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It’s tough to win with creative today. Everyone is smart, everyone is spending, everyone has AI, and everyone is fighting like H E double hockey sticks to kick your metaphorical rear end.
So what do you do?
Watch our latest webinar with 6 creative experts on building a creative advantage. And shamelessly steal some of their best tips to shift into a higher creative gear.
While you’re watching the full webinar, check out some of the top insights from the webinar here …
Win with creative: what’s the problem?
First up: insight from attendee polls
Everyone wants to win with creative. The problem is that desire is not enough. It’s freakishly hard.
We asked the hundreds of webinar attendees about their core creative challenges, and what’s working:
- When it comes to UA performance, what is currently your biggest creative challenge?
- Which ad format has driven the highest ROAS for you recently?
- Where are you using or planning to use AI in your creative process?
What’s actually working?
The biggest creative challenge: figuring out what’s actually working. (Sounds like it’s time for Creative IQ!) The second: coming up with new ideas.
Here are the results:
- 34.1% Figuring out what’s actually working
- 25.0% Generating enough new creative concepts
- 20.5% Fighting creative fatigue
- 15.9% Scaling production without losing quality
- 4.5% Localizing creative effectively
Marketers’ biggest creative challenge is understanding what’s working, followed by the pressure to generate new creative concepts. Creative fatigue and production quality are also significant concerns: it’s hard to maintain high-performing creative over time.
Understanding what’s working should not be the biggest challenge, but with siloed data all over your partners’ dashboards and black boxes proliferating, it’s understandable. As suggested above, get Creative IQ from Singular to clear the confusion.
What are the right formats?
To win with creative, you also need to use the right formats. We asked the webinar participants which ad formats have driven the highest ROAS for them recently.
Video and UGC ran away with the field.
Here are the results:
- 39.0% Short-form video
- 27.3% UGC
- 16.9% Playable ads
- 10.4% Influencer-driven
- 6.5% Static image
Short-form video dominates with 39% of respondents calling it their top ROAS driver, followed by UGC at 27.3%. Playables and influencer content have meaningful traction too. Static images are falling behind, reinforcing the move toward interactive and motion-based formats.
Where does AI fit in?
And finally, we asked webinar participants where they were using or planning to use AI in their creative process …
Here are the results:
- 27.2% Concept creation
- 20.6% Visual generation
- 18.6% Voiceovers or audio
- 17.5% Localization and translation
- 15.5% Creative tagging and reporting
- 0.5% Not using AI yet
Most marketers are already using AI to ideate and generate visuals. Concept creation leads, followed by visual and audio production. Very few said they’re not using AI, signaling that adoption is already mainstream in creative workflows.
Win with creative: magic and math
Our own CMO Stephanie Pilon hosted the session and she kicked it off with a kick in the pants highlighting just how important it is to win with creative …
“Targeting only makes up 9% of the success of an ad… deliverability and viewability make up 22%. But creative makes up a shocking 49%.”
Just to state the obvious because it’s so ridiculously critical, that means nearly half of your ad’s performance hinges on the creative you put in front of people.
No pressure.
There’s magic in creating creative, but there’s math in finding the ones that work best.
As I’ve heard from marketers before, it doesn’t have to hang in the Louvre. It does have to perform. It does have to demand the click. It does have to sell the next step in the customer journey.
How?
“It’s just about continuous iteration,” said Lisi Gardiner, Director of Product at Singular. “And I think a lot of marketers understand that it’s one of the best, most cost effective ways of driving performance.”
Structure matters too
Don’t misunderstand that continuous iteration. Testing creative isn’t just about throwing variations into the wild. It’s also about organizing ideas into frameworks and testing them with purpose.
Tinuiti’s Brent Hastie talked about using performance buckets to structure testing:
“These aren’t just themes, they’re concept archetypes … storytelling cohorts, if you will, that we use to ensure we’re telling distinct stories that can be tested and optimized.”
Those might be buckets of ad types focused on social proof, or product/service education, or brand introduction.
That helps with iterations, too. Now you can generate variations on the bucket themes easier, and structure them better. All of this will help you understand what themes resonate with specific audiences in specific geos.
Once you’ve dialed that in, you can dive down into more granular elements, fine-tuning what is working into what is awesome.
For example, if your UGC personal story bucket is doing well, maybe you try different version, like a skeptical weight loss veteran, or a first-time mom who’s looking to get back into shape, or an exec who just wants to fit those jeans again, or a retiree looking to be able to play more golf.
Win with creative by sweating the assets
If you’ve got it, flaunt it.
You’ve made a bunch of stuff already: brand images, product images, screenshots, videos. Rip, mix, burn all that stuff to make it work for different purposes.
From TikTok’s Dina Kirshner:
“We really try to emphasize making the most of what you already have… repurposing material, whether it’s a photo or clips that you have, and then making them feel like new again to create that robust volume you need.”
It’s always tempting to make new stuff, or to discount what you have.
But some of your best campaigns might come from materials you’ve already created.
So much more in the full webinar
There’s gold in this webinar. Here’s an overview of what you can expect to find …
- 00:00 Introduction and Session Kickoff
- 02:33 Importance of Creative in Advertising
- 03:43 Panel Introduction and Session Overview
- 06:10 Biggest Creative Challenges
- 07:16 Why Creative is Critical
- 10:21 Adapting Creatives for Different Audiences
- 15:37 Brainstorming New Creative Ideas
- 20:12 Best Practices for High-Value Creative Assets
- 24:44 Creative Testing Strategies
- 30:03 Iterative Strategies
- 31:43 Maximizing Ad Formats for ROI
- 32:39 Leveraging UGC for Authentic Marketing
- 37:46 AI in Creative Strategy
- 45:46 Addressing Creative Fatigue
- 52:19 Show and Tell: Creative Examples
- 58:19 Conclusion and Final Thoughts
Get it free and on-demand right here.
