Advertising is a major driver of paid media performance, but over the years it has also been the most difficult to measure.
That’s the problem we set out to solve when we built Creative Intelligence. Already working for many of the most sophisticated advertisers in our client base, it pulls creative analytics and performance data into one place so you can see exactly what’s working and why.
In this clip, Jordan Taylor, the engineer who built it, and Shirin Bucknam, the creative strategist who deploys it with clients, walk you through what it does and how to change creative strategy.
Why A/B testing alone is not enough
The default answer to understanding creative performance has been A/B testing. Run two versions, see which one works, and repeat. It works to a point, because what it tells you is what won, not what caused it to win. You know it’s the B version of the A version. You don’t know if it was the opening hook, the moment the product appeared or the emotional tone of the voice. So the following brief is written on instinct. An informed instinct, perhaps, but an instinct nonetheless.
Then there is the question of scale. A/B testing is a one-time tool, and most brands that use paid social media at any reasonable volume have hundreds or thousands of active creatives spread across campaigns, formats, and platforms. The signs are all there. The patterns are there. But no group can manually extract and isolate creative attributes from that volume and connect them to performance results in any meaningful way. That was a problem that required creating something new.
Creative Intelligence: breaking creativity down into its parts
Creative Intelligence pulls creative from Meta (and all platforms to follow in late Q2), uses AI to identify and categorize everything across every asset, and aligns those creative attributes with your actual performance metrics to show what’s working and what’s not from a creative perspective.
The analysis applies to all four dimensions: style and format, people and product, content and messaging, and CTA and offers. In addition, in the video, each hook is separated by a time stamp, capturing the visual details on the screen, the text, the sound, the emotional element, and whether the product is visible at that time. All of that information flows back into a dashboard that you can see, organized by AI tags and presented as specific performance-related recommendations.
The result is a single place where creative decisions and performance results exist in the same place.
What you know now that you didn’t know before
Hook analysis at the timestamp level
The first few seconds of a video ad are where most performance is won or lost. Creative Intelligence categorizes every video by timestamp, identifying the type of hook used, the details visible on the screen, the emotional element, whether the product is visible, and what marketing element is played, all mapped to the exact second it happens.
So instead of knowing that the video has a strong hook, you know that the opening of the solution to the problem in the zero-second position with a product characterized by three second correlation has the highest completion rates in your entire portfolio.
Portfolio level pattern recognition
Each art analysis is useful. But pattern recognition in hundreds or thousands of creators is where the real creativity resides. Creative Intelligence tags all assets automatically on-board, with the option to add custom tags, for all aspects such as tone, visual style, emotion, movement, and messaging. Those tags are then aligned with performance metrics across your entire portfolio.
Output is not a league table of your best ads. It is the answer to questions like this: does a small visual tone outweigh the high energy in all your awareness campaigns? What hook categories drive retention vs. conversion? When is the best time to submit a benefit claim? The platform conducts a statistical analysis to ensure that the data available has enough volume behind it to be reliable, so you do not progress to establishing what has happened to have a good CPA with little spending.
Creative snapshots made with AI
The ability to inform is where this is most evident in smart teams. Creative Intelligence can generate creative strategy reports directly from your portfolio data that analyze what’s working, uncover creative ideas to test, and generate briefs that tell your creative team not only what to do but why, based on evidence from your performance history.
It also pulls benchmarks from the core industry. So in short it’s not just “here’s what worked for you,” but “here’s what worked for you, the opposite of what works in class.”
Custom analysis of product-specific queries
Not all information resides in a standard taxonomy. Creative Intelligence includes a custom analysis feature that allows you to define your variables: to identify which specific product lines appear in the creation, to score against the criteria defined by the brand, to extract information specific to your category or portfolio structure. Where manually tagging thousands of items can take weeks, AI does it in minutes.
This changes in practice
The notification process is where this comes in handy. Currently, most creative briefs are built on a combination of field best practice, category convention, and whatever worked well in the last campaign. It’s a reasonable starting point, but it means that creative strategy is always less about the wisdom you get than your data.
When you have Creative Intelligence working across your portfolio, the brief becomes the result of the analysis rather than the input to it. You know which hook categories drive retention of your audience. You know the right time to display your product. You know your high-powered creative is converting or generating cheap clicks. The creative team receives clear direction, evidence-based, and linked to key metrics.
Bottom line
Creative has been generating data. Every hook, every planning decision, every choice about when to display a product and how to frame a profit generates a signal. The problem has been that until now, those symbols were invisible at scale, buried in the space between the creative suite and the performance dashboard.
Creative Intelligence bridges that gap, not by changing the creative instinct, but by giving people with that natural state a clear understanding of what really works and why.
If creativity is a major driver of paid performance, it deserves the same analytical rigor you apply to everything else. Now you can have it.
Want to see where Creative Intelligence comes from in your portfolio? Get in touch.
