Gain Theory has published a global survey of Fortune 500 marketing leaders on measuring creative effectiveness, finding that 62% struggle to prove the value of their creative investment.
The survey of 115 senior marketers found a sharp gap between confidence in creative work and confidence in the evidence used to assess it. While 89% said their creative had been effective or very effective over the past 12 months, nearly half could not confidently justify creative spending to senior finance leaders.
According to the findings, 49% said they lacked the data-informed evidence needed to defend or expand a creative budget with a chief financial officer or other finance executives. One in four said their creative budget had been reduced in the previous 12 to 24 months because they could not make a data-informed business case.
The results point to a wider imbalance in how companies judge media and creative work. Although 81% said creative and media are equally important to business impact, only 36% apply the same measurement rigour to both.
Many marketers still rely on broad media indicators to judge creative outcomes. The survey found that 80% use media metrics such as reach and impressions to evaluate creative effectiveness, even though those measures do not show whether the work is contributing to sales.
As a result, many large brands are backing campaigns without clear evidence of what the creative itself is delivering. Gain Theory found that 62% acknowledged putting media spend behind creative assets whose true value was unknown.
Measurement gap
The findings come as marketers face growing pressure to show the commercial return from every part of their budgets. Creative has often been treated as harder to quantify than media placement, partly because media buying has long been assessed through established reporting systems and attribution models.
The survey suggests this gap remains unresolved even among some of the world's largest advertisers. Two-thirds of respondents rated their ability to measure creativity as advanced or very advanced, and 63% said they were confident their approach accurately captures creative impact on key business goals. Yet the same group reported basic shortcomings in the data and methods behind those claims.
Among the main barriers, 68% cited inadequate data, and 56% pointed to a lack of tools and technology. The report also found regional differences, with North American marketers reporting lower confidence in their measurement approach than peers elsewhere.
In North America, 60% said their measurement capability was advanced, compared with 70% in the rest of the world. Respondents there were also more likely to rely on older methods such as copy and pre-testing, with 64% using those approaches versus 42% elsewhere.
By contrast, marketers outside North America were more likely to identify human and cultural obstacles. Half of North American respondents cited those barriers, compared with 31% in other regions.
AI adoption
The study also found growing use of artificial intelligence in both the creation and assessment of advertising. Most respondents said they were already using or piloting AI in creative production, suggesting automation is becoming embedded in mainstream marketing processes.
Specifically, 87% said they were using or piloting AI for creative production. More than half (56%) said they were also using AI for creative effectiveness measurement, indicating that adoption in assessment is following production, though from a lower base.
This matters because the survey suggests a mismatch between the speed at which companies can produce creative work and the systems available to judge it. If marketers can generate more advertising variations more quickly, the need for reliable measurement may become more urgent, not less.
The report builds on earlier Gain Theory research that found 50% to 70% of a campaign's sales uplift can be attributed to creativity. That finding has added to industry debate over whether boards and finance teams have undervalued creative work because its evidence base has been weaker than that for media buying.
Russell Nuzzo, Global Head of New Media Measurement at Gain Theory, commented on the findings.
"For too long, advertising creative has remained a comparative blind spot, while media buying has been subjected to intense scrutiny and sophisticated analytical models. Our research shows marketing leaders feel good about their creative, but can't prove it's working, and CFOs are starting to notice. At the end of the day, if you can't measure it, you can't defend it. Closing that gap is now the single biggest opportunity in marketing measurement," said Nuzzo.