By Sam Bradley  •  December 4, 2025  •

Ivy Liu

The aim is to eliminate poorly performing creative assets before they go out, and boost high performing ones in ongoing campaigns, said Peter Grant, head of media effectiveness, Boots U.K. “The proliferation of digital content continues at pace. We need these sorts of tools to be able to be in a place, to be able to do the right things with them,” he said.

Brand investment in the data layer of creative operations has risen this year, buoying companies like EDO, iSpot and System1; the latter’s ad testing revenue rose 38% between 2024 and 2025, according to its most recent annual results. Most of their scaled solutions are, in some way, reliant on generative AI tools.

Why the rise? CMOs, media buyers and creative directors know that the biggest variable in making an effective advert is its creative content — and attempts to institutionalize creative quality can make a brand’s media dollars work much harder.

“There is a growing awareness that in a global ad spend of about a trillion dollars, there’s a lot of wasted spend out there,” said Nick Pugh, managing director of Ebiquity Europe. “Poor creative versus a good creative can have a profound impact on the returns that you get from your spend,” he added.

Furthermore, while generative AI creative production can shave time off traditional advertising workflows, companies won’t be able to access true economies of scale if they stick to old ways of judging advertising effectiveness.

Ian Forrester, CEO of DAIVID, a company which provides pre-flight testing of campaign assets based on large panel surveys, told Digiday the company’s sales had doubled in the last year, driven in part by that demand, though didn’t provide financial specifics.

“Clients can produce hundreds or thousands of assets using gen AI, but they still need to know if it actually works or not,” he said.

Some advertisers, like CPG company Kellanova, have pursued bespoke treatments for that problem. But for advertisers without the Kellogg’s owner’s considerable resources, buying in that capability makes more sense.

As well as Boots, upmarket pasta brand Barilla is also piloting the CreativeX system. “It means we can pre-test ideas more easily, collect a full set of diagnostics, and then move into post-campaign analysis with all our media and creative data in one place. It creates a smoother workflow, yes, but more importantly, it gives us the access to the data we need for richer measurement, modeling, and reporting,” Mariama Kamanda, associate director, data and analytics, Barilla, said in an email.

“Being able to keep a track of the effectiveness of those assets at scale is the challenge,” added Grant. Though he said Boots would eventually use the system to test across every channel it uses, he noted that investment on paid social and on Google’s Performance Max format were focuses for the measurement pilot. 

The CreativeX project, called Datalink, will allow brands to access pre-flight creative measurement tools from Kantar, Adverteyes, DAIVID, Amplified and Dragonfly into a single system. Five brands, including Boots and Barilla, are kicking off Datalink pilots. CreativeX’s chief exec Anastasia Leng likens it to an “air traffic controller” for effectiveness data.

Though it’s early days, Boots is using the system to monitor projected impressions and the cost of media investments associated with each creative asset; Grant would eventually like to link pre and post-flight testing to incremental sales. “That’s what we’re aiming at,” he said.

Centralizing measurement and effectiveness data might sound prosaic, but it can mean the difference between getting lost in the noise, or being able to act on clear signal. “Having ability to compare across the mix is actually quite tough, which also leads to a degree of confusion,” noted Ebiquity Europe’s Pugh.

Brands need to aim not just to measure their creative and media activities, he added, but place them in a framework that enables a “unified perspective.”

“There’s a need to have accountability [with] a single point of view,” he said.