For years, media spend has been picked apart with surgical precision, while the actual creative—the ads themselves—often slipped by with little more than gut checks and focus groups. A new report from Gain Theory, a global marketing effectiveness consultancy, suggests that imbalance may be costing brands dearly.
According to Creative Effectiveness Decoded: A Guide to Data-Informed Creative Impact, brands that adopt a rigorous, AI-backed approach to measuring and optimizing creative could see a 30% boost in advertising’s impact on sales. For a $1 billion company with a $50 million ad budget, that translates to more than $27 million in incremental sales.
Creativity: The Overlooked Multiplier
The report highlights a striking truth: 50–70% of a campaign’s sales uplift comes from the creative itself. Yet most marketing teams still lavish their data science budgets on media placement and targeting, while treating creativity as an art form that defies quantification.
“Creative has remained a comparative blind spot,” says Karen Kaufman, Gain Theory’s Global Chief Strategy Officer. “The difference between the most effective and least effective creative is far greater than the gap between media partners—yet creative doesn’t get the same level of measurement rigor.”
That’s not just an oversight—it’s a lost opportunity.
AI Steps Into the Creative Process
The report argues that advances in AI and analytics are finally making it possible to treat creative as a measurable, optimizable business lever rather than a wild card. Instead of relying on proxy metrics like brand recall or click-through rates, marketers can now directly link creative elements to sales outcomes using econometric modeling, machine learning, and predictive AI.
Gain Theory lays out a six-step framework for making this shift:
- Structure creative data – Use AI to turn video, image, audio, and text assets into analyzable datasets.
- Extract competitor insights – Build searchable libraries of rivals’ campaigns to benchmark creative performance.
- Measure sales impact – Apply advanced econometric models to quantify how specific creative assets drive incremental sales.
- Pinpoint why they work – Deploy multimodal AI to isolate which creative elements (colors, voices, story arcs) correlate with success.
- Forecast performance – Simulate how new creative concepts are likely to perform before they hit production.
- Create a feedback loop – Continuously feed learnings from past campaigns into future creative development.
It’s a playbook that promises to bring the same accountability to creative that media buying has enjoyed for decades.
From “Art” to Boardroom Evidence
The implications go beyond better ads. With data-backed insights, marketing leaders can walk into the boardroom armed with quantifiable evidence of creative’s role in driving business growth. That not only strengthens the case for bigger ad budgets but also positions marketing as a growth engine rather than a cost center.
Equally important, this approach can help eliminate waste. By identifying underperforming creative early, brands can reallocate budgets to high-impact campaigns and speed up time-to-market with fewer false starts.
The Industry Shift
Gain Theory isn’t alone in pushing for creative accountability. Industry peers like Analytic Partners and Nielsen have been experimenting with similar approaches, while adtech startups are leveraging AI to test creative concepts at scale. But Gain Theory’s report underscores just how central creativity is in the value equation—and how overlooked it remains compared to media targeting.
The message is clear: in a world where marketers obsess over programmatic bidding algorithms and audience segmentation, the creative itself may be the single biggest lever brands can pull.
Or, to put it bluntly: If your ads are bad, no amount of targeting will save you.
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