Why creative intelligence is an essential tool for scaled media performance

As teams return to planning tables in 2025, the marketing industry is once again caught between reflection and reinvention. We’ve just come off another year of rapid acceleration—driven by AI, new media behaviours, and tighter economic scrutiny—and now the focus is on how to keep pace without burning out or blowing budgets.

Looking back at what shaped 2024 gives us a crucial roadmap for the year ahead. Creative stood at the centre of the stage—but this time, it wasn't just about all the great ideas. It was about the data that fuels them, the platforms that host them, and the tools that test them.

In short: the creative game has changed. Here’s how:

Creativity is now a scalable data source

Creativity has always always been paramount. But the main difference is that last year, we saw a growing number of brands finally acknowledge it as a measurable, and scalable data source.

Only 54% of marketers are confident in ROI measurement across digital channels—signalling that campaign success hinges not just on where you show up, but how strong your creative assets are when you get there.

Relying on post-campaign performance data is outdated and marketers are now looking to creative analytics platforms to optimise brand presence across all channels. This means leveraging creative scoring to verify brand prominence, generate attention heatmaps, analyse key features, test emotional resonance, check platform suitability etc.

It’s less about “what’s the big idea?” and more about “which elements of this idea are proven to land best?”

The process is being formalised too. Top brands are adopting Creative Excellence Departments as a lever for growth—bringing creativity and data together under one roof and eliminating the endless back-and-forth between siloes.

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Platform-specific creative is non-negotiable

According to Google, creative quality accounts for 70% of campaign performance. This means that subpar creative (or creative that doesn't meet the best digital practices), even when coupled with perfect execution, is likely to fail. Think: Instagram stories without sound, TikToks with poor brand prominence, or YouTube pre-rolls that miss the hook entirely. 

It’s not just an oversight—it’s expensive.

We’ve known for years that different platforms require different ad formats. But the shift in 2025 is about using objective data, not subjective judgement, to determine what’s fit-for-platform.

AI solutions such as SmartAssets can now scan your assets and score them against each platform’s algorithmic preferences—from how quickly your logo shows up, to whether your ad opens with a human face. And brands are using this to make pre-flight tweaks that avoid media wastage and improve ROAS—before anything goes live. 

In today’s feed-first world, if it doesn’t suit the scroll, it doesn’t stand a chance.

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Generative AI is flooding the pipeline

Generative AI tools exploded in 2023 and have been constantly improving their output since. 73% of global marketers now actively use GenAI tools across their creative workflows—whether for image generation, voiceovers, scripting, or dynamic video resizing.

And while the benefits are clear (speed, efficiency, low cost), the side effects are starting to show: asset overload and brand inconsistency. But there is a fix.

Creative QA tools are able to use computer vision and rule-based logic to scan thousands of assets at once—checking for branding consistency, localisation errors, compliance risks, or visual clutter. Some can even flag platform-violating creative in real-time.

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The rise of retail and content-embedded ad networks

Everything is an ad network in 2025. From Uber receipts to Netflix loading screens, advertisers have a dizzying number of touchpoints to take advantage of. Retail media, streaming platforms, mobile-first apps, telcos—all building their own ecosystems for brands to plug into.

According to eMarketer, retail media will be the fastest-growing digital ad segment this year, with Amazon, Walmart, and Instacart leading the charge. Meanwhile, social commerce on platforms like TikTok Shop and Meta’s Amazon integration is blurring the line between product discovery and purchase in real time.

So what does that mean for creatives? A whole new world of format-specific, commerce-driven, hyper-contextual storytelling.

The challenge is less about finding media space, and more about designing for it. Tailoring assets not just to platform dimensions, but to the buying moment—where your ad is sandwiched between a cooking tutorial and a ‘buy now’ button.

If you want your creative to sell, it has to feel native—and that takes data, testing, and a lot of cross-functional coordination.

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The ultimate art-science collab

Creative intelligence and data science are two sides of the same coin. And one without the other just doesn’t cut it anymore. 

Aude Gandon, Chief Marketing Officer at Nestle, says that “the science of digital tools is in service of the thing we’ve always done—creativity.” There’s no longer a need for “creative-led” and “data-driven” to be mutually exclusive since it’s possible—and more effective—to build systems in which these compliment each other.

In practice, this could mean using AI to inform storytelling, analytics to refine ideation, and using QA tools to protect consistency at scale. The SmartAssets approach to blending media intelligence, data and creativity is helping brands to create content that boosts ROAS and stands out by:

• Tagging creative assets automatically based on brand elements, tone and emotional drivers.
• Forecasting ad performance and generating recommendations for channel, region, and diverse audience.
• Informing and verifying best practices across advertising channels.
• Creating a single source of truth for both media and creative teams.

This takes out both the guess and the grunt work so your teams can rest assured with decisions and concentrate on driving efficiency.  

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Final thoughts

While marketing is moving faster than ever, and the playbook is continually shifting, the goal remains the same: create work that performs.

This requires more than clever headlines or flashy visuals in 2025. It takes a system—a scalable, AI-enhanced, data-backed creative ecosystem—that helps brands make smarter decisions, faster.

So if you’re still keeping creative and media disconnected, or hoping your best-performing ad from last quarter will “just work again,” it might be time for a rethink. Creative intelligence isn’t a trend—it’s table stakes.