Creative, the element of advertising that most determines its efficacy, has long been underserved by technology. By contrast, much has been said about and done to audiences, who are convoluted by data deprecation, subject to identity resolution, and increasingly fed up with audience targeting’s status quo. Media planning and buying are mature processes that, for decades, have been effectively mediated by demand-side platforms and agencies. Similarly, measurement and optimization are supported by a robust market of technology-enabled services that riff on multitouch attribution and media mix modeling.

Meanwhile, the creative process has been fraught — for too long — with arbitrary taste-making and the opinions of the highest-paid people in the room. Such rooms were filled with creative directors, art directors, designers, and copywriters generating big ideas, such as De Beers’ “A Diamond Is Forever,” Volkswagen’s “Think Small,” and UNICEF’s “Tap Project.” Their ideas were disconnected from media planning and buying, however, making it challenging to isolate and optimize creative’s impact. Various assumptions were made about how creative should look and feel. Over decades, risks inherent in the creative process exacerbated, eroding brands’ value exchanges with consumers.

That erosion hastened as data deprecation intensified. In 2021, costs per acquisition across paid social skyrocketed due to Apple’s iOS 14 update. As signal loss strengthened, advertisers realized that creative — rather than audiences, media planning and buying, or measurement and optimization — was their most effective lever of brand and performance. They began investing in tools to exponentially increase their amount of creative, personalize it, and learn how variables within it performed. The market for creative advertising technologies was, therefore, tripartite: Creative automation tools generated more creative, dynamic creative optimization tools personalized it, and creative intelligence tools gleaned granular insights.

It’s Time For Creative Adtech To Consolidate

Advertisers realize that it’s self-defeating to produce more creative for more creative’s sake and generate unactionable creative intelligence. They need tools spanning the entire creative lifecycle, from brainstorming big ideas to learning how each creative variable performs. Furthermore, creative and media teams need a source of truth that de-risks creative production as well as media planning and buying. Deep, cross-functional empathy is required between creative scientists and artful marketers, who are deploying creative across channels while cutting their teeth on generative AI-powered tools eating the world.

The Forrester Wave™: Creative Advertising Technologies, Q4 2024, has just published to help advertisers select tools that accelerate the creative process, synergize creative and media, and rehabilitate value exchanges with consumers. Compared to our last Wave evaluation on creative advertising technologies four years ago, this Wave focuses less on owned media-related capabilities and more on new-fashioned predictive and generative AI tools as well as solutions for retail media and shoppable advertising. All vendors in our Wave have a primary focus on proprietary creative advertising technologies, span various channels and aspects of the creative process, and are asked about often by advertisers during Forrester inquiries, guidance sessions, advisories, and consulting.

Consider supplementing our Wave with our Ad Creative Competency Assessment Tool to gauge and improve your creative process’s maturity. In addition, check out How To Use Technology To Develop Better Ad Creative for best practices. If you’re interested in learning more about vendors in our Wave or in the report, The Creative Advertising Technologies Landscape, Q2 2024, please reach out.