Photo: Scottsdale Mint / Unsplash
THE ROI OF
Creative
System1 star-rated 304 ads. Kantar tested 450 more. Both matched their scores against databases of what campaigns actually returned.
In the WARC and System1 analysis, ads rated 4–5 stars for creative quality returned 8.1× revenue. Ads rated 1–2 stars returned 3.3×. On profit-based return the spread was wider still: 5.7× against 1.7×.
Kantar and WARC, working from a different ad-testing database entirely, found the most creative and effective ads generate 4.7× more profit.
Two separate research firms, two separate ad-testing databases, the same conclusion: the difference between good creative and average creative is a multiple, not a margin.
Not 8% better. Not 20% better. Somewhere between two and three times the return on the identical budget.
This report is about that gap — why almost nobody can prove it to a CFO, where the money leaks out before it gets there, and what the new cost base actually looks like.
Two databases. One answer.
Two research firms. Two independent ad-testing databases, built and scored by different people using different methods. Both land on the same shape of answer: creative quality moves return by a multiple. When independent methods converge like that, it stops being a marketing claim and starts being a finding.
Photo: Anthony Aird / UnsplashTHE
MULTIPLIER
Every lever in marketing has a different length. Most teams are pulling the shortest one.
Someone actually ranked the profit multiplier of every marketing lever. Creative quality came second. Audience targeting came last.
Paul Dyson's analysis of profit drivers — reproduced in System1 and Effie's 2025 research — puts a number on each lever. Creative quality carries a 12× profit multiplier. Getting your target audience right carries 1.1×.
Which one does your team spend more meetings on?
Rate an ad's creative quality before it runs, and you have a usable forecast of what it will return.
System1 star-rated 304 ads, then matched them against WARC's database of real campaign ROI outcomes. The relationship isn't subtle. Moving creative from 1–2 stars to 4–5 stars roughly doubles to triples the revenue return on the same spend.
Profit-based return (ROMI) shows an even wider spread: 5.7× against 1.7×.
This isn't one dataset with a flattering result. It's the most replicated finding in advertising effectiveness.
The multiplier is also growing. System1 and Effie tracked creative's profit multiplier at 10× in 2014 and 12× in 2023. Their 2025 update puts it at 21×.
System1 & Effie, "How Creativity Multiplies Profit," 2025 — base: 1,265 campaigns representing an estimated $139B in market shareAnd being boring has a price. Campaigns in the least-dull quartile returned $7.10 per dollar. The most-dull quartile returned $4.40.
System1 & Effie, 2025 (n=147 campaigns matched with ROI data)More assets at 3× is just a more expensive way to lose. The only version of scale worth having is scale that holds its creative quality.
That's the specific problem Quickads is built around — 30M+ ads of performance intelligence behind every asset, so volume goes up without the star rating going down.
Photo: Denis Sebastian Tamas / UnsplashTHE PROOF
PROBLEM
There's a multiple sitting in plain sight. Almost nobody can prove it exists to the person holding the budget.
85% of marketers say they can measure ROI. 32% actually measure it. The rest are walking into the CFO's office holding a feeling.
64% of B2B marketing leaders say they don't trust their own organisation's marketing measurement enough to make decisions with it.
Forrester Marketing Survey, 2024Not one of roughly 50 senior marketing leaders interviewed at Fortune 500 companies could clearly articulate the ROI of their martech investment.
McKinsey & Company, "Rewiring martech," Oct 202561% of marketing budgets are set from prior spend or enterprise revenue — not from demonstrated return.
Deloitte Digital, "2025 Marketing Investment Trends," May 2025 (n=1,395 US marketing leaders)
Photo: Susan Wilkinson / UnsplashEvery year, more people upstairs want the number. Every year, fewer marketers have it.
In one year, the share of marketing leaders reporting increased CFO pressure went from 52% to 63%. Board pressure jumped from 33% to 50%. Their self-reported top challenge? Demonstrating marketing's impact on financial results.
The CMO Survey, 34th edition — Duke University Fuqua School of Business, with Deloitte and the American Marketing Association, Jan–Feb 2025 (n=281, 99% VP-level or above)Unmeasured budgets get cut, and unmeasured marketers get replaced. Gartner named the pattern.
A brand underinvests in measurement. Weak measurement produces unconvincing results. Unconvincing results attract less funding. Gartner calls it the brand doom loop — and found 84% of companies stuck inside it.
Photo: Logan Voss / UnsplashWHERE THE
MONEY LEAKS
Nobody budgets for the eighth round of feedback. Everybody pays for it.
The biggest savings in creative aren't found by making the work cheaper. They're found in the money that leaves before any work happens.
McKinsey put a number on it: a global telecom saved $65 million a year by restructuring how it bought creative — keeping the big agencies for ideas, building in-house for campaign craft, and routing low-value production work elsewhere. McKinsey's broader estimate is that 10–20% of marketing spend is simply inefficient.
Note what that is and isn't. It isn't a discount negotiated off a rate card. It's a different structure.
McKinsey & Company, "Beyond belt-tightening," June 2023 — underlying survey of ~3 dozen CMOs at major North American consumer companiesNone of these appear as a line item. All of them are real money.
We started working with agencies on a retainer, and the quality of work was subpar. We were spending time and money on revisions for simple things.
Even the process of choosing an agency burns money on both sides. The average new-business pitch costs an agency €43,804 to run — a cost that gets recovered somewhere.
EACA, "Cost of Pitching 2025" (n=412 European agency respondents)Meanwhile 39% of CMOs are actively cutting agency budget allocations, and 22% say generative AI has already reduced their reliance on external agencies for creative and strategy.
Gartner 2025 CMO Spend Survey (n=402 CMOs, Feb–March 2025)A global telecom saved $65 million a year by building its own creative capability and buying execution differently. McKinsey estimates 10–20% of marketing spend is simply inefficient.
McKinsey & Company, "Beyond belt-tightening," June 2023 — underlying survey of ~3 dozen CMOs at major North American consumer companies
Photo: Scottsdale Mint / UnsplashTHE NEW
MATH
P&G now tests an ad for a tenth of what it used to cost. That isn't a productivity story. That's a different cost base.
These aren't vendor projections. These are figures the advertisers themselves put on the record.
P&G: ads tested and optimised in days versus weeks, at a tenth of the cost — with a stated runway of $500–700M in annual advertising savings and efficiencies.
P&G CFO Andre Schulten at CAGNY, Feb 2025 (reported by Marketing Week; corroborated by WARC)Unilever: product imagery 2× faster and 50% cheaper; TRESemmé Thailand saw an 87% content cost reduction with a 5% lift in purchase intent.
Unilever plc press release, March 2025Unilever Beauty & Wellbeing, across four brands: up to 55% savings, 65% faster turnaround, double the click-through rate, attention held 3× longer.
Unilever plc press release, March 2025
Photo: Anthony Aird / Unsplash83% of ad executives have deployed AI in the creative process, up from 60% two years ago. A third of all ad assets now use it. Cost efficiency has become the number one reason cited.
IAB with Sonata Insights, "The AI Ad Gap Widens," Jan 2026 (n=104 US ad executives) · IAB Digital Video Ad Spend & Strategy, July 2026A cheaper cost base doesn't automatically become a better return. Most of the industry is taking the savings and stopping there.
Nine in ten US marketing agencies use generative AI — but 61% still classify AI as "a cost of business," with limited direct monetisation. They're cutting cost, not creating value.
Forrester Research with the 4As, "The State Of AI Inside US Marketing Agencies, 2026," June 2026Labour rose to 24.5% of marketing budgets in 2026, up from 21.9% — moving in precisely the opposite direction to the assumption that AI quickly cuts headcount cost.
Gartner 2026 CMO Spend Survey (n=401 CMOs, Jan–March 2026)Coca-Cola's AI-generated holiday campaign produced 70,000+ AI video clips — and still required roughly 100 people to make. The humans didn't leave the process.
Wall Street Journal reporting, Nov 202571% of CMOs will invest $10M+ a year in generative AI, up from 57%. Only 30% describe their organisation's AI capability as mature enough to scale.
BCG, June 2025 (n=200 CMOs) · Gartner 2026 CMO Spend Survey (n=401)Put the two halves of this report together and the conclusion is uncomfortable but simple: the industry is using AI to make 3× creative cheaper, when the actual prize is using it to make 8× creative repeatable.
Photo: M. Rokhman Az-Ziqro N.S. / UnsplashPULL THE
LEVER
Three moves. None of them are "increase the budget."
Fund the 12× lever, not the 1.1× one.
Creative quality carries a 12× profit multiplier. Audience targeting carries 1.1×. If your quarterly planning spends more hours on segment definitions than on whether the work is any good, you are optimising the shortest lever in the building.
The reallocation costs nothing. It's the same budget, aimed at the part of the equation that actually moves.
Quality and speed at the same time — the production layer handled so the judgment calls get the attention.
Quickads helped us translate 150 years of craftsmanship into creative that actually performs on Meta and Google — without losing the soul of the brand.
Change the cost base, not the vendor.
The $65M a year McKinsey documented didn't come from negotiating harder with the same structure. It came from replacing the structure — keeping agencies for the ideas they're genuinely best at, and refusing to pay agency rates for resizing and reformatting.
Another agency search gets you a different logo on the same eight rounds of feedback.
Measure the creative, not just the media.
85% confidence against 32% practice is the gap that funds everything else. Star-rate the work before it runs. Track return by creative, not only by channel. The research proving creative's 8× ceiling exists precisely because someone bothered to measure creative as its own variable.
Do that, and the budget conversation stops being a defence and becomes a business case.
"Quickads turned our ad workflow from a grind into a growth loop."
Behind all three: 30M+ ads of performance intelligence, 500K+ ads generated for 30,000+ brands across 120 countries, and strategists who have managed $100M+ in ad spend. Not a tool bolted onto the old process — a different cost base with the creative quality bar built in.
Quickads published company data, quickads.aiTHE BUDGET WAS
NEVER THE PROBLEM.
Two independent databases put the same gap in front of the industry: 8.1× for creative rated genuinely good, 3.3× for creative that isn't. Same money. Same channels. Same team. The multiplier is the variable almost nobody is managing — and it's the only one with a 12× profit coefficient attached to it.
You don't need a bigger lever. You need to stop pulling the short one.