Marketers still don't know whether creative is working

Despite widespread confidence in creative performance, most marketing chiefs still lack the measurement rigour to know whether their creative is truly working, with a lack of data and tools compounding the issue.

So says a new report from consultancy Gain Theory, “Creative Effectiveness Decoded: The Global CMO Survey”. On the surface, the mood is bullish. Some 89% of respondents say their creative has been effective or very effective over the past 12 months, with 65% rating their ability to measure creative as advanced or very advanced and 63% confident their approach accurately captures the impact creative has on key business goals.

Beneath that high confidence, however, lies a more complicated reality. Some 81% of marketing leaders state that creative and media are equally important to business impact, yet only 36% apply the same measurement rigour to both.

In fact, nearly four in five (80%) rely on media metrics such as reach and impressions to evaluate creative effectiveness; proxies that do not show whether creative is driving sales. Almost two-thirds (62%) acknowledge they are investing in media to deliver creative whose true value is unknown to them.

Meanwhile, half (49%) of respondents are not confident they have the data-informed evidence to defend or grow a creative budget with their chief financial officer or other finance leaders, with one in four (25%) admitting that their creative budget was reduced in the past 12 to 24 months because they could not make a data-informed business case.

Measurement barriers include inadequate data (68%) and a lack of tools and technology (56%). AI is starting to address these challenges, with 87% of respondents using or piloting AI for creative production, and more than half (56%) are using it for creative effectiveness measurement, a gap that is expected to close.

The survey builds on Gain Theory’s 2025 Creative Effectiveness Decoded report, which revealed that 50–70% of a campaign’s sales uplift can be attributed to creativity, yet most brands still lack the analytical rigour to measure and optimise it.

Gain Theory global head of new media measurement Russell Nuzzo commented: “For too long, advertising creative has remained a comparative blind spot, while media buying has been subjected to intense scrutiny and sophisticated analytical models.

“Our research shows marketing leaders feel good about their creative, but can’t prove it’s working, and CFOs are starting to notice. At the end of the day, if you can’t measure it, you can’t defend it. Closing that gap is now the single biggest opportunity in marketing measurement.”

Marketers still don’t know whether creative is working

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