New research from EMARKETER and Perion, surveying US marketers and agency professionals
Perion Marketing
16th Apr 2026
Nearly half of marketers believe that real-time creative optimization could drive performance lifts of 11% to 30%, yet very few are structured to capture that upside.
That disconnect points to a growing issue in creative performance marketing: the industry knows creative matters, but it still struggles to operationalize it.
In this post
There is broad alignment on creative’s importance. According to new research from Perion and EMARKETER, 89% of marketers say creative is a key driver of campaign performance, and most evaluate it based on business outcomes like sales, conversions, and return on ad spend.
“Nearly 9 in 10 marketers agree creative is critical to campaign performance.”
And yet, that belief hasn’t translated into execution.
Only a small minority of marketers say creative is fully understood and actively optimized today. For many, it remains inconsistent, siloed, or difficult to measure holistically.
The result is a paradox: creative is treated as essential, but not yet managed as a true performance lever.
The core issue isn’t a lack of data or ideas. It’s how slowly insights translate into action.
Creative decisions are still made across fragmented platforms, each with its own signals and reporting logic. That fragmentation breaks the feedback loop needed for continuous optimization.
“53% of marketers say creative insights arrive slower than media signals.”
In practice, that means feedback often comes too late to influence live campaigns – sometimes weeks after launch or only once a campaign has ended.
As a result, creative optimization becomes reactive rather than proactive.
“72% of marketers wait for performance decline before refreshing creative.”
Ownership is equally fragmented. With responsibility split across teams, delays and disconnects are common, making it harder to act on insights quickly and consistently.
What makes this gap more significant is the scale of opportunity.
“1 in 4 marketers believe real-time creative optimization could unlock gains of 20% or more.”
Nearly half expect double-digit performance improvements if creative could be optimized and activated in near real time.
Yet today, creative is still too often treated as a static asset rather than a continuously evolving input into performance.
Even when testing is in place, learnings are rarely carried forward systematically across campaigns or channels. Instead of building momentum, many teams restart the process each time.
The full research report breaks down exactly where creative performance is being lost, and what high-performing teams are doing differently.
The report will give you access to:
Download: The Creative Optimization Gap
Closing the gap requires more than faster reporting. It requires a system that can continuously learn and apply insights across campaigns.
This is where AI creative optimization begins to shift the model.
AI enables teams to:
“Over half of marketers plan to invest in AI-powered creative systems in the next year.”
However, most adoption today is still focused on asset creation or basic automation. The larger opportunity lies in using AI to build a continuous feedback loop—one that improves creative performance over time, not just campaign by campaign.
To fully unlock creative’s potential, marketers need to move beyond disconnected tools and toward a unified execution model.
This is where Adaptive Creative Intelligence comes into focus.
Rather than treating creative as a one-time deliverable, it reframes it as a dynamic system – one that learns, adapts, and improves continuously based on performance signals.
In practice, it requires four shifts:
At scale, this requires an execution layer capable of turning fragmented signals into continuous optimization.
Creative has long been treated as a moment in time: developed, launched, and reviewed, but performance marketing now demands something different.
The next frontier is not just better creative – it’s creative that operates at the speed of media, learning, and continuously adapting based on what’s working.
For a deeper look at the data, benchmarks, and operating models shaping the future of creative intelligence in advertising:
Download the full EMARKETER x Perion research report
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