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In advertising, if you win in creative, you win. Period, full stop, end of story. You can screw up targeting, you can fail in campaign creation, you can mess up SKAN measurement, you can pick suboptimal ad partners, but if you absolutely kill it with amazing images, videos, or playables that absolutely demand attention and irresistibly drive action, it’s almost impossible to fail.
That’s why I was so pumped to spend 30 minutes with Lisi Gardiner, Singular’s director of product and the product manager most responsible for Creative IQ, Singular’s new AI-powered creative optimization suite.
Check it out here. Push play, and keep scrolling …
High-level, what does Creative IQ do?
Everyone knows that creatives are the lifeblood of advertising and mobile user acquisition. The problem now is that they’ve never been harder to manage.
Because AI can now generate thousands of assets in minutes, the challenge isn’t just making great ads anymore — although that’s still the biggest problem — it’s also testing and optimizing the assets you have.
Creative IQ helps. Big picture, here’s how.
Creative IQ is a full-stack creative analytics platform that offers:
- A super-cool gallery view of everything
- Shows all your ads in 1 place
- Loads performance data so quickly beta testers prefer Creative IQ over internal DBs and ad network dashboard
- Includes support for video and playables
- Built-in AI tagging
- Automatically tags ads across dimensions like audio, visuals, text, characters, and languages
- Enables structured performance analysis to pinpoint what’s actually driving results
- Supports custom client-specific tagging needs (e.g. “dragon theme” vs “forest theme” in gaming)
- Cross-partner fragmentation solutions
- Unifies your view of creatives and performance data across all ad networks
- Shows how the same asset performs across Google, Meta, TikTok, etc.
- Eliminates siloed views, black boxes, and inconsistent naming conventions
- Collaboration tools for your whole team
- Shares insights for UA teams, design teams, execs, even agencies.
- Offers visual-first reporting for better communication across all users
- Creative-level ROI
- Shows creative along with ROI and engagement metrics
- Support upper funnel and post-install metrics
- Per-partner placement intelligence
- Offers a cheat sheet on what placements are available from which partners, which is super varied and super detailed … now you don’t have to learn or remember all those details
- Benchmarks
- Shares cross-network creative benchmarks (coming)
- Creative insights
- Suggests how many creative to run at various stages of your campaigns (coming)
In other words: this is a big deal.
1 creative suite, multiple perspectives
Creative IQ is a single suite, but it works for your whole team … and beyond. Creative IQ bridges the gaps between three often siloed teams, plus external partners:
- Executives can get a high-level overview
- UA teams can get granular views with detailed metrics and source-level breakdowns
- Design teams can get a visual-first experience, with actual videos and images paired directly with ROI stats
- Agencies can get what you choose to share with them
Creative is a team game. Your creative optimization suite needs to play along.
See inside the black box
Naturally, every ad network has its own siloed reporting: they just see what you’re doing on their platform. But many major networks hide some asset-level combinations of ads behind black boxes.
So marketers not only can’t get all their data together, they also often don’t know which creatives are actually being shown … or why they’re working.
And that means you don’t have all the insights you need to optimize creative and campaigns across all your partners.
Creative IQ solves this by aggregating and normalizing creative data from all partners. Singular’s deep integration stack allows it to pull in image and video files even if some partners don’t have them, and thanks to our data governance and naming conventions, also allows it to pull some of your performance data out of the black boxes and into your hands.
The result?
A truly unified, normalized view of performance across channels, networks, and formats.
You’re still going to likely optimize per partner, and that’s totally fine. But it’s super-useful to have the big picture as well, and incredibly valuable to get hidden details out of the dark and into the light.
ROI and creative side-by-side … because science
I’m not even a designer or artist, but I like visual information. Most likely, so do you. And there’s a good reason for this … a science-based reason.
Because visuals are brain-friendly.
So there’s a widely-cited claim that suggests the brain processes visuals 60,000 times faster than text. That’s more of a myth than a fact, but it’s hinting at a deeper truth. We are super-fast at processing visual information. In fact, a study by MIT neuroscientists found that the brain can identify images seen for as little as 13 milliseconds. In contrast, reading just a few words (a “fixation” in science jargon) takes about 200–250 milliseconds, or even up to 500 milliseconds.
That’s easily 1800% slower.
And it’s for just a few words.
So yeah: 60,000 is a myth, but we process visual information much faster than textual information.
That’s why Creative IQ shows your ad creative side-by-side with your ROI:
“ We want to dummy proof this,” says Lisi. “This report makes it easy for all the teams … UA, executives, design, marketing … everybody can use the report and it runs really fast. And you have easy-to-understand … this is the video, these are the stats, impressions, clicks, ROI … and we’re gonna be adding more post-install events in there as well.”
Everything you need to know. Simple. Fast. Effective.
Launching this month
Creative IQ has been in development for over a year. Lisi’s talked to dozens of UA teams and designers and marketers to get the exact details of what they need, and it’s been in private beta for months.
We announced it last month, and it’ll be launching this month.
Keep your eyes peeled here for the full release announcement, and talk to your Singular rep about when you can start using Creative IQ.
More in the full podcast
As usual, there’s much more in the full podcast. Check it out on YouTube or any major audio podcasting channels.
Here’s what you’ll find:
- 00:00 Introduction to the New Gallery View
- 00:37 The Evolution of Creative Testing
- 01:27 Understanding the Problem
- 04:15 Creative IQ Features and Benefits
- 08:22 AI Tagging Explained
- 12:35 Creative ROI and Gallery View
- 14:07 Cross-Functional Collaboration
- 14:57 Early Feedback and Future Plans
- 18:05 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
