Product development without research resembles tuning a piano while wearing earplugs. You might hit some right notes, but you’re essentially guessing. At TripleLift, our product roadmap isn’t driven by intuition or industry trends, rigorous research that reveals the mechanical realities of digital advertising anchors our decisions.
Research as Strategic Infrastructure
Most companies treat research as validation for decisions they’ve already made. We’ve flipped this model where research becomes the foundation that shapes our strategic thinking before we commit to building anything. Our recent eMarketer collaboration perfectly illustrates this approach.
When we surveyed 164 brand and agency marketers about creative effectiveness, according to the EMARKETER and TripleLift study, we weren’t trying to prove that creative matters. We wanted to understand the specific mechanical breakdowns preventing marketers from scaling quality creative. The findings revealed that 54.3% of marketers say the reason creative in programmatic campaigns most often falls short is because assets aren’t updated frequently enough, while 51.8% say they don’t produce enough versions for different audiences, contexts, or formats.
These weren’t abstract insights. They became engineering requirements. Our creative technology roadmap now prioritizes automated versioning and rapid A/B testing capabilities specifically because research showed us where the mechanical friction exists.
From Insight to Implementation
Research only matters if it changes what you build. We mechanically transform research insights into product features through systematic processes.
Our eMarketer research revealed that 73.2% of marketers expect data analysis to play a greater role in creative success over the next two years, but only 51.2% of marketers have reliable metrics or dashboards to track creative effectiveness. This created a clear product requirement to build creative analytics tools that connect creative quality to performance metrics automatically.
We’ve built metadata tagging systems that allow advertisers to understand not just whether their campaigns performed well, but which specific creative elements drove that performance. Knowing exactly which component failed versus simply knowing your car broke down represents the difference our approach creates.
Research-Driven Format Development
Our creative format development exemplifies research-driven product development. Before building any new format, we conduct three types of research including Publisher Research to understand technical constraints and user experience requirements, Advertiser Research to identify creative workflow pain points and performance expectations, and Consumer Research to measure engagement patterns and attention metrics.
Our Scroll and Carousel formats, which generate 6x more time spent than standard banners according to TripleLift proprietary eye-tracking studies from 2020-2025, emerged directly from research showing that consumers engage differently with content that responds to their interactions. We didn’t build these formats because they were technically possible, we built them because research proved they solved real engagement problems.
Competitive Intelligence Layer
We also conduct systematic research on competitive positioning and market gaps. This isn’t about copying competitors, understanding where the industry has mechanical blind spots that create opportunities for differentiation drives our analysis.
Our position as the Creative SSP emerged from research revealing that most SSPs optimize for efficiency and scale while treating creative as an afterthought. By identifying this gap, we could build our entire value proposition around solving problems that others ignored.
Partnership Strategy Through Research
Even our partnership strategy stems from research insights. Our platform integrations are informed by research showing that buyers wanted access to high-performance native formats without complex setup processes. Rather than building another direct relationship, we engineered workflows that make premium creative formats accessible through existing buying platforms.
Measuring Research ROI
We track the impact of research investments through feature adoption rates, customer satisfaction improvements, and revenue attribution. Features that emerged from research insights show higher adoption rates than features built from internal assumptions alone.
But the real value isn’t measured in individual features, the compound effect of making better decisions consistently represents our true return. Research has become our competitive advantage because it allows us to solve problems that customers didn’t even know they had.
Internal Research Element
Perhaps most importantly, we conduct ongoing research with our own teams. Regular retrospectives, workflow analysis, and productivity studies help us understand how to build better products by building better product development processes.
This internal research led to our AI-powered project status updates, a feature that emerged from studying how our teams actually communicate and where manual work was creating unnecessary friction.
Research-driven product development isn’t about gathering more data, gathering the right data and having the discipline to let that data reshape your assumptions represents our approach. When you get the research mechanics right, product development becomes predictable, strategic, and remarkably effective.
Andrew Eifler is the Chief Product Officer at TripleLift.To download the TripleLift/EMARKETER research discussing the impact of creative on digital advertising effectiveness, go here.
