Ad creative is the biggest driver of paid media performance, but for years it’s also been the hardest thing to measure.
That’s the problem we set out to solve when we built Creative Intelligence. Already running across dozens of sophisticated advertisers in our client base, it pulls creative analysis and performance data into one place so you can see exactly what’s working and why.
In this piece, Jordan Taylor, the engineer who built it, and Shirin Bucknam, the creative strategist deploying it with clients, walk you through what it does and how it’s changing creative strategy.
Why A/B testing alone isn’t enough
The default response to understanding creative performance has been A/B testing. Run two versions, see which wins, then iterate. It works only up to a point, because what it tells you is what won, not what caused it to win. You know version B beat version A. You don’t know whether it was the opening hook, the moment the product appeared or the emotional tone of the voiceover. So the next brief gets written on instinct. Informed instinct, maybe, but instinct nonetheless.
Then there’s the question of scale. A/B testing is a one-at-a-time instrument, and most brands running paid social at any meaningful volume have hundreds or thousands of active creatives spread across campaigns, formats, and platforms. The signals are all there. The patterns exist. But no team can manually extract and cross-reference creative attributes across that volume and connect them to performance outcomes in any meaningful way. That’s the problem that required building something new.
Creative Intelligence: breaking creative down into its parts
Creative Intelligence pulls in creatives from Meta (with all platforms to follow in late Q2), uses AI to identify and categorize every element across each asset, and aligns those creative signals with your actual performance metrics to show what is and isn’t working from a creative perspective.
The analysis operates across four dimensions: style and format, people and product, content and messaging, and CTA and offers. On top of that, for video, every individual hook is broken down by timestamp, capturing the visual detail on screen, the text, the audio, the emotional trigger, and whether the product is visible at that exact moment. All of that information feeds back into dashboarding you’d recognize, organized through AI tags and surfaced as specific recommendations tied to performance.
The result is a single environment where creative decisions and performance outcomes exist in the same place.
What you can now know that you couldn’t before
Hook analysis at timestamp level
The first few seconds of a video ad are where most performance is won or lost. Creative Intelligence breaks down every video by timestamp, identifying the type of hook used, the visual detail on screen, the emotional trigger, whether the product is visible yet, and what marketing element is at play, all mapped to the exact second it occurs.
So instead of knowing that a video had a strong hook, you know that a problem-solution opening at the zero-second mark with product visible by second three correlates with significantly higher completion rates across your portfolio.
Portfolio-level pattern recognition
Individual creative analysis is useful. But pattern recognition across hundreds or thousands of creatives is where the real intelligence sits. Creative Intelligence tags every asset automatically on onboarding, with the option to add custom tags, across dimensions like tone, visual style, emotion, pacing, and messaging approach. Those tags are then aligned with performance metrics across your full portfolio.
The output isn’t a league table of your best ads. It’s an answer to questions like: does a minimalist visual tone outperform high-energy across your awareness campaigns? Which hook categories drive retention versus conversion? When is the optimal moment to introduce a benefit claim? The platform runs statistical analysis to ensure the insights it surfaces have enough volume behind them to be reliable, so you’re not optimizing toward a creative that happened to have a great CPA on minimal spend.
AI-generated creative briefs
The briefing capability is where this becomes most tangible for creative teams. Creative Intelligence can generate creative strategy reports directly from your portfolio data analyzing what’s working, surfacing hypotheses worth testing, and producing briefs that tell your creative team not just what to make but why, grounded in evidence from your own performance history.
It also pulls in industry benchmarks for context. So a brief isn’t just “here’s what’s worked for you,” it’s “here’s what’s worked for you, set against what’s working in the category.”
Custom analysis for brand-specific questions
Not every insight lives in a standard taxonomy. Creative Intelligence includes a custom analysis feature that lets you define your own variables: identifying which specific product lines appear in which creatives, scoring assets against brand-defined criteria, extracting information that’s particular to your category or portfolio structure. Where manual tagging across thousands of assets would take weeks, the AI does it in minutes.
What this changes in practice
The briefing process is where this lands most concretely. Right now, most creative briefs are built on a combination of platform best practice, category convention, and whatever performed well in the last campaign. It’s a reasonable starting point, but it means creative strategy is always partially working from received wisdom rather than your own data.
When you have Creative Intelligence running across your portfolio, the brief becomes an output of analysis rather than an input to it. You know which hook categories are driving retention for your audience. You know the optimal timing for your product reveal. You know whether your high-energy creative is actually converting or just generating cheap clicks. The creative team gets direction that’s specific, evidence-based, and connected to the metrics that matter.
Bottom line
Creative has always generated data. Every hook, every edit decision, every choice about when to show the product and how to frame the benefit produces a signal. The problem has been that until now, those signals were invisible at scale, buried in the gap between the creative suite and the performance dashboard.
Creative Intelligence closes that gap, not by replacing creative instinct, but by giving the people with that instinct a clear read on what is actually working and why.
If creative is the biggest driver of paid performance, it deserves the same analytical rigor you apply to everything else. Now it can have it.
Want to see what Creative Intelligence surfaces in your own portfolio? Get in touch.
