This is the second piece in our series on why campaigns fail to convert. The lead article named creative as one of the four places a campaign breaks. This one makes the full case for why it's the biggest lever most businesses aren't pulling hard enough.
The number that should change how you budget
NCSolutions analysed 455 CPG campaigns across digital and television and found creative quality drives 49% of incremental sales. Not targeting. Not reach. Not the platform you chose. The creative itself, the thing being said and how it's being said, accounts for close to half of everything the campaign achieves. Targeting accounted for 11%, reach 14%, recency 5%, and brand 21%, in the same analysis.
Kantar and WARC ran a separate study matching creative quality scores against real profit data and found the most creatively effective ads generated more than four times the profit of the weaker ones, and that pattern held whether the ad was built to move product this quarter or build the brand over years.
Put plainly: two businesses can spend the same media budget, targeting the same audience, on the same platform, and get a fourfold difference in return purely because one of them took the creative seriously and the other treated it as a formality.
Why most businesses get this backwards
When Advertiser Perceptions asked marketers and agencies how much of a campaign's result they thought came from creative, the average estimate was around 21%. Roughly half its real, measured value. Meanwhile the same group consistently overestimated how much targeting contributes.
That gap explains a pattern you see across almost every mid-size business's marketing budget: sophisticated, expensive targeting and automation, sitting on top of creative that got whatever time and budget was left over once the media plan was finalised. It's the wrong order of operations, and the evidence has been saying so for years.
Media platforms themselves increasingly say the same thing. Google has stated that for brand campaigns, media only accounts for roughly 30% of what makes a campaign work, with the remaining 70% coming from the creative running inside it.
Why the separation makes it worse
The problem isn't just underinvestment, it's disconnection. When a media buyer isn't in the room while creative is being built, and creative isn't adjusted once real performance data starts coming in, you get campaigns where the message and the buy were never actually talking to each other. That disconnect is estimated to leak around 30% of overall marketing efficiency, and campaigns that keep creative and media connected, so creative can be iterated against live performance rather than judged only at the brief stage, have been shown to cut wasted spend on underperforming assets by a similar margin.
What this looks like done properly
This is the case for a full-service studio sitting inside the same team as strategy and media, rather than as a separate line item bought from whoever's cheapest. Creative built with the media plan in mind from the outset. Creative that gets revised based on what's actually converting once the campaign is live, not left untouched until the next quarterly review. Creative given the budget and the creative leadership its measured impact actually justifies, rather than the leftover portion of the spreadsheet.
We've delivered work under exactly that model for clients including Google Cloud, Mastercard, HP, Lenovo and UNICEF, where the creative wasn't a wrapper around the media plan, it was built alongside it from day one.
FAQ
How much of my campaign's performance actually comes from the creative versus everything else? NCSolutions' analysis of 455 CPG campaigns puts creative's share of incremental sales at 49%, making it the largest single contributor.
If creative matters this much, why do most marketing budgets weight it so lightly? Marketers and agencies themselves consistently underestimate creative's contribution, Advertiser Perceptions found the average estimate sits around 21%, roughly half its measured impact. Budgets tend to follow that underestimate rather than the evidence.
Does this apply to performance campaigns as much as brand campaigns? Yes. Kantar and WARC's research found the fourfold profit advantage of strong creative held for both short-term, sales-driving ads and long-term, brand-building ones. It's not a brand-only effect.
Explore how Cleo's full-service studio builds creative and media as one connected process. Visit /how-we-work/