Marketers believe real-time creative optimization could drive significant performance gains, yet fragmented workflows, delayed insights, and unclear ownership continue to stand in the way.

Creative is widely recognized as a core driver of campaign performance, but most marketers acknowledge they are far from maximizing its impact. New research from EMARKETER and Perion highlights a clear disconnect between belief in creative’s value and the ability to operationalize it at scale.

• Nearly 9 in 10 marketers (89.2%) say creative is critical to optimizing campaign performance, putting it on par with media and targeting.
• Despite that consensus, very few organizations have built the capabilities to manage creative with the same level of rigor: Just 3.6% believe creative performance is well understood and actively optimized today.

This gap is especially significant given the perceived upside. Nearly half of respondents (48.7%) expect an 11% to 30% lift in performance if creative could be optimized and activated in near real time, positioning it as one of the largest untapped opportunities in marketing today.

Realizing that opportunity will require a shift in how creative is managed. Organizations will need to apply the same level of discipline and operational consistency used in media, with continuous testing, faster feedback loops, and systems that connect insights across channels.

Measurement gaps and slow feedback loops limit creative optimization

Realizing creative’s full potential remains challenging, largely because measurement is not yet fit for that purpose.

More than a third of marketers (38.7%) say measurement is siloed or inconsistent, while 14.4% describe creative effectiveness as a “black box.” These challenges make it difficult to generate a clear, actionable understanding of what is working.

Even when data is available, it often arrives too late to influence outcomes.

• More than half of marketers (53.2%) say creative insights lag behind media signals. In many cases, feedback cycles are measured in weeks rather than days.
• Specifically, 41.4% receive insights two to four weeks after launch, and 16.2% only receive them after campaigns have ended.

As a result, optimization tends to be reactive rather than continuous. Nearly three-quarters of marketers (72.1%) say they wait for performance to decline before refreshing creative, instead of iterating and improving assets throughout the campaign lifecycle.

Organizational misalignment adds friction

The barriers are not only technical. Organizational structure and workflows also play a significant role in slowing progress. More than half of marketers (56.8%) report that disconnects between media and creative teams lead to delays or errors at least monthly, and nearly 1 in 5 (18.9%) say this happens on a weekly basis.

These operational gaps are reinforced by unclear ownership.

• While 31.5% say responsibility for underperforming creative is shared, others assign it to media teams (18.0%) or creative teams (18.0%).
• Another 12.6% report that no clear ownership exists at all.
• Without defined accountability, it becomes difficult to drive consistent improvement.

Although many marketers are experimenting with optimization, relatively few have embedded it into ongoing processes. Only 41.4% automate creative testing, and 30.6% automate variant selection or rotation. At the same time, 38.7% say their creative remains largely static, with limited iteration once campaigns are live.

The challenge extends across channels as well. Nearly half of marketers (49.6%) say they only sometimes apply learnings from one channel to another. This inconsistency limits the ability to scale insights and build on past performance.

AI investment is rising, but adoption remains early

Against this backdrop, AI is emerging as a potential enabler of more efficient and responsive creative workflows. More than half of marketers (54.1%) say they are likely to invest in AI-powered creative or optimization tools in the next year.

Even so, adoption today remains limited.

• Only 20.7% use AI for creative analysis, and just 13.5% apply it to optimization using performance feedback or cross-campaign learnings.
• This suggests that most organizations are still in the early stages of building AI-driven capabilities.

A combination of practical and perceptual barriers continues to slow progress. A majority of marketers (59.5%) cite creative production constraints as a key challenge, while 36.9% point to measurement limitations and 36.0% to a lack of timely insights. Together, these issues reinforce the gap between ambition and execution.

Read the full report.

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