Daniel & Friends / Blog / Creative
Creativity drives most of the result. So stop endlessly tuning channels.
There is one number marketers hate to hear, because it ruins the pretty coloured dashboard. According to Nielsen and other large studies, the creative itself, what you say and how you say it, is by far the single biggest driver of whether an ad sells. AdWeek and others cite figures around seventy percent of the effect. Seventy. And yet most teams spend their lives tuning audiences, bids and landing pages while elegantly avoiding the actual brake: a boring ad. Let us fix that.
Daniel Votruba · 28 July 2026 · 5 min read
The number that ruins the dashboard
Nielsen has measured it for years, and in an analysis of nearly five hundred campaigns it found that of all the levers advertising uses to move sales, the biggest is creative: on its own around 47 percent of the effect, and up to 56 percent for digital campaigns. Reach follows at 22 percent, brand at 15 percent, and only then targeting at 9 percent. Add creative and reach together and you are at roughly seventy percent, which is where that famous seventy figure you may know from AdWeek comes from. And here is the awkward irony: marketers themselves estimate creative's contribution at only around seventeen percent, nearly three times less than it really delivers. We underrate the exact lever that decides the most.
Why creative, and not targeting
The reason is annoyingly simple. Even perfectly targeted advertising is useless if nobody notices it and nobody remembers anything. And most advertising ends up exactly there: skipped, scrolled past, forgotten before it finishes. Creative handles the three things it all rests on:
- Attention. Without it nothing happens at all. A boring ad is the tax you pay the media for being ignored.
- Emotion. Binet and Field showed that emotionally driven campaigns power long-term growth far more than a rational list of features. Nobody feels anything toward a spec sheet.
- Distinctive brand assets. Ehrenberg-Bass repeats it like a mantra: the brands that grow are the ones that are unmistakably themselves and easy to recall. Logo, colour, character, sound, shape. So the customer recalls you when they are buying, not just when they are watching your ad.
System1 and Orlando Wood made this measurable in their book Lemon: ads that work with the right brain hemisphere, with characters, story, humour and feeling, earn higher ratings and predict higher long-term profit. Targeting just delivers the envelope. Creative decides what is inside it and whether anyone opens it at all.
The expensive trap: you're tuning the wrong thing
Here is a scene I see on repeat. A campaign underperforms, so the team spends a month reshuffling audiences, twisting bids, testing five landing pages and cursing the algorithm as if it were the weather. Meanwhile the problem sits right in front of them on the screen: the ad is boring. No amount of channel optimization saves a message nobody cares about. Sometimes the best optimization isn't another round in the ad manager, it's simply a better ad.
Try it as a test next time something stalls. Before you reach for the sixth audience setting, ask honestly: if a stranger saw this ad with no sound and no context, would they stop? Laugh? Remember the brand? If the answer is no, no targeting will save you. You are repainting the steering wheel of a car with no engine.
What creative that actually sells looks like
It is not about budget or production cost. It is about a few things you can do cheaply and still cleverly. Ruthlessly distinctive brand assets, so it is clear within half a second who is talking. Emotion or humour instead of a feature list. A recurring device, character or motif that holds across campaigns, because consistency beats novelty. And above all one real idea, not five pretty executions with no shared thought. We wrote separately about how to spot and explain such an idea.
When even the best creative won't save you
Lest this sound like "shoot a nice spot and you're done": creative won't fix a bad product, an inflated price or leaky distribution. And in performance you still need workable targeting and measurement, or even a great ad never reaches the right person. This is about priority order, not deleting data. Media and targeting are a necessary condition. Creative is what decides what happens when the message lands. And it decides the majority.
The takeaway (TL;DR)
- Creative is the single biggest driver of an ad's effect: 47% per Nielsen, 56% for digital. With reach, roughly 70% combined.
- It wins because it handles attention, emotion and distinctive brand assets. Targeting only delivers the envelope.
- The common mistake: months of channel tuning instead of a better ad. Sometimes the fix is new creative, not optimization.
- Good creative: distinctive brand assets, emotion over features, a consistent device and one real idea.
- Creative won't fix a bad product, price or distribution. Media is the necessary condition, creative decides.
Frequently asked
What percentage of an ad's result comes from the creative?
Per Nielsen (nearly 500 campaigns), creative alone accounts for 47% of the sales effect, up to 56% for digital. It is by far the biggest single factor, ahead of reach (22%), brand (15%) and targeting (9%). Creative and reach together make up roughly 70%.
Why is creative more important than targeting?
Even perfectly targeted advertising fails if nobody notices it and nobody remembers it. Creative handles attention, emotion and distinctive brand assets. Targeting delivers the message; creative decides what happens when it lands.
Does that mean media and data don't matter?
No. Media, targeting and measurement are a necessary condition, not a sufficient one. It is priority order: most teams over-invest in channel optimization and under-invest in the creative quality that moves the result most.
How do I recognise good creative?
It grabs attention, triggers emotion, carries distinctive and consistent brand assets, and is clear even with the sound off. Tools like the System1 star rating measure emotional response and correlate with long-term growth.
What is the System1 star rating?
Research that measures emotional response to an ad and rates it 1 to 5.9 stars. A higher rating correlates with higher long-term sales potential. It builds on Orlando Wood's right-brain work and the book Lemon.
Sources: Nielsen (analysis of ~500 campaigns: creative 47%, 56% for digital of the sales effect; creative and reach together ~70%) · System1 and Orlando Wood, Lemon (star rating, right brain) · Les Binet & Peter Field, The Long and the Short of It (IPA) · AdWeek and Westwood One (creative and reach share of effect) · Kantar, WARC. Treat specific percentages as directional and verify against current studies.
Related to what we do: branding & websites and content & production. And on spotting and explaining an idea, there's this piece.
Think a campaign is stalling on the channel when it's really the ad? We'll tell you straight. Talk to us.