When TripleLift partnered with EMARKETER to study creative effectiveness in programmatic, the results confirmed a shift already underway: marketers know creative drives performance, but they also admit it’s the hardest lever to track, measure, and scale. That recognition alone signals progress: the industry is asking the right questions and aligning on creative as the performance driver.
Creative Is Critical — But Hard to Measure
According to the report, 84% of marketers believe creative is the most important factor in driving performance, well ahead of media placement or targeting. Yet only 35% say they have reliable dashboards to evaluate creative effectiveness. Click-through rates remain the most common metric, but more than half of marketers now track engagement rate and attention signals as well. This shows growing sophistication: marketers understand the link between creative quality and outcomes, but they lack consistent standards to measure it. That measurement gap is now fueling demand for clearer frameworks and more precise tools.
AI Enhances, It Doesn’t Replace
The findings also show that two-thirds of marketers expect AI to have a significant impact on creative development within two years, but not as a substitute for human imagination. Today, the top use cases are ad copy generation and format adaptation, while the biggest future role cited is workflow automation: freeing teams from repetitive tasks like resizing, versioning, and A/B testing. Crucially, over 80% of respondents said human review of AI-generated creative is “very important” or “critical.” The industry consensus is clear: AI is best as a co-pilot, accelerating workflows and expanding creative possibilities while human judgment safeguards strategy and storytelling.
A More Deliberate Creative Focus
Marketers are beginning to operationalize creative excellence. The study found that the top attributes of effective creative are clear brand storytelling (66%), compelling design (63%), and personalization (58%). Many are also experimenting with treating creative elements as measurable components (copy, imagery, format) and optimizing them individually. With 45% of marketers citing “too few creative variations” as a driver of underperformance, AI-powered tools that generate and test multiple iterations from a lead concept are becoming essential. This shift also goes beyond clicks: more marketers now say attention and engagement are stronger indicators of success than conversion alone. Together, these developments are democratizing creative excellence, making advanced capabilities accessible to brands of all sizes and helping performance scale more sustainably.
At the end of the day, the EMARKETER & TripleLift findings tell a clear story: creative is the biggest lever for performance, even if it’s still hard to measure. AI is here to help, not to replace, giving marketers more scale without losing human spark. And by being more deliberate with creative attributes, testing, and attention metrics, we’re building systems that make optimism not just an attitude, but a strategy. The future of programmatic is creative, and with AI as our co-pilot, optimism is not just a mindset, it’s a performance strategy.
Ed Dinichert is the Chief Revenue Officer at TripleLift, the world’s leading Creative SSP. To download the full EMARKETER/ TripleLift guide, go here.
