Why Every Marketer Must Start Building Their Own Creative Data

For anyone who is paying attention, it should be obvious at this point that the world is changing rapidly. This is what happens when you take an already exponential development curve (Moore’s law) and multiply it by a factor of 20x (the new pace of growth for AI compute). 

It is almost impossible for a person to prepare for how quickly things will change, and it’s even harder for a company to do so. But difficulty is not an excuse, and the time is now for marketers to begin thinking strategically about what is likely to happen, and what they can do to be prepared.

After a decade of investment in first-party customer and audience data assets to improve media targeting capabilities, leading platform media AI is levelling the playing field. Put simply, it is getting harder to differentiate through media strategies alone. This has led Meta to lean more heavily into their “Creative is the New Targeting” slogan, and Google to counsel companies that creative may soon be the only path to sustainable advantage. 

So, let’s talk about creative and what is likely coming down the pike. Generative AI tools continue to leapfrog each other on a near-weekly basis. Billions of dollars are being invested to advance the capabilities of tools from Open AI, Google, Apple, Amazon, Stability Labs, Adobe, Runway and many others. At this point, it’s hard to argue against a near-term reality where every marketer on the planet will be able to pick from any one of a wide variety of Gen AI tools, and make anything they want, instantly and essentially for free. We call this “content infinity”. It is the soon-to-be future where every SMB can create with the production quality of Michael Bay. 

And in this world of content infinity, value will shift for marketers.  After all, when everyone can make anything they want, being able to scale content will not be valuable. Doing what everyone else does is not a winning strategy. If 10,000 sock companies all have essentially the same ads on Amazon, will any one of them win? Of course not. The goal of marketing is to stand out, to rise above the noise, and to drive business outcomes more effectively than your competitors. To do that, marketers will need to know exactly what to make to drive the behaviors that matter to them, by brand, platform, format, and audience. This is where value will accrue. And the key to knowing this is Creative Data. 

 Understanding Creative Data

First, let’s define what creative data is not. Creative data is not the ability to use computer vision models to get a bunch of tags for what is happening inside a particular ad. Creative Data is what you get when you combine (1) a total understanding of all creative decisions inside every one of your ads, with (2) all of the results data that you care about (across media metrics, brand, attention, sales, MMM, carbon impact, and more). When you combine creative decisions and continuously updated performance data, the result is Creative Data. It isn’t knowing what’s happening in your ads. It’s knowing how every creative decision impacts the results you care about. And once you have creative data, it can be applied to improve your entire marketing supply chain; from planning to production to media activation to measurement. 

Creative Data – The New First-Party Data Asset

In this emerging market reality, AI (generative and other) is the shovel and creative data is the gold. It is the key to getting differentiated results from the same tools everyone else is using. And make no mistake about it, you must own it and control it. This is why Vidmob is laser-focused on being The Creative Data Company. We see it as our mission to help marketers develop their own first-party creative data asset and then orchestrate that across all of their marketing activities, technologies and partners. Our Creative Data Platform enables marketers to bring their creative data into their planning tools in the form of insights and brand toolkits, into their production processes through plugins like the one we recently announced with Adobe and through integrated enhanced prompting of GenAI. Imagine every prompt being appended not just with a model trained on prior assets, but all current performance information for every conceivable element by audience, format, and channel. Our platform brings also creative data into media decisioning and reporting, and lastly, into their measurement ecosystem so that attribution can be improved by finally accounting for creative quality. When marketers build this creative data asset, Vidmob’s Creative Data Platform then enables their agencies to activate it in unique and amazing ways to drive further benefit through a mix of services and custom integrations. Extensible, interoperable, fully secure, and most importantly, powerful. 

It’s the last point that gets me most excited about the journey that we’re on with our clients and agency partners – the opportunity to help them build a powerful new driver of value and competitive differentiation. We have all long known that the ability to communicate effectively was one of the greatest powers of all. And properly orchestrated creative data opens a river of opportunity in this regard. Whether it’s ensuring brand consistency across millions of assets around the world, making sure your content is appropriately representative of your audience, using creative as a way to understand how consumers feel about product characteristics, making sure your entire content supply chain is adhering to key sustainability goals, or just simply maximizing sales performance, all of this and so much more is downstream of having a world-class creative data asset. 

With the assistance of a lot of brilliant clients and agency partners, we have much of this built and figured out already. But there’s so much more to do! If you want to join the creative data revolution and start your journey down this path, we’d love to help.