Ahead of ATS Singapore, Perion’s head of sales, SEA, Doreen Liu, looks at the challenge of turning creative insights into action quickly enough to unlock their full performance potential…

Creative has long been recognised as one of advertising's most important performance levers. Yet despite widespread agreement on its importance, many marketers still struggle to optimise creative with the same speed and precision applied to media.

Recent research conducted by EMARKETER and Perion found that 89.2% of marketers believe creative plays an important role in campaign performance. However, only 3.6% say creative performance is well understood and actively optimised today. This disconnect represents a significant opportunity for marketers seeking stronger campaign outcomes.

In fact, nearly half (48.7%) of marketers believe that if creative could be optimised and activated in near real time, performance could improve by between 11% and 30%.

For years, the advertising industry has focused on optimising media. Marketers have invested heavily in audience targeting, bidding automation, attribution, frequency management, and budget allocation. Media buying has become faster, smarter, and more efficient.

Yet creative, widely recognised as a significant contributor to campaign effectiveness, often remains managed through slower, disconnected processes.

The creative optimisation gap

The challenge is not a lack of data. Marketers already have access to more performance signals than ever before. The issue is that creative decisions are still often made within disconnected platforms, workflows, and reporting systems.

The study found that more than half of marketers (53.2%) receive creative insights more slowly than media optimisation signals. As a result, creative decisions are frequently made after performance opportunities have already passed.

This creates a fundamental imbalance. Media can react in real time, while creative often operates on delayed feedback cycles measured in weeks rather than hours or days.

As channels multiply and consumer behaviour becomes increasingly dynamic, this gap becomes more costly. Consumers move fluidly between streaming platforms, social feeds, retail environments, mobile devices, and physical locations throughout the day. Performance is influenced not only by audience targeting, but also by timing, context, messaging relevance, and cross-channel coordination.

Yet many organisations still optimise these elements independently.

A campaign may generate valuable creative insights within social media, but those learnings often fail to influence execution elsewhere. Teams work against different KPIs, reporting structures vary by platform, and feedback loops remain fragmented.

The findings suggest that the industry's ability to generate signals may be evolving faster than its ability to operationalise them.

Why AI changes the equation

As marketers search for ways to close the creative optimisation gap, AI is emerging as a powerful enabler. While much of the industry conversation has focused on generating creative assets faster, the larger opportunity lies in helping marketers better understand which creative elements drive performance and applying those learnings more effectively across campaigns.

This distinction matters.

Automation improves speed. Optimisation improves outcomes.

Increasingly, AI is transforming advertising from a channel-based execution model into a connected intelligence system capable of learning continuously across environments.

An AI-native execution layer can identify emerging performance patterns, interpret contextual signals in real time, and apply those learnings dynamically across channels. Instead of optimising isolated placements, marketers can begin optimising broader systems of execution.

Historically, creative optimisation has been constrained by slow feedback loops, production bottlenecks, and fragmented ownership. AI has the potential to help reduce those barriers by accelerating insight generation and helping marketers connect signals across campaigns, channels, and contexts.

The opportunity extends beyond automating creative production. Increasingly, marketers are exploring how creative can become a more continuously optimised component of campaign performance.

From channel optimisation to system optimisation

The next challenge for marketers is not adding more tools. It is reducing operational fragmentation.

Many organisations already operate sophisticated technology stacks. The problem is that these systems often function independently rather than cohesively. As a result, insights generated in one environment rarely improve performance elsewhere.

Execution intelligence changes that model by creating a connected learning system across channels.

Instead of launching campaigns and reacting to results afterwards, marketers can begin operating within a continuously learning framework that adapts dynamically as conditions change.

Signals generated in one environment can influence decisions elsewhere. Audience behaviour, creative performance, contextual signals, and media outcomes become part of a unified optimisation process rather than separate workflows.

This also changes how organisations think about performance.

Historically, optimisation focused heavily on delivery metrics such as CPMs, click-through rates, and viewability. As AI-native execution systems mature, optimisation increasingly expands beyond isolated delivery metrics toward broader business outcomes.

The focus moves from optimising placements to optimising performance ecosystems.

The future belongs to connected execution

As advertising grows more fragmented, execution becomes increasingly important.

The competitive advantage of the next decade will not come solely from access to inventory, data, or individual AI tools. Those capabilities are increasingly becoming table stakes across the industry.

The real differentiator may be an organisation's ability to connect signals, decisions, media, creative, and contextual intelligence into unified execution systems capable of learning continuously in real time.

That requires more than automation.

It requires operational redesign.

Marketers will need infrastructure capable of reducing latency between insight and action, breaking down channel silos, and enabling intelligence to move fluidly across environments.

As advertising continues to evolve, organisations that can more effectively connect creative insights, media performance, and execution may be better positioned to unlock stronger performance outcomes.

As creative, media, and execution become more closely connected, marketers will be better positioned to turn performance insights into action at greater speed and scale.

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