When measuring creative impact, marketers typically rely on circumstantial evidence. Brand awareness and sales trends are important and provide useful KPI numbers, but they reflect the entire campaign.
They don’t tell you what part of creation is in contact with people. Is it the copy, the images, the audio? And while A/B testing can shed some light, it doesn’t reach a granular level. It doesn’t tell you if some parts are more effective than others.
This explains why only 36% of marketers in a recent survey said they were “very confident” in their ability to effectively track creative performance. The survey, conducted by Plus Company, collected information from 350 senior marketing professionals in B2B and B2C organizations in the US, UK, Canada and Germany with more than 1,500 employees.
Sixty-eight percent said challenges evaluating creative led to inefficient allocation of resources, and 44 percent said they missed growth opportunities because of it.
Source: Plus Company 2025 Guide to AI and Measuring Creative Impact
Fortunately, there is now a tool seemingly designed to measure creative impact: artificial intelligence.
“AI is good at breaking something down into its component parts,” said Michael Cohen, head of data and analytics at Plus Company and co-author of the study. “In the classic image recognition problem, it’s about breaking it down fundamentally to be able to answer the question.”
Multiple data sources
This possibility allows you to mark certain aspects of the creations. The AI ​​can then find the common elements of the most successful campaigns. This information can be used in campaign iterations.
Data can be enriched with insights into individual reactions to creation that lead to successful interactions.
“You know who sees a particular creation in a particular configuration and who doesn’t,” Cohen said. “So you learn how effective this creation was at a particular communication moment for a particular individual.”
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This would be a huge improvement over the way marketers currently collect information to improve their campaigns. Three-quarters of respondents in the Plus Company survey say they still rely on methods such as impact studies, media mix and attribution modeling, and incrementality testing.
These time- and labor-intensive approaches mean missed opportunities and reduced competitiveness in an increasingly rapidly changing market. This gap in real-time access can seriously impact a brand’s ability to stay relevant. Something marketers are well aware of:
58% of respondents cited a lack of real-time data and insights as a barrier to their ability to adapt creative strategies on the fly.
A new power of connection
“It’s about AI unlocking this new power of connection that has been an integral part of our category for quite a long time,” said Crystalyn Stuart-Loayza, another co-author of the study and chief digital officer of two of the Plus the company’s agencies. “Historically, experiments have been done in silos, as opposed to truly integrated and comprehensive movements that allow us to test and experiment with all facets of a program and have learnings in real time. »
Marketers looking to use AI to measure creative impact will face non-technological obstacles. Even though 88% of marketers say AI is valuable for generating responsive content, only 52% have fully integrated it into their workflows.
A common barrier? Resistance to change is said by 45% of marketers to be a significant problem, a figure that rises to 71% among small businesses. This reluctance to adopt new technologies combines with less interest in AI at higher levels of organizations. Mid-level marketers are the most enthusiastic about AI, with 57% calling it “very useful.” However, at the vice president level, that enthusiasm drops to 49%, largely due to very reasonable concerns about costs.
The full survey is available here (no registration required).
