90% of Global Campaign Toolkits Never Activated by Local Markets

New research launched by CreativeX at Cannes Lions demonstrates that brands continue to spend millions on creative work that never makes it to market.

CreativeX, a technology company powering creative decisions with data for leading brands such as Diageo, Bayer and Unilever, analysed over 1,000 core assets, or the hero creatives that form the heart of a brand’s campaign toolkit. It then looked for the presence of those core assets across 250,000 ads to determine how often those assets made it to market, in either its original or adapted form.

The analysis revealed that 45% of core assets are never activated in any capacity and are lost in the handoff between production and media functions, or global and local teams. This represents a substantive waste of time, money, and creativity that never reaches its intended audience, and is estimated to cost the average F500 company $25M a year, or the equivalent of three super bowl ads and nearly half a billion impressions.

The low level of core asset activation is driven by difficulties in content discovery as ad volume continues to expand, as well friction between global and local teams. 90% of global campaign toolkits are never activated by local markets, who at best case simply do not use the assets created for them and at worst-case, invest additional budget into recreating similar assets at a local level.

These low levels of activation persist due to a lack of visibility into the end-to-end content production process, with brands having little real-time data on the activation, adaptation, and media investment of all their content investments. Marketers have tried to solve this problem through the use of taxonomies, but human error and oversight, not to mention the continued increase in content production accelerating with genAI, have made taxonomies increasingly ineffective at providing an accurate view of the health of a brand’s content supply chain.

By using machine learning technology to match assets based on visual similarity, CreativeX was able to get a near real-time view of asset activation, adaption, and investment. Through this, the research also found that ads derived from core assets had, on average, only 20-30% more media investment than stand-alone ads that were unaffiliated with a big idea.

CreativeX founder Anastasia Leng comments, “Our ads aren’t wearing out. In fact, they’re barely wearing in. 45% of ads aren’t even given a chance to wear-in. This represents a large opportunity for greater budget efficiency and brings to the forefront the measurement and accountability gaps in our content supply chain, which AI is uniquely positioned to help address.”