The 2026 Brand Creative Report
Creative quality accounts for roughly half of what advertising sells. It receives about a third of the budget.
We read 291 independent sources on advertising effectiveness and traced every figure back to its origin. Here's what they say.
July 10th, 2026
The part of an advertisement that actually sells is the creative itself, the idea and the craft you see on screen, not the money spent buying airtime or the targeting. It does about half the selling but gets about a third of the budget, so the thing that works hardest is paid the least. Good creative makes people feel something and uses characters, sounds and styles you recognize on sight. Most work does neither, and dull work costs more, because it has to buy the attention that better creative earns for free. Most video ads never hold attention long enough to be remembered at all. And here is the 2026 twist: nearly every marketer is now racing to make ads with AI, yet most people say they prefer and trust work made by humans. So the move is simple. Spend more on getting the creative right, because that's the lever that moves sales, and human work is gaining value, not losing it, as AI floods everything else.
- TL;DR
- Abstract
- 1Introduction
- 2Method
- 3Findings
- 3.1 Creative quality as the primary driver of sales
- 3.2 AI adoption among marketers
- 3.3 Consumer response to AI-identified work
- 3.4 Emotional response and distinctiveness
- 3.5 The cost of dull advertising
- 3.6 Budget allocation versus measured impact
- 3.7 Attention thresholds in digital video
- 3.8 Effectiveness in business-to-business advertising
- 3.9 Production capacity and the in-house shift
- 4Discussion
- 5Practical implications
- 6Limitations
- References
How much is good creative actually worth? We wanted an answer in numbers, so we read the largest independent datasets on advertising effectiveness, and they told a consistent story. The creative itself, not the media weight or the targeting, is the single largest driver of what an advertisement sells, and by a wide margin. One dataset finds it drives close to half of the effect an advertisement has on sales, ahead of reach, brand and everything else. Then we looked at how budgets are divided, and a separate benchmark gives creative under a third of the money, so the work doing the most to sell is funded as if it did the least. A second pattern runs alongside the first: as generative AI pushes the cost of competent creative toward zero, audiences are moving the other way, and they trust and prefer the work they take to be human-made. Every figure here is traced to its primary source, so you can check us on all of it.
We should be straight with you about our position. We are Moonb, a human-led creative studio, and two of the findings here happen to be what we sell: that creative is the single largest driver of an advertisement's effect on sales, and that most consumers prefer advertising made by people. That alignment is exactly why we didn't lean on our own data for any of it. Every figure in this report is attributed inline and traced to an independent primary source, so check us: verify each number against its cited origin, and weigh the conclusions on that evidence alone.
Introduction
Every marketing budget is, in the end, an argument about what makes advertising work. Media weight, targeting, and channel mix all have their champions, and all attract investment, while the creative itself is the odd one out. It's the work people actually see, yet it's the hardest part to measure, so it's usually the first thing treated as a cost to trim. We make creative for a living, and that bothered us.
The good news is that we didn't have to guess. A large body of independent measurement now bears on the question, and we read it, from econometric studies of tens of thousands of campaigns to controlled experiments to consumer surveys running into the hundreds of thousands, and they all point the same way. This report gathers that work and tells you plainly what it shows, and it takes up a newer question, one generative AI has made urgent: whether people respond differently to advertising once they believe a machine made it.
The stakes are large. Global advertising revenue passed one trillion dollars for the first time in 2024 and it has kept growing, with digital now more than three-quarters of the total268,276, and at that scale, even small differences in what makes advertising work turn into very large sums of money.
Method
A word on how we worked. We didn't run new primary research for this edition; it's a structured review of what has already been published, and we selected sources for three properties: they draw on primary data, they're independent of the outcome being measured, and their method is disclosed. Where we had a choice, we preferred econometric databases, controlled experiments, longitudinal industry benchmarks, and large-sample consumer surveys from research bodies and trade associations.
Every figure reported here is tied to its originating source, with the sample and year stated, so you can go straight to the original and check. Where an estimate is modelled, or a study was commissioned by a vendor, we say so and discuss its limitations. Looking ahead, we're planning a primary survey of marketing and creative practitioners for a subsequent edition.
Findings
Creative quality as the primary driver of sales
What actually drives sales? The econometric models we read pull that question apart driver by driver, and the creative comes out on top, ahead of where the money is spent and who it reaches, and it's the lever you can most readily move.
Contribution to advertising's effect on sales. NCSolutions, Five Keys to Advertising Effectiveness. Approximately 500 CPG campaigns, 2017.2
Dyson, Drivers of Advertising Profitability, WARC. 28,000 campaigns, 2023.82,83
Kantar finds the most creative and effective advertisements earn more than four times the profit of the average3, and System1 shows that adding a validated creative score to media data nearly doubles the accuracy of predicting long-term share growth44: two independent databases landing on the same answer.
Figure 4. Return-on-investment multiplier by driver: creative execution is the largest lever an advertiser directly controls. Source: Accelero and Dyson, via Thinkbox and WARC.
AI adoption among marketers
Generative AI is now part of nearly every creative team's daily work, yours too, most likely. That near-universal adoption is the backdrop for what comes next: how audiences have started to react to it.
Canva with The Harris Poll, State of Marketing and AI 2026. 1,415 marketing leaders.168,167
We checked this across independent surveys. 86% of video advertisers use or plan to use generative AI for video creative, and buyers expect it to reach 40% of all advertising by 2026169; 86% of global creators already use it173; and in one industry panel every brand surveyed, representing 72 billion dollars of spend, now uses generative AI175.
Consumer response to AI-identified work
So how do audiences respond to all that AI-made advertising? The surveys give an answer, and controlled experiments give the same one: a measurable preference for work people can tell a person made.
A further 87% consider a human element essential to the best advertising.
Canva with The Harris Poll, State of Marketing and AI 2026. 3,547 consumers across 7 countries.168,179
Figure 2. Identical advertisements shown under different attributions. Participants rated the AI-attributed version lower on naturalness, usefulness, and emotional response, although the material was unchanged. Source: Nuremberg Institute for Market Decisions, 2024.225,198
You can watch this happen in the lab. Identical images get rated higher when they are labelled human-made, and the largest effect is on how much people would pay for them185. In an EEG study, AI-made advertisements produced weaker memory activation and were rated more annoying and confusing198, and about 73% of people say they would pay more for human-made work than for a comparable AI version208.
Emotional response and distinctiveness
Advertising works mostly through feeling, and through the distinctive assets that make a brand recognizable. Most work falls short on both, and that, we found, is exactly where the advantage sits for the work that doesn't.
Share of advertisements that provoke no emotional response. System1, Test Your Ad database, 2023.44,45
Ipsos and Jones Knowles Ritchie, Be Distinctive. 26,000+ respondents, 2023.53,54,56
The data is blunt on this: emotional campaigns are around twice as efficient as rational ones and return roughly twice the profit7. Recurring brand characters make an advertisement about six times more likely to perform strongly, and distinctive sonic cues over eight times, yet such assets appear in only about 8% of work54. And the most creatively consistent brands record 28% more very large business effects50.
The cost of dull advertising
Dull advertising is expensive. It has to buy the attention that better creative earns for free, so the same result costs more.
Dull advertising requires roughly 2.6 times the spend to achieve the same share growth.
System1 with Peter Field, The Extraordinary Cost of Dull, 2023. Modelled estimate.45,46
But there's another side to that ledger, and it pays. Advertising that does make people feel something works harder for the same money: positive-emotion campaigns have been associated with 47% higher return on ad spend and six times the lift in intent to act113.
Budget allocation versus measured impact
Creative and production take a minority of most budgets, well out of proportion to what they contribute to sales. One honest caveat: the two shares come from separate studies, one measuring where the money goes and the other where the sales effect comes from, so don't read them as a single like-for-like split.
Working versus non-working share of advertising budgets. WFA benchmark, via ANA and TrinityP3, 2021.19
The good news is that where budget does flow to brand-building rather than short-term activation, the return compounds. Integrating the two lifts return on investment by about 90%, while a performance-only approach carries roughly a 40% penalty87. And brand marketing beats performance marketing on ROI in about four cases out of five89.
Attention thresholds in digital video
What decides whether a video advertisement works is attention, specifically whether it holds enough of it for a memory to form. On the evidence we read, aspect ratio barely matters.
Figure 3. Of 100 digital video placements, 85 get less than 2.5 seconds of attention, short of the level that reliably builds a memory. Source: VCCP Media with Dr Karen Nelson-Field, 72 advertisements, over 20,000 views, 2025.103,109
Attention predicts outcomes about three times better than viewability105, and you need roughly nine attentive seconds to shift consideration104. So format follows from attention rather than driving it: long-form television carries about 2.2 times the unaided recall of short-form mobile, and viewers watch 71% of an advertisement on television against 30% on a phone111.
Effectiveness in business-to-business advertising
Business-to-business plays by the same rules, only more so. Most buyers are not ready to purchase, and strong creative is rarer still.
The 95:5 rule. Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for the LinkedIn B2B Institute, 2024.145
LinkedIn B2B Institute with System1, Cashing In on Creativity144. Google and CEB, From Promotion to Emotion152.
Figure 5. The 95:5 rule: at any moment only about 5% of business buyers are in-market. Source: Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for the LinkedIn B2B Institute.
Production capacity and the in-house shift
Demand for creative is outrunning the teams that make it, and companies have noticed. Their answer has been to build the capability in-house.
Share of advertisers operating an in-house agency. ANA, The Continued Rise of the In-House Agency, 2023.245,246
Over the same period, marketers report content demand rising more than fivefold, while roughly seven in ten creative professionals report burnout. The constraint those two facts point to is not raw volume but scarce, high-quality creative direction.
Adobe, content demand research, 2025. Never Not Creative, Mentally Healthy survey, 2024.20,21
The squeeze shows up inside teams: some 57% of creative professionals spend more than a quarter of their time on non-creative tasks248, and on one platform alone, the volume of brand assets under management grew 458% in three years92.
Everything we read points one way: creative quality is the biggest measurable lever on what advertising returns, and it's funded as though it were the smallest. That gap is the whole story. As generative tools drive the cost of average creative toward zero, the work that reads as human seems to be gaining value, and on the evidence we gathered, the one change most consistent with how advertising actually performs is this: spend more on the quality of the creative itself.
Practical implications
The same evidence that diagnoses the problem also describes the remedy, because the qualities that separate effective creative from dull creative are the ones the studies keep measuring. Effective work does four things.
It makes people feel something
Emotional campaigns run about twice as efficient as rational ones7.
It's built on distinctive assets, used consistently
Rarer than it sounds. Only 15% of brand assets are truly distinctive53, recurring brand characters make an advertisement about six times more likely to perform strongly and distinctive sonic cues about eight times, yet such assets appear in only about 8% of work54. The most creatively consistent brands record 28% more very large business effects50.
It earns enough attention to lay down a memory
Most placements never manage it: 85 of every 100 digital video placements get less than 2.5 seconds of attention, short of the level that reliably builds a memory103.
And, increasingly, it reads as human
78% of consumers prefer advertising made by people even where AI could do the task better168.
Four traits, one signature: we kept finding them together in the work that returns the most.
So what does that signature mean for budgets? It's a logic more than a figure. Dull work needs about 2.6 times the media spend to reach the same share growth45, which means money that improves the creative is buying down that media penalty. Set this against a benchmark split of 68% media and 32% creative and production19, and the marginal return on the non-working portion is where your money works hardest. Funding brand-building alongside activation rather than in place of it compounds the effect, lifting return on investment by about 90%87. And because a validated creative score can nearly double the accuracy of predicting long-term share growth44, you can check the quality of an execution before you commit the media behind it, which turns creative investment into a measured decision instead of a hopeful one.
Read together, the findings don't ask you for a bigger budget. They ask you to point the one you have at the part of the work that, on all this evidence, decides the outcome.
Limitations
Let's be straight about what this report is. We synthesized other people's studies, so we inherit their limitations. Several headline figures are modelled estimates rather than direct measurements, including the estimated cost of dull advertising, and sample sizes vary widely. A number of sources were commissioned by parties with a commercial interest in the result, whether they sell the media whose effectiveness they measure or compete in the category. So wherever a claim is load-bearing, we corroborated it against independent academic or trade-body evidence.
Three gaps deserve to be stated plainly. First, the landmark effectiveness research predates generative AI, so we've had to set pre-AI effectiveness theory alongside post-2024 adoption data without a source that directly tests whether the same rules govern AI-produced creative, and nobody has run that test yet. Second, no field study yet isolates the effect of AI-made against human-made creative on actual sales, as distinct from memory, attention, or stated preference. Third, the consumer and workforce evidence is weighted toward the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. These gaps are exactly why we're planning a primary survey for the next edition.
Creative effectiveness and profitability
Emotion, distinctiveness, and the cost of dull
Brand building and performance
Attention, memory, and video
Business-to-business effectiveness
AI adoption in marketing
Consumer response to AI-made work
Human and AI creativity: academic literature
Trust, authenticity, and disclosure
Production capacity and the creative economy
The advertising market
291 sources, grouped by theme.
Cite as: Moonb. The 2026 Brand Creative Report. 2026.