Recentering creative and relevance in a precision-driven industry

"For over a decade, "the right person, the right message, the right time" has been a guiding principle in digital advertising. It has been cited in decks, planning documents and strategy sessions across the industry. Even so, it rarely happens in reality. In practice, the industry focus has gone toward refining targeting and timing. The creative experience itself has received less attention."

"In most campaign planning workflows, media and creative are still treated as separate domains. Media teams focus on inventory, frequency and optimization. Creative teams focus on storytelling, asset production and brand alignment. The information that connects the two often fails to circulate in a timely or structured way. As a result, many ad experiences are built without input from audience behavior, real-time performance data or contextual signals."

"Creative outputs are often measured at the campaign level. It remains difficult to isolate which elements of the ad experience contributed to success or failure. This limits the ability to improve future campaigns and weakens the feedback loop that should exist between performance and creative direction. However, this gap is beginning to close. More advertisers are building ad experiences with modularity, variation and flexibility from the outset. The goal is relevance, not simply personalization. This requires planning creative structures that can adapt"

Digital advertising prioritized refining targeting and timing while creative experience received less attention. Advertisers learned to identify high-value audiences and reach them at key moments, but creative was often static and predefined. Media and creative teams are frequently treated as separate domains, preventing timely, structured information flow between them. Many ad experiences lack input from audience behavior, real-time performance data, or contextual signals. Measuring creative at the campaign level makes it difficult to isolate which elements drive outcomes, weakening optimization. Increasingly, advertisers design modular, variable, and flexible creative structures to improve relevance.

Read at Digiday