Only 36% of respondents to a recent Plus Company-Statista survey of 350 marketing leaders revealed they were very happy with using their existing tools to measure the impact of their creative content.
Marketers relied on traditional tools like brand tracking, trend analysis on sales/revenue, campaign performance metrics, media mix modeling, attribution modeling and incrementality testing for decades. It’s no wonder then, in a fast-paced digital era, the other 64% of respondents said they were unhappy with their measurement capabilities. Traditional methods just aren’t keeping pace with modern marketing methods.
Of all the elements in a marketing campaign that can be measured, creative content is the most elusive. Cliches such as “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” come to mind, for how can you quantify something as subjective as creative? How can a marketer connect a creative execution to a sale?
The other problem is these approaches were designed in and for market conditions that no longer exist. In today’s rapidly and constantly changing marketplace, traditional methods are slowing down creative research and development and reducing competitiveness. Who has weeks or even months to wait for the results from a brand study?
That just doesn’t cut it anymore. We now operate in a real-time environment that requires the ability to respond to changing market conditions on the fly. Indeed, in the Plus Company-Statista study, 58% of marketers cited the lack of real-time data as a critical challenge in adapting creative strategies.
AI can solve for this, allowing for more responsive campaigns that meet market demands with greater agility. It can provide real-time insights and more accurate data on audience engagement, enabling marketers to make more informed decisions that drive better results.
Companies that fully embrace AI-driven solutions will be better equipped to produce high-performing campaigns, adapt to changing consumer behaviors, and measure creative impact with greater precision. By evolving their approach to both strategy and creative development, brands can stay competitive in an increasingly dynamic market. In the Plus Company-Statista survey, 89% of marketers agree. But only 54% have fully integrated AI for creative ideation and strategy into their processes.
Why the gap? One big factor is resistance to change. A full 45% of marketers identify it as a significant hurdle. In smaller companies that figure rises to 71%.
Mid-level professionals exhibit the most excitement for AI, with 57% rating it as “very helpful,” but at the VP level, that enthusiasm drops to just 49%, largely due to concerns about costs.
The proliferation of new technology, the costly AI-feature upgrades on core workspace platforms and the difficulty to roll out mass access to all employees continue to pose very tangible challenges for leaders to manage as well.
And yet, the advantages proffered by AI adoption should outweigh these concerns. Take target market identification, for instance. A lack of comprehensive audience insights and data can result in a limited understanding of consumer behavior and preferences, making it difficult to build briefs that result in effective creative. For planning purposes, AI can automatically feed relevant audience, creative, media and market insights into a brief with much more predictive power.
When it comes to measuring campaign performance, AI enables marketers to study real-time audience engagement and how different segments are interacting with the creative content. AI follows conversion impact amongst your target audience’s interactions with top, middle and bottom of funnel content. Comprehensive creative attribution analysis helps evaluate long-term impact by studying audience behavior before, during, and after exposure. This analysis refines messaging by measuring emotional responses, recall, and brand awareness, ensuring the creative contributes to overall campaign success.
To stay competitive, brands must move beyond resistance and invest in AI tools that unlock deeper insights, provide actionable recommendations, and streamline processes. The future of creative impact measurement lies in embracing AI-driven tools to stay competitive and agile in an ever-evolving market.
The new is always met with fear of change, and there are always those who prefer to live with the methods and tools they know rather than explore the potential benefits of those they don’t, even when they recognize that the old methods just can’t deliver what the ever changing market demands.
Whether it’s fear of change, organizational reluctance, the challenges of company-wide onboarding and implementation or just plain cost, the barriers to adoption of AI as a way to turbocharge planning, measurement and optimization of creative content remain intimidating to most companies. Even though most will say they agree that AI is a valuable tool, actual integration is slow.
To develop a deeper understanding of the value of overcoming these barriers, The 2025 Marketer’s Guide to AI & Creative Impact Measurement is a great place to start. There you will find the results of the latest Plus Company-Statista report on the adoption of AI and the competitive advantages it offers.
You can download it here.
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