Are your creative choices driven by data or intuition?
Media buying is increasingly automated. Targeting is largely algorithmic. Bidding is optimized in real time. While these levers continue to evolve, many marketing teams have already captured a large share of their efficiency potential.
What’s less clear is whether creative decisions are being optimized with the same rigor. According to our research with Google, many teams still rely on intuition over evidence when it comes to creative decisions. And that gap has a name: creative effectiveness.
58% of videos in the US and 85% in EMEA are not optimized
A study Ekimetrics conducted with YouTube found that a majority of video ad creative fails to activate the key drivers of creative effectiveness. The opportunity cost is real: when creative isn’t optimized, it burns media spend that no amount of targeting efficiency can recover, effectively scaling inefficiency.
Closing this gap does not call for a wholesale transformation of creative quality. The changes are often far more subtle, and solvable with the right measurement framework.
What is creative effectiveness—and does it drive attributable lift?
Creative effectiveness is the quantifiable link between a creative asset's specific features and its ability to drive sales effects, brand equity, or both. The focus is less on aesthetic quality or award-worthiness. Instead, creative effectiveness offers a proven approach to link your creative decisions to better commercial results:
- Framing
- Emotion
- Structure
- Branding cues
- Calls to action
Creative effectiveness expands the opportunity beyond awareness and engagement. When it is optimized, it also protects price premiums and sustains long-term business health.
The results are worth your while. Optimized video creative in our YouTube study lifted ROI by up to 2x, compared to videos that were not optimized.
Why this was hard to solve—and why it isn't anymore
Isolating the contribution of a specific creative decision from all other variables in a campaign was, for a long time, genuinely difficult. Marketing Mix Modeling (MMM) could quantify the impact of media spend, price, distribution, and seasonality. But creative—which is fluid, subjective, and varies asset-by-asset—resisted the kind of structured input that rigorous modeling requires.
Two developments have changed this. The first is the maturity of MMM. The second is the availability of structured creative data at scale.
When a creative quality score, built from standardized, feature-level analysis of each asset, is fed into an MMM model as a variable, it becomes possible to isolate creative's contribution to commercial outcomes with the same rigor applied to any other input.
For the first time, creative can be measured with the same rigor as media.
What the data reveals—and what most teams get wrong
Two findings stand out. First: creative performance is not driven by complexity. Just about 20 features explain the majority of variation in creative effectiveness. Teams that understand which features matter can focus energy on the creative decisions with the greatest commercial value.
Second: some of the highest-impact features are consistently underutilized. The clearest example is Direction—the presence of a clear, specific call-to-action. Performance marketers tend to prioritize it, while brand marketers tend to treat it as an afterthought. The data suggests the latter are leaving measurable ROI behind. This tension between branding and performance elements within a single asset is one of the most commercially important (and under-discussed) dynamics in creative strategy.
Google's ABCD framework (Attention, Branding, Connection, Direction) is one structured approach to making these findings actionable. Its value is less about the framework itself and more about what it represents: a shift from gut-based creative feedback to criteria-based review that is faster, more consistent, and more likely to produce commercially effective output.
How Ekimetrics measures creative effectiveness—and makes it scalable
Ekimetrics integrates a creative quality score directly into MMM. Each asset is analyzed at the feature level, producing a structured, standardized score that travels into the model as a measurable variable. The result is a modeled, attributed contribution to commercial outcomes, allowing brands to connect creative execution to business outcomes with the same confidence they bring to media measurement.
In practice, this means brands can see not just whether creative is working, but which specific decisions are driving or limiting performance. Perhaps even more significant, brands can then model the ROI impact of creative changes.
To bring this to scale across digital platforms, Ekimetrics recently announced a partnership with CreativeX. A structured creative data “credit score” transforms visual assets into standardized inputs across nine global media platforms—YouTube, TikTok, Amazon, and others—feeding directly into MMM.
Creative effectiveness: the last lever worth pulling
The best creative teams have always operated on sharp instincts. What's changed is that those instincts can now be tested, validated, and refined against real commercial outcomes. Ekimetrics' methodology doesn't ask teams to choose. It gives them the evidence to know when their instincts are right.
When high-performing marketing teams have already optimized their media mix, creative effectiveness is the next frontier, and often the most underexploited one. The ROI is there. The methodology exists. The only thing standing between most marketing leaders and a possible 2x uplift is adopting a new measurement framework.
Want to go deeper?
- Explore Ekimetrics Marketing Effectiveness—see how we build creative power into M
