Two senior marketing leaders say the ongoing failure from brands to properly measure creative effectiveness remains one of the industry’s biggest blind spots, despite its outsized influence on performance.
Their comments come as Sydney-based marketing intelligence platform Mortar AI has partnered with global creative data provider DAIVID to embed creative measurement directly into marketing mix modelling (MMM). The collaboration is designed to bring creative performance into the same analytical framework traditionally used to assess media, enabling marketers to evaluate how emotional and creative factors contribute to sales alongside channel spend and media impact.
By combining their capabilities, the two companies aim to unify media and creative inputs within a single decisioning system, allowing brands to better quantify how creative drives outcomes rather than treating it as a separate or secondary input.
Speaking with B&T, Mortar AI’s chief customer officer Paul Sigaloff and DAIVID founder and CEO Ian Forrester said the partnership reflects a shift toward treating creative as a measurable, financially relevant lever within marketing analytics.
What is the blind spot?
According to the pair, despite Australia’s advances in measurement, creative has remained difficult to quantify.
Former oOh!media exec Sigaloff said traditional measurement frameworks have focused heavily on inputs such as reach, spend and conversions, but stopped short of connecting creative to real business outcomes.
“Creative, despite being one of the most powerful levers in the system, has traditionally sat outside MMM,” he told B&T.
Instead, creative has been judged through a mix of instinct, feedback and limited testing. According to Sigaloff, they are approaches that don’t tie directly to commercial impact.
“That’s created a major blind spot,” he said. “One of the biggest drivers of performance hasn’t been taken into consideration when linking marketing to financial outcomes.”
Forrester said part of the issue has been scale. While surveys and research have long been used to measure creative, they’re too slow and expensive to apply broadly.
“You might test a handful of assets a year,” he said. “But brands today are producing thousands. Without scale, you simply can’t quantify creative properly.”
Why creative has been missing from MMM
Sigaloff highlighted increasing pressure on marketing teams to prove ROI, alongside fragmented channels, shifting consumer behaviour and the need for faster decision-making.
“In that environment, siloed reporting is no longer enough,” he said. “You’ve got media reports telling one story, brand tracking telling another, and sales data telling a third, but none of them give you the full picture.”
While MMM has evolved to unify some of these inputs, creative has remained absent—meaning models are still incomplete.
“The industry is shifting away from analytics that explain the past, towards intelligence that improves the next decision,” Sigaloff said. “And that needs to include creative.”
Forrester added that understanding how creative works, not just what outcome it delivers, is critical.
“It’s about the method of action,” he said. “If you understand how attention, emotion and memory drive results, you’re not just measuring performance, you’re unlocking insight.”
Fixing the problem
A longstanding tension between creative and media teams has also contributed to the gap.
“Media teams are data-driven and rational, while creative teams rely on intuition,” Forrester said. “That’s why the two have historically operated separately.”
DAIVID’s approach aims to bridge that divide by applying data to creativity, quantifying elements including attention, emotional response and memory to generate an objective “quality score” for creative.
“Suddenly, it’s no longer just opinion,” Forrester said. “There are numbers that show whether creative is working.”
Crucially, he said the goal isn’t to reduce creativity to formulas, but rather “to provide direction without limiting ideas.”
“We’re not saying ‘put a dog in every ad’,” he said. “We’re saying ‘this worked because it evoked warmth’. That gives creatives a much more powerful and flexible starting point.”
Creative, media & performance need each other
Sigaloff argued that one of the biggest barriers to better decision-making is fragmented data spread across different teams and systems.
“Marketing teams are good at optimising individual parts of the machine,” he said. “What’s missing is driving growth across the whole system.”
The pair highlighted the integration of Mortar AI and DAIVID aims to solve this by “bringing creative, media and commercial data into a single model”, ultimately allowing brands to optimise all three simultaneously.
“The future of marketing effectiveness belongs to brands that adopt connected systems,” Sigaloff said. “Creative, media and performance shouldn’t sit in separate conversations, because in the real world, they all work together.”
Forrester agreed, adding that combining these datasets unlocks deeper insight into why campaigns either succeed or fail.
“When you blend the right creative data with MMM, you don’t just see what worked, but you understand why,” he said. “That’s where the real value lies.”
