How to bring creative and media together? It’s a question that has perplexed advertising leaders for years.

The big money in advertising has been shifting away from creative and towards media; from the big creative idea to data-led measurement of a brand’s performance. But it’s also true that it’s almost impossible to succeed without both sides of the coin working in your favour.

Barney Worfolk-Smith is chief growth officer at Daivid, an adtech company that provides creative data to clients, allowing them to measure what it calls the “constituent parts of creative effectiveness”: attention, emotional response, brand recall and more.

Worfolk-Smith argues that creative needs to start being data-led, lest it fall into irrelevance as media becomes dominant. He also unpacks the implications of commoditising creative by turning our understanding of it into 1s and 0s.

Highlights:

3:58: Testing creative data to improve effectiveness — why winners are differentiated

11:40: Influencer marketing's "painful adolescence": vanity metrics, eschewed brand guidelines, briefing process

14:49: Implications of assessing creative at scale

20:28: Getting creative and media to work more closely together by engaging with data

25:52: AI anxieties: "the sloppening" is here

Related articles:

Creative process stifled by poor training and feedback

How to hack the attention economy — with VCCP Media’s Will Parrish

Havas Play Network’s CEO is on a mission to bring media and creative back together

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Thanks to our production partners Trisonic for editing this episode.

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