The state of creative effectiveness in 2025

It’s that time of year again — time for the release of our annual state of creative effectiveness report. 

Each year, we dive into how advertising has evolved in response to global trends and consumer behavior, providing actionable insights for brands to create impactful campaigns.

Read on for an overview of what creative effectiveness is, why it matters, how it's measured and, of course, a summary of our key findings from this year’s report.

First, let’s get into what creative effectiveness really means. 

In short, creative effectiveness is the power of creative to drive short and long-term effects for the brand. After all, successful advertising can’t just be creative work. It must drive outcomes for the business, both in short-term sales and long-term brand equity.

Measuring creative effectiveness tells you whether your creativity has been harnessed for the brand to drive those short and long-term effects. 

It’s important to note that creative effectiveness refers to the isolated power of the creative. While media targeting and volume of spend obviously have a big role to play in overall advertising success, we’ll be diving into the impact of the creative in isolation to help understand if the creative itself will work successfully as a multiplier of your media spend.

Why does this matter? Three letters: ROI. 

Paul Dyson, founder of Accelero consulting, conducted research in 2023 to explore the drivers of return on media spend. 

In his research, he found that the profitability multiplier of creative quality is 12x. This means that better quality creative can result in 12 times the ROI of an ad vs. poor quality creative. And recent validation from Zappi found a 30% greater ROI from ads with strong creative effectiveness.

“Creativity is still the main lever at a marketer’s disposal.”

- Paul Dyson

When an ad isn't creatively effective, brands have to invest significantly more in media for the same effect if they’re able to get those effects at all. Therefore, it's worth ensuring your creative is effective.

It’s very difficult to measure the effectiveness of creativity. 

Many methods have emerged through the years to quantify creative effectiveness, including: 

• Traditional prompted closed questions, such as an ad enjoyment rating scale.

• Intuitive questions or tasks, such as using pictures of facial expressions to ask about emotional responses or measuring how quickly people respond to a question, getting closer to intuitive thinking.

• Inference, such as comparing purchase intent before vs after exposure to the advertising or behavioral measures such as whether people watch the full ad.

All of these methods exist to help measure consumer response to creative. 

A deeper dive into how Zappi measures creative effectiveness

Developed in partnership with some of the world’s biggest consumer brands, the Zappi Amplify Ad System blends the best thinking in advertising research to give a well-rounded and complete picture of creative effectiveness through: 

• In-context exposure: Measures real media behavior, ad skipping, brand recall and purchase impact.

• Emojis: Captures emotional response in an intuitive and globally relevant and representative way.

• Forced exposure: Assesses key ad KPIs, social risk and direct consumer feedback.

With this approach, we get a full picture of creative effectiveness. We can also understand an individual piece of creative’s strengths and weaknesses to help diagnose issues and optimize it so it performs to its fullest potential.

Now that we have a greater understanding of what creative effectiveness is, why it matters and how to measure it, let's dive into the trends we’re seeing in 2025. 

Based on the findings from over 4,000 US ads collected using the Zappi methodology we discovered three main highlights out of many findings:  

1. Older generations are not being as recognized as they should be

We found that overall emotion and distinctiveness stay relatively stable from audiences aged 18-45, but from ages 46+, we see a sharp decline in ad distinctiveness (meaning the ads don't stand out and capture attention) and overall emotion (meaning they don't resonate as powerfully). 

It would be a mistake to simply conclude that as consumers age they become hardened and less emotionally moved by advertising. Rather, this is a clear indication of two problems:

1. Brands are intentionally targeting younger generations: Older generations are not connecting emotionally because brands are working hard to stay relevant to the youth, at the expense of staying relevant to older audiences.

2. Advertisers are struggling to understand and connect with older generations: Older generations are more rarely depicted in advertising, and when they are, we often misrepresent them and misunderstand what matters to them to make them feel seen. 

This is particularly problematic when we consider that these older audiences represent almost 45% of the population — and it is a hugely diverse group spanning decades!

2. Brand recall is higher among older audiences

While distinctiveness and overall emotion decrease with age, we found that unaided brand recall actually increases on average as people get older. 

Having built up representations of brands over time, older demographics perhaps have more shortcuts to identify the brand via the distinctive assets, tone of voice, and more in advertising.

3. Men are responding more positively to advertising

We also see differences in the way men and women respond to advertising in the US. On average, men are slightly more positive towards advertising than women, finding it more distinctive and more relevant to them.

Our conclusion from this is not that men are simply more susceptible to advertising or more positive toward it overall, but rather that brands are targeting their creative more towards men or executing in such a way that the stories and execution resonate more with men.

Men are more likely to feel advertising is more relevant to them because they have been the default audience for many years. While times have changed and advertising has gotten more inclusive, we’re still seeing the impact in the data.  

One notable difference to consider, however, is with brand recall: Women have a higher overall brand recall than men.

These are just some of our high level findings from our research on the state of creative effectiveness this year. 

For a deeper dive into the state of creative effectiveness in 2025, including the impact of emotions, celebrities, a deeper dive into category-specific findings, top tips and more, download our latest report.