There was a time when making an add was a big deal.
A 30-second TV spot could take months to plan and produce. OOH had to be booked months ahead. Print meant spending serious money to appear in a finite number of circulations.
When the cost of getting something in front of an audience was high, there was a natural forcing function around quality. You had to get it right, so you sweated the detail.
Digital changed all of that. Today, a brand can brief, produce and launch an ad in hours. Production is cheaper, barriers to entry are lower, and platforms reward volume. When performance starts to fatigue, the answer is often simple: make another creative.
We’ve traded scarcity for abundance. And somewhere along the way, we’ve started to lose the art of reviewing what we’re making.
Creative became an input to the algorithm
The problem is when volume becomes a substitute for quality.
CTR down? Refresh the creative. CPMs up? Make more variants. Meta says the ads are too similar? Create more visual diversity.
Before long, we’re producing creative to keep the platform happy rather than because we’ve learned something meaningful about the customer.
How many brands can genuinely say they have a creative testing programme that builds institutional knowledge – what works for whom, why, and what should influence the next brief?
A/B testing can become another scoreboard: version A won, version B lost, next test please. The interesting question is what the result tells you about the person you’re trying to influence.
Testing creative isn’t the same as learning from creative.
We’ve forgotten how to look at creative
With longer planning cycles, you’d develop multiple positioning territories and headlines, then put the work in front of real people. You’d sit behind a focus group and listen to whether they understood the message, whether it changed their perception of the brand, and whether it made them more likely to consider buying.
There was a discipline to it: look at the work properly before you put it into the world.
Now we can go live the same day the brief arrives. After years of optimising for speed, some of us have forgotten what we’re supposed to be looking for.
Make reviewing a habit
At HSBC, we had a daily creative drop-in. Anyone could bring their work: brand advertising, digital acquisition campaigns, existing customer communications. You’d put it on the screen and get an opinion from people who hadn’t been involved in creating it.
No rubber stamp, or approval theatre. It was simply a place to ask: how does this land?
Someone might spot that the proposition wasn’t clear. Someone else might question whether the customer would understand the message. Someone with no connection to the work might notice that something simply didn’t feel right.
And because it happened regularly, people got better at it.
The junior marketer learned what good questions sounded like. The experienced marketer sharpened their judgement. Creative teams got used to defending an idea rather than every executional choice. Everyone developed a more critical eye.
It was, effectively, a creative gym.
That’s what many organisations are missing now. Not another approval layer. Not another governance process. A culture where people regularly look at creative together and learn how to assess it.
At Lloyds, I’m trying to build that discipline into the briefing process itself – teams have to articulate the hypothesis they’re testing and what we expect to learn. That shifts testing from “which ad won?” to “what did we learn about the customer, proposition or creative?”
That’s the difference between testing creative and learning from it.
A creative review isn’t a taste test
Everyone has an opinion on creative. That’s not the same as having creative judgement.
“I don’t like that picture.”
“It doesn’t feel like us.”
“It’s not premium enough.”
None of this is useful feedback – and “I don’t like that picture” might be the most dangerous of all. It tells the creative team exactly one thing: you don’t like that picture. It doesn’t tell them whether the image is right for the audience, communicates the proposition, supports the idea, or whether changing it would actually make the work better.
A good creative review asks different questions.
Is the idea distinctive? Is the audience recognisable? Is the proposition clear? Does the brand have a meaningful role? Is it memorable? Does the execution make the idea stronger or weaker? Will it actually change behaviour? And, most importantly, does it answer the brief?
The brief should be the referee. If you’ve done the work to understand the customer and distilled that into a clear customer truth, the review should come back to it.
The problem isn’t too many people looking at creative. It’s too many people giving opinions without knowing how to look at it.
The new reality
A 200-page brand guideline can feel out of date almost as soon as it’s shared. We’re creating for more platforms than ever, each with different formats, behaviours and rules. Add content creators into the mix and we have even less control.
A global playbook might establish the direction of travel for something like an Amex Gold, while giving local markets room to nuance the work for their audience and channel.
But flex doesn’t mean anything goes. It makes judgement more important, not less.
As the media landscape becomes more fragmented, playbooks should capture what works better, for whom and where – alongside the latest do’s and don’ts – rather than becoming another list of rigid yes/no rules.
The goal isn’t to control every piece of creative. It’s to create enough structure that teams can move quickly without relying on one person remembering what the brand “would or wouldn’t do”.
The best feedback isn’t always more feedback
A CMO saying “I’m not sure I love it” can send a team back to the drawing board for weeks, even when nobody can articulate what’s actually wrong.
Your job isn’t to make creative you personally like. It’s to help make creative that works.
Sometimes that means challenging work everyone else loves. Sometimes it means defending work you didn’t initially like. And sometimes it means leaving it alone.
Sometimes that means challenging work everyone else loves. Sometimes it means defending work you didn’t initially like. And sometimes it means leaving it alone.
Digital gives us the ability to move faster, test more and learn at scale. We shouldn’t give that up – but we shouldn’t let the algorithm become our creative director either.
The answer isn’t to go back to several months of planning and production… it’s to bring the discipline of the old world into the speed of the new one.
The brands that rebuild this discipline will out-market the ones that don’t, so build creative review into your marketing operations. Make it a regular part of how you work, because once the muscle goes, it’s hard to rebuild.
Build creative review back into how you work. Practise it while you still remember how.
Jay Safdar is a growth marketing leader with experience spanning global financial giants, British icons and tech innovators – including AllSaints, Amex, Amazon, Barclays, EE, Goldman Sachs, HSBC, Hyperoptic, John Lewis, Lloyds and WEX Inc. Specialising in demand generation, performance marketing and marketing effectiveness, Jay has a proven track record of driving commercial impact through data-led strategy and insight-driven creative.
