Digital marketing agency, Elephant Room has unveiled a new performance creative division in response to client demand for more creative and smarter optimisation.
The new division was established in response to changes in the paid media landscape, where creative refreshes are increasingly critical to driving performance and growing demand from Elephant Room clients for expanded creative production, optimisation and testing capabilities.
Sitting beside the performance marketing division, the team will work from performance data to identify creative opportunities and fatigue. The team will develop testing strategies, hooks and angles, produce assets for experimentation, and feed learnings back for future creative development and optimisation.
Elephant Room’s Vivien Ray, and former creative agency founder Mattie Frelingos will lead the new performance creative team, bringing together expertise across storytelling, performance marketing and creative strategy.
Ray, who joined Elephant Room in 2021, has been promoted to senior performance creative strategist, while Frelingos joins the business as senior performance creative producer.
“Paid media has changed significantly in recent years. Historically, performance marketers could drive results through audience targeting, bidding and placement optimisation. Today, platforms like Meta Advantage+, Google Performance Max and TikTok Smart+ have automated much of this. As a result, creative has become one of the biggest controllable drivers of performance,” said Elephant Room managing director, Adam Sharon-Zipser.
“With creative quality and freshness having a larger impact on performance outcomes, brands are increasingly feeling creatively fatigued. As a result, they need creative that is directly informed by media and performance data, and for creative to be subject to ongoing testing and iteration, rather than periodic campaign production. Our Performance Creative team is designed to fill that gap, and create a tighter feedback loop between media performance and creative production.
“We’re thrilled to have Viv and Mattie leading this. Viv has a deep understanding of what drives creative performance in-platform and how creative decisions translate into measurable results. She brings a performance lens to the creative process, and is known for her ability to develop ideas that balance brand, creative thinking and commercial impact. After years as a trusted creative partner, we’re excited to have Mattie joining us. She is passionate about developing ideas that are culturally relevant, creatively distinctive and built to perform, bridging the gap between strong storytelling and measurable impact.”
Ray has been in a senior performance manager role at Elephant Room since 2022, leading paid media strategy for clients including Leo Lin, Billini and Ksubi. She brings a strong background in performance marketing, paid media strategy and creative optimisation to her new role, along with ecommerce experience from in-house stints at Lioness and SENSO.
Frelingos has worked alongside Elephant Room for many years as the founder and owner of her own creative branding and social media agency. She’s worked across a diverse portfolio of brands, giving Frelingos significant experience in creative strategy, social media, content production and brand storytelling.
Commenting on her new role, Ray said: “I’m incredibly excited to step into this new role. The opportunity to co-lead the Performance Creative team is a chance to build on the experience I’ve gained across performance and paid media, while taking on more responsibility for shaping our approach and driving growth for our clients. I’m looking forward to the challenge.”
“Having worked alongside the Elephant Room team for years, I’ve seen firsthand the strength of the agency and its people, so it feels like a natural next step for me. Co-leading the Performance Creative team is about bringing different strengths and perspectives together – I’m looking forward to sharing my experience across creative, social and brand storytelling with the agency’s strong performance and media expertise,” added Frelingos.
