New to the Party: The Rise of Creative Data

By : Alex Collmer

6/2/21

This is the third in a series of posts where we explore key themes from The Essential Guide to Signal Loss for Digital Marketers.

First, we dug into the evolution of consumer data privacy and what the changing regulations mean for advertisers in different parts of the world. Then, we explored the different kinds of data available to marketers , from publicly available information to data derived from third-party tracking. Now, we’ll look into a type of first party data that’s rapidly gaining traction in the advertising space: Creative Data.

When we think about advertising data, media performance metrics are top of mind: how many impressions, clicks, and purchases or conversions did a campaign generate, and how much did each part cost? And, up until recently, the connection between a click and an eventual purchase was the holy grail of data points. But, as signals continue to fade and privacy regulations make the line from A to B harder to definitively draw, marketers are left looking for other performance indicators to rely on. Enter Creative Data.

What Is Creative Data?

Creative Data is a new type of first party data that enables marketers to understand the nuts and bolts of their creative ads in a way that only recently became possible. With the rise of computer vision and machine learning, we’re now able to analyze ads and express the components as code. That makes it possible, using Artificial Intelligence (AI), to tag each visual element, correlate it to performance, determine related trends, and more.

Let’s dig into that a little more. Whether a campaign uses static or video creative, the raw material — the ads themselves — equate to thousands of data points that can be analyzed and interpreted for the purposes of optimizing performance. How that works is pretty straightforward: each data point is tied to a creative pixel, and AI is what lets us interpret that data in a meaningful way.

For example, the ideal sponsored image size for many major platforms is 1,200 x 628 pixels. For marketers, that adds up to more than 750,000 pixels available for scanning and performance analysis. When we look at video, the number of available data points increases exponentially.

The result? Creative Data. And what makes Creative Data so powerful, of course, is by pairing it with first party Performance Data marketers can connect the dots between key creative elements in ads and their impact on KPIs. That empowers marketers to make creative decisions that can drive desired campaign outcomes.

The Unique Benefits of Creative Data

  • Creative has always been the marketing lever with the biggest influence on ROI, and it’s now fully configurable. Fine-tuning the details of that creative in line with performance targets used to require a lot of heavy lifting. . Now, with AI doing the lifting for marketers, and Creative Data available to prove or disprove that hunch your team member had about blue backgrounds driving better performance than green ones, creative is gearing up to be the next frontier for campaign optimization.
  • Creative performance is channel-specific, and Creative Data helps your ads to take that into account. Sure, it’s always been possible to see identical ads performing differently on different platforms, but it was difficult to discern why. The visual elements that increase engagement on Instagram may have the opposite effect on TikTok, and vice versa. Creative Data uncovers what visual details work best where, and much of an impact they’re likely to have on campaign performance. Suddenly, creative can get personal to each ad platform, each audience, and perform accordingly. That’s a huge boon for advertisers.
  • Creative Data provides more insights into ad performance than ever before, because it takes every pixel in every frame into account. Read: a game-changer for digital advertisers.

Make Every Millisecond Count with Creative Data

The average digital ad is viewed for less than three seconds. When you have less than three seconds to captivate your audience, every creative decision counts. Thankfully, Creative Data helps marketers make data-informed decisions designed to make an impact.

Leveraging Creative Data enables you to show, with data, that featuring your product in the opening frame doubles Click Through Rate, or that opening with your logo decreases View Through Rate. It opens the door for fine-tuning creative so it engages audiences in line with your campaign goals by platform. The result is what’s known as Intelligent Creative. The best part is, that ultimately means a more enjoyable experience for consumers as much as marketers.

Your creative matters now more than ever. With the days of hyper-targeted ads and cookie tracking slipping away, now is the time to get ahead with Intelligent Creative built to help your brand succeed.


In our fourth and final post in this series, we’ll look at how today’s top brands are using Creative Data to help shift the needle on their advertising performance.

Want to learn more about Signal Loss and the growing importance of Creative Data? Download the full eBook.