring creative to validate the model's predictions. Over time, Kroger’s analysis will expand to additional platforms and new audiences.