While over 80% of marketers agree that creative drives performance, fewer than 60% (58.5%) share a clear definition of what great creative actually is, according to a recent survey from EMARKETER and TripleLift.

That lack of alignment is a fundamental obstacle.

“We all know that creative is important, however, the definition that we specifically have for it isn’t really aligned,” said Toccara Baker, vice president, field and brand marketing, TripleLift during EMARKETER’s The Future of Digital Summit. “A lot of that does come down to finding ways to really scale measurements and really dive deep to understand across these various screens and formats how performance actually works.”

Here’s a deeper dive into the challenges and opportunities marketers are facing in creative.

Personalization vs. stale assets

Limited creative variation is a key driver of underperformance, according to the survey.

• Marketers are under pressure to refresh assets more frequently and diversify formats—without breaking production workflows.

“Assets going stale quickly and always needing to kind of have different versions or right size for different areas has always been a common problem,” said Baker. “The biggest thing missing is that marketers need a measurement framework at the start that takes into account how they’re able to evaluate creative specifically.”

The creative supply chain

Unlike data, creative strategy has lacked a clear, standardized process.

“We don’t have across the industry an understanding of what success looks like for creative,” said Baker. “For an industry that loves standards and loves process, we haven’t figured it out for creative.”

Marketers who integrate creative analytics into their strategy from the beginning, however, show stronger alignment across their organizations.

Measurement gaps and practical fixes

Measurement emerged as the top opportunity for competitive differentiation.

Baker suggested that marketers invest in creative analytics from the start, aligning on KPIs and allowing space for testing and learning. It’s also important to get the whole picture, she said.

• “Make sure that data is a part of and integrated into your other measurement systems that you already have, so they have a holistic view of what's happening,” she said. “So you're looking at data, creative, conversions, efficiency, all in one place, and so it's not a missing sort of piece of your overall story.”

AI’s role—today and tomorrow

AI is already reshaping creative workflows as marketers incorporate it into their day-to-day lives.

“People are using AI for some of the low-level tasks… different sizes for formats, localization, which can take a significant amount of time,” said Baker. “That frees up a lot of time to do the strategic, big sigh thinking.”

Still, human oversight remains essential—90.9% of marketers believe human intuition/involvement in evaluating or generating AI-generated creative is very important or critical, per the survey.

“You need to have some sort of human element added to it to really take it to that next level,” said Baker.

The bottom line: Creative should be treated as a measurable growth driver, not a subjective cost center.

“When creative opportunities are missed, it is really, really important to just consider the role of creative within your business, to take that time, to take a step back and give it the tracking and infrastructure it deserves,” said Baker. “This is a journey. It’s going to take time to build this out within your company, but freedom is one of the biggest drivers of performance. So treat it as such.”

This article was prepared with the assistance of generative AI tools to support content organization, summarization, and drafting. All AI-generated contributions have been reviewed, fact-checked, and verified for accuracy and originality by EMARKETER editors. Any recommendations reflect EMARKETER’s research and human judgment.