Why creative data is the answer in the AI era

By feeding creative content into AI-based ad generators, it’s become easy to automate the production of thousands of ads all aimed at increasing views and sales associated with a campaign. It has created an endless war for consumers’ attention among today’s leading companies like Amazon, Google, and TikTok.

But efficiency doesn’t always equal effectiveness. And chasing short-term success is not a recipe for creating meaningful, lasting, emotional connections with consumers. 

In fact, the rapid integration of generative-AI tools into ad campaigns appears to have caused many advertisers to overlook the importance of creative storytelling and brand salience. This is, at least in part, because the most popular ad optimization platforms today seem more concerned with monetizing clicks and making fast sales than helping a brand build the kind of impressions that differentiate it from its competitors and develop consumer loyalty. 

Unpacking brand salience

There is a sense that the Information Age has turned the idea of brand success on its head. Metrics associated with immediate platform performance have come to overshadow what any intelligent, creative marketer knows about creating a successful campaign. That is, it should be effective in communicating a brand’s story to the consumer and in a way that creates an undeniable sense of distinctiveness and differentiation, ideally tapping into the audience’s emotions and providing a meaningful value in the customer’s lives. 

This, in essence, is what brand salience is all about. 

AI and the short-term mirage

The problem is not the use of AI, but rather the misuse of AI based on the application of the wrong data and key performance indicators (KPIs). For example, Google’s generative-AI tools can be used to create “novel” advertisements optimized for immediate performance, but this requires that a brand’s creative content be altered to maximize platform-specific performance and interactions at the potential expense of coherent storytelling and long-term brand building, and in many cases, overall brand value. 

Put simply, views and interactions imply very little about the actual effectiveness of the content in creating an emotional resonance among consumers. And the proliferation of retail-enabled platforms means maintaining overall brand quality across dozens of channels has made it increasingly difficult for marketers to determine the overall quality of one of the most important parts of an advertising campaign: creativity. 

Prioritizing Brand Salience in Creative fields

While the allure of quick wins is nothing new in the age of digital advertising, it has considerably grown over the past year with the emergence of generative AI. However, the data being utilized by generative-AI systems in advertising is not designed for creative storytelling or to inform creative decision-making in the context of a brand and its relevant category. The ultimate cost of rapidly deploying GenAI-based creative content is a race to the middle and the loss of what makes a brand unique. However, prioritizing long-term growth over short-term gains in a splintered media world continues to be a challenge every CMO is facing. 

Brand salience is the linchpin of sustainable growth and essential long-term brand building, but without integrating creative data, it’s virtually impossible to trust current AI models in advertising without sacrificing your ability to tell your brand’s story and differentiate your identity from the competition. 

This absence of creative data in the advertising industry is something we noticed even before the rapid rise of generative AI. And understanding both the critical importance of brand salience and the potential of rapid advancements in AI and machine learning, we spent years building StoryData to help brands disrupt the cycle of short-lived strategies in favor of long-term, data-driven brand building powered by never-before-seen creative insights. 

Charting a New Course

Importantly, delivering brand salience in the Information Age requires the desire and willingness to go against the grain of current conventional wisdom. It requires having unshakable confidence in both the capabilities of your creative teams and the utilization of emergent forms of data alongside increasingly powerful technologies. 

To gain such confidence, however, it helps to first understand what it means to measure and monitor brand salience in a metrics-driven world. 

Whereas most agencies focus on datasets highlighting how consumers react to certain communications, our creative intelligence platform applies AI and machine learning to deconstruct and understand communications in the unique context of their category, in addition to measuring the impact of different storytelling elements within a given campaign. Born exclusively from the stimulus of audio and pixels within brand communications, the resulting creative dataset allows advertisers to quantify key variables associated with brand salience, such as emotion, meaningfulness, and differentiation, gaining insights into the stimulus, not the response, that is creating consumer behavior.

To be sure, this approach represents a radical deviation from the existing status quo, but it is a deviation born of an understanding that current uses of data and AI in advertising are actively replacing the pursuit of brand excellence with a fruitless infatuation with short-term engagement. More importantly, without charting this bold new course to revive brand salience, there is a risk that more shallow uses of generative AI will lead to a significant, and potentially permanent, devaluation of creative storytelling, which is not only essential for successful long-term brand building but has always been and should continue to be the very lifeblood of the advertising field. 

By feeding creative content into AI-based ad generators, it’s become easy to automate the production of thousands of ads all aimed at increasing views and sales associated with a campaign. It has created an endless war for consumers’ attention among today’s leading companies like Amazon, Google, and TikTok.

But efficiency doesn’t always equal effectiveness. And chasing short-term success is not a recipe for creating meaningful, lasting, emotional connections with consumers. 

In fact, the rapid integration of generative-AI tools into ad campaigns appears to have caused many advertisers to overlook the importance of creative storytelling and brand salience. This is, at least in part, because the most popular ad optimization platforms today seem more concerned with monetizing clicks and making fast sales than helping a brand build the kind of impressions that differentiate it from its competitors and develop consumer loyalty. 

Unpacking brand salience

There is a sense that the Information Age has turned the idea of brand success on its head. Metrics associated with immediate platform performance have come to overshadow what any intelligent, creative marketer knows about creating a successful campaign. That is, it should be effective in communicating a brand’s story to the consumer and in a way that creates an undeniable sense of distinctiveness and differentiation, ideally tapping into the audience’s emotions and providing a meaningful value in the customer’s lives. 

This, in essence, is what brand salience is all about. 

AI and the short-term mirage

The problem is not the use of AI, but rather the misuse of AI based on the application of the wrong data and key performance indicators (KPIs). For example, Google’s generative-AI tools can be used to create “novel” advertisements optimized for immediate performance, but this requires that a brand’s creative content be altered to maximize platform-specific performance and interactions at the potential expense of coherent storytelling and long-term brand building, and in many cases, overall brand value. 

Put simply, views and interactions imply very little about the actual effectiveness of the content in creating an emotional resonance among consumers. And the proliferation of retail-enabled platforms means maintaining overall brand quality across dozens of channels has made it increasingly difficult for marketers to determine the overall quality of one of the most important parts of an advertising campaign: creativity. 

Prioritizing Brand Salience in Creative fields

While the allure of quick wins is nothing new in the age of digital advertising, it has considerably grown over the past year with the emergence of generative AI. However, the data being utilized by generative-AI systems in advertising is not designed for creative storytelling or to inform creative decision-making in the context of a brand and its relevant category. The ultimate cost of rapidly deploying GenAI-based creative content is a race to the middle and the loss of what makes a brand unique. However, prioritizing long-term growth over short-term gains in a splintered media world continues to be a challenge every CMO is facing. 

Brand salience is the linchpin of sustainable growth and essential long-term brand building, but without integrating creative data, it’s virtually impossible to trust current AI models in advertising without sacrificing your ability to tell your brand’s story and differentiate your identity from the competition. 

This absence of creative data in the advertising industry is something we noticed even before the rapid rise of generative AI. And understanding both the critical importance of brand salience and the potential of rapid advancements in AI and machine learning, we spent years building StoryData to help brands disrupt the cycle of short-lived strategies in favor of long-term, data-driven brand building powered by never-before-seen creative insights. 

Charting a New Course

Importantly, delivering brand salience in the Information Age requires the desire and willingness to go against the grain of current conventional wisdom. It requires having unshakable confidence in both the capabilities of your creative teams and the utilization of emergent forms of data alongside increasingly powerful technologies. 

To gain such confidence, however, it helps to first understand what it means to measure and monitor brand salience in a metrics-driven world. 

Whereas most agencies focus on datasets highlighting how consumers react to certain communications, our creative intelligence platform applies AI and machine learning to deconstruct and understand communications in the unique context of their category, in addition to measuring the impact of different storytelling elements within a given campaign. Born exclusively from the stimulus of audio and pixels within brand communications, the resulting creative dataset allows advertisers to quantify key variables associated with brand salience, such as emotion, meaningfulness, and differentiation, gaining insights into the stimulus, not the response, that is creating consumer behavior.

To be sure, this approach represents a radical deviation from the existing status quo, but it is a deviation born of an understanding that current uses of data and AI in advertising are actively replacing the pursuit of brand excellence with a fruitless infatuation with short-term engagement. More importantly, without charting this bold new course to revive brand salience, there is a risk that more shallow uses of generative AI will lead to a significant, and potentially permanent, devaluation of creative storytelling, which is not only essential for successful long-term brand building but has always been and should continue to be the very lifeblood of the advertising field.