A new industry report published on April 15, 2026, by EMARKETER in partnership with Perion has put numbers on a gap that has circulated as conventional wisdom for years: marketers believe creative drives campaign results, yet almost none of them manage it with the same systematic discipline applied to media. The survey, conducted in February 2026 among 111 US agency and marketing professionals each managing more than $5 million in annual media spend, found that 89.2% consider creative important for optimizing campaign performance. Only 3.6% say creative performance is well understood and actively optimized today.

The gap between those two figures is the central finding. It is not a small discrepancy - it spans the distance between an industry talking point and an operational reality that the data now makes uncomfortable to ignore.

The disconnect in numbers

The survey, titled "The Creative Optimization Gap," was fielded by EMARKETER in collaboration with Perion and authored by Arielle Feger, Senior Analyst, Media at EMARKETER. According to the report, 38.7% of respondents describe a state where creative is recognized as important but measurement is inconsistent or siloed. Another 23.4% say cost efficiency and scale still take priority over insight when creative decisions are made. Some 14.4% go further, describing creative effectiveness as a "black box," while 19.8% characterize creative intelligence as a major untapped opportunity.

The measurement methods being used tell a similar story. According to the report, 75.7% of respondents measure creative effectiveness primarily through business outcomes such as sales, conversions, or ROAS. Media performance metrics - click-through rates, video completion rates, engagement - are used by 73.0%, and brand metrics by 62.2%. Only 20.7% apply AI-driven or automated creative analysis, and a mere 2.7% report not measuring creative effectiveness systematically at all. The irony embedded in those numbers: most marketers claim to measure creative, yet the same data shows creative is rarely optimized in response to what is measured.

Feedback that arrives too late

Part of the structural problem sits in timing. According to the survey, 41.4% of marketing teams receive creative insights two to four weeks after a campaign launches, and 16.2% receive no feedback until the campaign has ended entirely. By that point, the window for in-flight adjustment has closed. Over half - 53.2% - say creative insights arrive slower than media optimization signals, and 36.0% report that this lag in timely insights is the primary reason creative is not treated as a continuously optimizable variable.

That asymmetry matters because media and creative are not separate systems - they share the same campaign. Media bidding and audience targeting have operated on automated, near-real-time feedback loops for years, while creative decisions continue to follow production timelines measured in weeks. According to the report, nearly three-quarters (72.1%) of marketers wait for a performance decline before making any creative change at all. A further 61.3% cite frequency or fatigue signals as a trigger, and 59.5% rely on planned rotation schedules. Only 11.7% use AI-driven performance signals as a trigger for creative refresh.

The implications are not purely operational. They carry financial consequences. According to the survey, one in four marketers believe that if creative could be optimized systematically and activated in near real time, it would unlock performance or efficiency gains of more than 20%. One in five believe the upside exceeds 30%. Nearly half - 48.7% - expect a performance lift of 11% to 30% from real-time creative optimization. Those projections, if accurate even in part, represent material performance value that is currently going uncaptured on most campaigns.

Ownership fragmented across teams

The accountability picture complicates matters further. According to the survey, 31.5% of respondents report that accountability for underperforming creative is shared across teams, while 18.0% each place it on the media team or the creative team separately. Another 12.6% say there is no clear accountability at all. The result is a structure where everyone is nominally responsible and nobody is specifically responsible.

This fragmentation has measurable downstream effects. According to the report, 56.8% of marketers say that disconnects between media and creative teams cause delays or errors at least monthly. Nearly one in five - 18.9% - face those disconnects weekly. The survey also surfaced a seniority-level discrepancy: managers and supervisors are significantly more likely than directors or senior directors to believe that agency partners are accountable for addressing underperforming creative. Senior leaders are more likely to recognize underperformance as a shared or internally influenced issue.

Automation versus optimization

The survey draws a distinction worth examining carefully. According to the report, automation and optimization are not the same thing: "Automation speeds things up, while optimization finds what's working and why, and applies that learning to the next decision." That distinction has practical consequences for how organizations interpret their current capabilities.

Currently, automation at most organizations focuses on media bidding and budget allocation (46.0%) and creative testing through A/B or multivariate methods (41.4%). Creative variant selection or rotation is automated by 30.6%, and dynamic creative optimization (DCO) by 22.5%. But a significant share - 16.2% of respondents - say none of those actions are automated at their organization at all.

The channel visibility data also reveals where optimization is structurally easier versus where it remains difficult. Social media provides the clearest visibility into creative performance, according to 69.4% of respondents. Programmatic display follows at 48.7%, then digital video at 42.3%, and connected TV at 24.3%. Digital audio registers at 11.7%, and DOOH at 2.7%. That ordering matters: CTV and DOOH are among the fastest-growing channels in programmatic advertising, yet they offer the least creative feedback signal today. A further 9.0% of respondents say no channel currently provides clear visibility.

The contextual inputs being used to inform creative decisions are also limited in practice. According to the survey, audience or behavioral signals are the most commonly used input (58.6%), followed by content or page context (48.7%). Location or proximity data is used by 36.0%, device or screen context by 28.8%, and time of day or day of week by 27.0%. Despite the variety of inputs available, most marketers rely on static rules defined upfront (23.4%) or basic automated optimization (33.3%) rather than dynamic workflows that connect those signals to creative decisions in real time.

AI investment intent versus actual deployment

The survey presents a specific tension around AI. Over half - 54.1% - say their organization is likely to invest in AI-powered creative or creative optimization systems in the next 12 months. But the current deployment picture looks considerably different. Only 13.5% of respondents currently use AI-driven optimization with performance feedback or cross-campaign learnings. Some 46.9% do not use AI for contextual creative at all.

According to the report, marketers use AI to adapt or personalize creative most actively across social media (37.8%), programmatic display (32.4%), and digital video (22.5%). On the measurement side, 20.7% use AI-driven or automated creative analysis - but only 1.8% describe those tools as the most impactful in their decision-making.

Barriers to adoption are both technical and cultural. According to the report, 24.3% of respondents say AI tools lack sufficient trust, and 14.4% describe them as difficult to integrate. The leading constraint overall is creative production constraints, cited by 59.5% as the primary barrier to treating creative as a continuously optimizable variable. Measurement limitations follow at 36.9%, lack of timely insights at 36.0%, organizational silos at 34.2%, and platform or data fragmentation at 33.3%.

This tension between stated investment intent and current deployment is not unique to creative optimization. Research from TransUnion and EMARKETER published in October 2025 found that marketing measurement confidence had stalled despite data growth, with 54.1% of marketing professionals reporting no change in confidence year-over-year and 14.3% saying it had declined. The gap between data availability and actionable insight is a recurring structural problem across marketing operations.

What the structural gap looks like in practice

The report identifies a specific workflow failure at the center of the problem. Creative decisions are being made inside disconnected platforms, each with its own optimization logic, feedback loop, and reporting framework. Without a unified execution layer, insights stay siloed and action lags behind performance. According to the report, nearly a fifth of respondents - 18.9% - iterate within campaigns without carrying learnings forward to future campaigns. Almost half - 49.6% - only sometimes use learnings from one channel to inform decisions in another.

That cross-channel learning gap is directly relevant to the industry conversation around modular creative structures. According to the report, making creative components - hooks, calls to action, value propositions, visuals - interchangeable and structured as discrete elements allows AI systems to test, recombine, and prioritize variations without requiring full asset redevelopment. That operational model requires a production approach that most organizations have not yet adopted. Clinch addressed a version of this problem in February 2026 with the launch of its Creative Template Catalog inside Flight Control, adding atomic asset-level optimization and AI auto-tagging to omnichannel ad campaigns - fitting into the same pattern of vendors moving to consolidate fragmented creative workflows under unified environments.

Perion's position in this research

The report is commercial in origin - it was produced by EMARKETER in partnership with Perion, the ad technology company whose Outmax AI execution agent is designed to address exactly the problem the survey describes. According to the press release distributed through Adweek Wire on April 15, 2026, Tal Jacobson, CEO of Perion, described the framing directly: "For years, marketers have placed more emphasis on inventory than on creative. This research confirms what we have been seeing with our clients: that framing is incomplete. Nearly three-quarters of marketers only refresh creative after performance declines. That is not optimization; it is a post-mortem."

Arielle Feger, the EMARKETER author of the report, framed the systemic issue in similar terms in the same announcement: "Marketers know creative is underoptimized despite the fact it's a performance driver. They know the feedback loop is broken, but they aren't sure how to fix it."

Perion describes Outmax as an AI execution agent that sits above multiple DSPs, allocating spend dynamically based on live performance signals while simultaneously optimizing creative delivery. Perion's 2025 Form 20-F, filed with the SEC on March 16, 2026, documented Outmax's performance in the field, including a CTV campaign where cost per action fell from $4.61 to $0.53 over four weeks - an 89% reduction. The company's architecture is positioned specifically as a cross-DSP layer, operating above individual platform optimization systems in a way no single walled garden can replicate.

For the marketing community, the context matters: this survey does not emerge from a neutral research body. Its methodology is sound - 111 respondents, all managing more than $5 million in annual media spend, surveyed in February 2026 - but its framing and conclusions align closely with Perion's commercial positioning. That does not make the data wrong. Research from Smartly and EMARKETER published in July 2025 found that 72% of marketers reuse or slightly modify creative assets across platforms rather than developing tailored content, a finding that independently corroborates the structural inertia the Perion report now quantifies at greater depth. The broader pattern - creative treated as a static deliverable while media optimizes dynamically around it - has been documented across multiple research sources now.

Why this matters for the marketing industry

The report arrives as the industry is navigating a broader recalibration toward outcomes-based advertising. Analysis published in January 2026 on PPC Land documented the shift from impression-based metrics toward business outcomes as the dominant frame for campaign evaluation, with LoopMe's research showing 85% of advertisers consider proprietary data and measurement capabilities critical in partner selection. Creative effectiveness, historically difficult to attribute with precision, sits at the center of that pressure.

The survey's finding that only 3.6% of marketers report creative performance as well understood and actively optimized is striking precisely because the industry has built sophisticated infrastructure for optimizing everything around creative - bidding strategies, audience segments, frequency caps, placement selection - while the creative asset itself often remains unchanged from launch to campaign end. The feedback loop that could drive continuous creative improvement exists in theory; in practice, it arrives too slowly and is owned by too many different teams to drive consistent action.

The Perion and EMARKETER data does not resolve those structural problems. What it does is put specific numbers on them, making the scale of the gap measurable for the first time with a dedicated survey rather than as a byproduct of broader media effectiveness research.

Timeline

Summary

Who: EMARKETER, in partnership with ad technology company Perion, surveyed 111 US agency and marketing professionals. The report was authored by Arielle Feger, Senior Analyst, Media at EMARKETER. Quotes in the press release include Tal Jacobson, CEO of Perion.

What: A research report titled "The Creative Optimization Gap" documenting the structural disconnect between how much marketers believe creative drives campaign performance and how actively they optimize it. The core finding: 89.2% of respondents say creative is important for campaign performance, but only 3.6% say it is well understood and actively optimized. The report covers feedback loop timing, accountability structures, automation adoption, AI deployment, and channel-level creative visibility.

When: The survey was conducted in February 2026. The report was published and distributed on April 15, 2026.

Where: The survey covered US agency and marketing professionals only, all managing more than $5 million in annual media spend. The findings apply specifically to the US market, though the structural issues the report documents are broadly relevant to digital advertising operations globally.

Why: Perion commissioned the research to provide an empirical foundation for the argument that creative is systematically underoptimized relative to media, and that connecting creative to real-time performance signals represents an unseen performance opportunity. The broader industry context involves increasing pressure to demonstrate business outcomes from advertising investment, a trend documented across multiple research sources throughout 2025 and into 2026.

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