By Erfan Djazmi, Former Chief Digital Officer, Mediahubww
In 2007, a gorilla sat at a drum kit, waited through ninety seconds of Phil Collins, and sold a frankly heroic amount of chocolate. Cadbury’s sales jumped around ten percent¹. No segmentation strategy or bid algorithm did that. A man in a monkey suit feeling it coming in the air tonight did that, and an entire generation of British marketers fell a little bit in love with the idea that the work itself could be the strategy.
Fast forward to today, and most media plans are built around audiences, data and platform mechanics, with very little structured data available on creative. Some brands pretest, yes. Creative effectiveness predictors – such as those powered by Human Made Machine and trained on large-scale brand lift experiments designed to link creative directly to brand outcomes or emotion based scores from System1 – rarely sit as hard inputs into media allocation logic.
The headline numbers flatter us. 86% of marketers claim to have analysis in place to measure creative effectiveness, albeit with murky definitions of what that even means². Impressive, until you look at where and when the measurement actually happens. Eight out of ten say creative quality is a key driver of effectiveness, yet fewer than half measure its impact³.
Of those who do, 90% measure after launch once the money is spent. Only four in ten pretest to diagnose and improve. A mere 20% test across the full journey. So that leaves most media effectiveness measured against a subsegment of the creative.
The biggest lever
That is the strange heart of our industry. UK econometric and effectiveness work from Thinkbox and IPA repeatedly finds creative to be one of the biggest controllable drivers of advertising profitability or effectiveness, often ahead of media choices.
The single biggest lever, and it is under considered for allocation decisions. There are exceptions of course, the gold standard work from P&G and Google Marketing among them. But the majority of plans are devoid of creative intelligence that informs outcomes.
The result is an industry confident in its measurement, yet largely blind to its most important variable.
Better together
What makes this the moment is that media and creative, bifurcated for years, have quietly converged, pushed together by the same technology.
Platforms are not there either. Their engines optimise for the shortest path to a clicks and engagement, not creative signals, reacting to immediate behaviour without ever grasping an asset’s emotional intent, brand building power or strategic context.
Metrics such as engagement and clicks are attractors precisely because they are easy to measure and easy to report, a tidy number that twitches when the creative changes. But they are inputs, not outcomes. They measure the auction, not the idea. What matters is the outcome creative is actually accountable for, and that intelligence, at scale, is what drives true growth.
The reasons are structural. Media and creative were split decades ago into separate agencies, P&Ls and definitions of what good looks like. We then built measurement around whatever was easy to count. Performance channels hoover up budget because they produce legible numbers for Tuesday’s trading meeting, brand equity erodes quietly, and when payback finally plateaus the diagnosis points everywhere except creative, because creative was never in the data to begin with.
Creative signals often exist but arrive after the decisions are made, sitting in presentations and systems media planners may not be able access, measured in a language planning teams do not act on.
Tighter, better
So picture a brand sitting on three years of advertising data. Hundreds of assets, most scored once, if at all, then filed and forgotten. Now audit that library where every asset is assessed and tied to brand health and sales. Do that at scale and a pattern emerges, one that stops being a post campaign verdict and becomes a predictor.
Feed it forward and you can score new work, and rank the media against predicted lift rather than predicted delivery, before a penny is committed. That is not a creative effectiveness story. It is a media effectiveness story powered by creative signals. Those signals can finally enter econometrics too – most mix models contain no creative variable at all.
For a travel brand, this rewrites the plan line by line. The audit confirms the obvious, that emotional films build desire and belong in CTV and YouTube, but it also catches what instinct misses. Say the cinematic hero films that the team championed test only average on memory, while raw guest footage scores highest on recall and preference.
The hero edit drops from three lengths to one, the guest footage scales into six second YouTube bumpers and fifteen second CTV spots, and the programmatic display eating a fifth of the budget gets halved, because it builds neither. Practical cues like ‘best time to go’ score high for consideration and shift out of Meta into search, Pinterest and travel native, where intent is already live.
In a previous column I argued we have entered the Signal Web era, a world run on predictions that are only ever as good as the inputs we feed them, and as agentic systems absorb more of the decisioning, creative becomes the missing input – that powers DSP and walled gardens – and the signal that finally converges creative and media.
In a sea of platform sameness, creative signals are the more ambitious play, and an obvious edge while the rest of the category follows the herd.
It is time to let the gorilla into the spreadsheet.
As for Phil, I suspect he saw this coming. He has, after all, been waiting for this moment for all his life.
