Perion data shows that optimising creative in real time could transform campaign performance.
More than a third (38.7%) of marketers report that creative is recognised as important, but that measurement is inconsistent, research by Perion has shown.
Just 3.6% of respondents said that creative performance is well understood and optimised today, while 23.4% reported cost efficiency and scale take priority over insight.
Creative effectiveness is primarily measured through outcomes like sales, conversions, or return on adspend (ROAS) according to three-quarters of respondents (75.7%). This is followed by media performance metrics like video completion rate (VCR), click-through rate (CTR), and engagement (73%), as well as brand metrics like awareness, consideration, and lift studies (62.2%).
But, the process isn’t streamlined. Almost half of marketers (48.7%) surveyed believe if creative could be optimised, they’d see a performance improvement of between 11% – 30%.
“The infrastructure was never built to let marketers optimise creative in real time,” said Tal Jacobson, cheief executive officer of Perion.
“Insights arrive too late, fragmented across platforms with no shared feedback loop. That gap has a price tag: one in four marketers believe closing it could unlock [over] 20% performance gains inside campaigns that are already running.
“What’s missing isn’t creative talent, it’s an execution layer that connects creative decisions to live media signals.”
Despite the importance of creative, teams often don’t get creative insights until two to four weeks after launch (41%), and a further 16% don’t get feedback at all until the campaign has ended.
Creative insights are slower to arrive than media optimisation signals marketers reported (53%), and a third (36%) said a lack of timely insights prevent creative from being treated as a ‘continuously optimisable variable’.
In fact, the majority of marketers (71%) do not undergo a creative refresh until they see performance decline, and over half (59%) wait for a planned rotation.
“If creative is expected to drive performance, it needs to be managed like other performance levers. If teams can approach creative optimization with the same rigor and consistency as media optimization, there’s an opportunity to unlock stronger results,” the study stated.
To manage and optimise the creative process, the research suggested that teams need to redesign creative around speed-to-learning, not just launch, assigning just one owner to close the loop and ensure accountability, make creative modular, making components like CTAs and value propositions can be swapped out as interchangeable elements.
It also suggested that the industry and companies individually creates a standardised decision framework tying signals to action, and building a cross-channel “learning engine” so that creative feedback can be distributed evenly.
