By Meg Haley
Consumer expectations about the advertising they’re targeted with and the ways brands engage with them are evolving at a breakneck pace, leaving global brands and agencies facing a unique challenge: how to make their messaging deeply authentic and relevant to diverse audiences, while operating at scale. Advertising has shifted from simply broadcasting compelling stories to delivering the right message to the right person, at the right time, on the right platform, and in the right format. To meet this challenge of getting everything right, marketers now need to do more than simply rely on AI—they need unique data and actionable insights to better inform their strategies and outputs.
Generative AI Needs Data to Grow
Generative AI (GenAI) has already made waves in the advertising industry, offering a powerful tool for content creation at scale. While the technology has grown exponentially since its mainstream launch, its development is beginning to plateau. Brands that initially embraced GenAI for experimentation are now shifting their focus to effectiveness and ROI. To achieve this, AI must be augmented with unique, robust data to unlock its full potential. Without these meaningful data inputs, AI risks stagnation, as its outputs are only as valuable as the data and insights driving them.
This is an important point: AI alone does not provide a strategic advantage. GenAI is widely accessible, allowing virtually anyone to create thousands of ad variations in minutes—but volume doesn’t equate to effectiveness. What differentiates leading brands and agencies is their ability to integrate data into these tools, turning generic outputs into impactful, highly-tailored assets. By pairing AI capabilities with actionable insights from creative data, brands and agencies can not only meet but exceed audience expectations, crafting personalized, resonant messaging that stands out.
Creative Data as the New Foundation for Advertising
The ability to measure and optimize ad performance is becoming the gold standard for modern marketing. Creative data, which connects a campaign’s creative elements, such as branding, story arcs, and pacing with its performance outcomes, gives brands a deeper, nuanced understanding of their ads and their effect on business outcomes.
By integrating this first-party creative data across the content supply chain, brands and agencies can generate a tighter feedback loop on everything from ad production, optimization strategies, and measurement, to media decision-making. This allows them to use real-time insights to quickly refine messaging, optimize ad placements across channels, and create ads that are both contextually relevant and deeply resonant with their audience. It can also help brands avoid inadvertent faux pas by keeping up with changing trends and responding to cultural moments which can otherwise be extremely difficult when managing a global creative catalogue.
In addition, brand guidelines and best practices criteria can be provided as inference data to GenAI to scan creative assets for adherence. On the other hand, if brands are looking to experiment with their messaging or other elements of their identity, creative data can help mitigate associated risks. These insights can suggest adjustments about what could perform better and allow for rapid evaluation of their impact, offering advice on whether brand guidelines should be updated to align with evolved consumer preferences.
The Age of Personalized Storytelling
Today’s consumers demand ads that align with their values, speak to their experiences, and feel genuinely authentic. This shift has ushered in a new era of personalized storytelling, where brands must scale bespoke content to millions of unique, yet complementary interactions without sacrificing quality.
First-party data as inference data for AI is the cornerstone of this transformation. By leveraging granular audience insights, brands can craft tailored narratives that adapt dynamically to consumer preferences. Creative data enables brands to analyze how decisions around tone, product display (in use versus in packaging), and messaging influence key performance indicators (KPIs). It also identifies emotional triggers that drive engagement, providing a deeper understanding of how audiences connect with creative content.
This isn’t just about reflecting on past successes—it’s about predicting future ones with unparalleled precision. For example, brands can use creative data to optimize storytelling elements like pacing, visual hierarchy, and emotional tone to resonate more deeply with their target audiences. By doing so, they create experiences that feel personal, relevant, and memorable.
Brands Must Answer the Call for Innovation
To thrive in this new advertising landscape, brands must maintain an unwavering focus on the consumer experience. This means investing in data and technologies that provide differentiated, actionable insights that result in a shared language for collaboration between production, brand, measurement, agencies, and media teams.
The advertising world is on the cusp of a revolution, and those who harness both the power of AI and data will lead the way. By marrying the art of storytelling with the science of data, brands can not only meet consumer expectations but exceed them, creating a future where every ad is as unique and impactful as the audience it’s designed to reach.
Meg Haley
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