For as long as I've been in this industry, creative has been decided the same way: a few cuts go up and the most senior person in it says which one they like. It's not a rule anyone wrote down, but it's the default almost everywhere, and it's persisted for a simple reason. Until recently, there wasn't a better option. You couldn't measure which fifteen seconds of a spot actually held someone's attention, so you measured the reaction in the room instead, and called it instinct.
I'm not arguing instinct doesn't matter. Some of the best creative minds I've worked with have a feel for what's going to land that no dashboard replicates. But instinct without evidence, repeated often enough across enough campaigns, stops looking like expertise and starts looking like a habit nobody's tested. Media buying stopped tolerating that a decade ago.
Creative is the last part of the funnel still running on gut check instead of evidence. But that's already changing.
Creative has no universal formula
Every few years, the industry publishes a fresh set of rules for making great creative: hook viewers in three seconds, hold the logo for X percent of the spot, cap it at this many cuts per fifteen-second unit. These guidelines can be useful, but anyone who's spent enough time in advertising knows that what works beautifully for one brand can fall flat for another..
That's because creative performance is contextual. When you can't measure attention, completion, or downstream response at the level of an individual creative decision, you default to heuristics borrowed from whatever worked last time, for someone else. That's pattern-matching dressed up as expertise, and it's why so many brands keep running the same "proven" playbook and wondering why the results keep sliding.
What's different now is that the excuse is gone. The infrastructure exists to see how a specific frame or a specific pacing choice performs against real behavioral outcomes. The opportunity now is to move beyond applying the same rules everywhere and start understanding what actually drives results in a specific piece of creative.
Every TV ad leaves data behind
Every ad that airs generates a trail of behavioral evidence. For years, almost nobody could actually use it. CTV is where that started to shift. Impressions tied to full households and completion tied to individual devices made it possible to measure engagement and actual viewing behavior. But having the data and being able to act on it fast enough to matter are two different problems, and for a long time the industry had only solved the first one.
AI is the reason creative teams today can predict how their creative will perform before an ad ever airs and before a single dollar gets spent on media. That’s different from getting fast feedback after a flight goes live. It means the model has seen enough prior creative and enough behavioral outcomes that it can look at a new cut and tell you with confidence, whether it’s likely to hold attention or not. This changes the entire cadence of how creative gets made.
tvScientific by Pinterest’s Creative Advisor is where we've put this into practice with advertisers, and it's part of why I keep coming back to the topic. CTV supplied the raw signal. AI is what turned that signal into something a creative director can use before the next flight goes out, not after the campaign's already over.
This is exactly why media buying got instrumented first. Impressions and clicks are tidy, structured numbers a machine can chew on immediately. Creative performance is messier: contextual, subjective, resistant to a single tidy metric. That messiness is precisely the kind of problem AI is suited to, which is why creative is finally catching up to a level of measurability media buying has had for years.
AI shouldn't replace creative directors
None of this is an argument for AI generating creative or replacing the people who make it. Can imagine good creative directors go tense the moment "AI" and "creative" show up in the same sentence, and I understand why. Plenty of vendors in this space have earned that skepticism by overselling automation as a substitute for craft. That's not what I'm describing, and it's not what we built.
What's actually true is that creative directors have been making enormously consequential decisions with almost no feedback loop, and that's the part AI is genuinely good at fixing. Tell a creative director which specific edit, which pacing choice, which version of a spot actually held attention or drove downstream action, and you've given them something to work with that didn't exist before. The best creatives I know want to know whether what they made actually moved the audience to take an action.
That distinction is the whole ballgame. A tool that hands a creative director evidence is a collaborator. A tool that hands them a finished ad assumes their judgment wasn’t needed in the first place, and, honestly, it's worse creative most of the time. The goal has always been to make strong creative people more sure of their own instincts, faster.
Creative is finally joining the performance stack
Media buying went through this exact transformation once. There was a moment when "we bought a good schedule" stopped being an acceptable answer and "here's the data proving it worked" became table stakes. Creative is going through that same shift now in the campaigns running today.
I think we’re headed in a direction where creative decisions finally get the same rigor we demand everywhere else in the funnel: evidence over assumption, iteration over guesswork, and a feedback loop that closes in days instead of quarters. You know, a hypothesis-testing and iteration process that looks an awful lot like the Scientific Method. Tools like Creative Advisor are one small part of that shift, but the point is bigger than any one tool. The teams that build that muscle now are going to make the entire performance stack make sense for the first time, top to bottom.
Inside Performance Advertising with Jason Fairchild delivers unfiltered insights, strategic perspective, and hard truths from inside the evolving world of adtech—cutting through the noise to focus on what really drives outcomes. Subscribe here.
