It’s Time for Creative to Answer to ROI

If you ask CMOs if they are interested in measuring the ROI of their creative, all will say “yes.” If you ask them what tools they use, you’ll make those CMOs uncomfortable because most of their creative effectiveness tools are not ROI focused. 

Vas Bakopoulos, SVP of research and insights at MMA Global, shared a fascinating chart at the Vidmob Creative Data Summit 2025. It summarized survey results from nearly 300 senior marketers about which tools they rely on to assess creative effectiveness. 

The top two cited tools – brand lift studies at 51% and media metrics at 41%– are among the least predictive signals of sales and ROI. And the most ROI-focused tools were among the least cited, including Market Mix Models (MMMs) at 31% and Random Control Testing (RCT) at 11%. 

Why is this so? What options do CMOs have? 

First, brand lift studies are abundantly funded by publishers, to demonstrate to media buyers short-term campaign impact, a reasonable goal in itself – but not ROI. Media metrics like clicks, likes and view duration are popular because they are instant, free, and ubiquitous – and often gamified. Even though they fail to show any meaningful link to sales and ROI, these tools have become so prominent and longstanding that people simply accept them. 

What about MMMs and RCT? Their lack of popularity can be explained by their complexity, rigidity, cost, and lagging historical views. They’re not practical for measuring creative effectiveness in a world where a single brand can have thousands of creatives and targeting permutations that must be decisioned in real-time. 

 
Enter ROI-Based Creative Effectiveness Scoring
What is the solution? One sound path is a hybrid model, taking advantage of ROI-focused tools like MMM and RCT, and appending creative evaluation techniques like AI-powered creative scoring. We call this ROI-based Creative Effectiveness Scoring, and it embeds two outcomes: sales effectiveness and media efficiency. 

Determining Creative’s Sales Effectiveness 
Realeyes’ own PreView creative measurement solution is a prime example. It was born as a creative copy testing tool, powered by human face coding technology, to measure attentional and emotional responses to ads. To predict sales performance, we evaluated large sets of sales outcome data (including MMMs, RCTs and more) against viewer response data of individual ads. We then weighted raw response metrics into a single composite score, calibrated to sales outcomes.  

Recently, we applied our historical database of 18 million human observations across 90 countries on every major ad platform to develop a synthetic version of PreView. It instantly predicts human attentional response as well as sales outcomes, applying the same calibrations against ROI from MMMs and RCT experiments. Requiring no human participants, the cloud-based system delivers high accuracy (80% versus ground truth) along with speed and scale to process every ad on the planet. 

Mars was an early PreView innovation partner, appending sales performance predictions to thousands of ad creatives. Mars reported the system drove 18% incremental sales lift in 19 markets, along with $30 million in ad optimizations in 18 months. 

Global finserv AXA executed a pilot integration of Preview into its MMM, revealing that a 5% lift in Attention Potential score resulted in a 12% increase in new business generation. Moreover, the creative scoring explained 23% of AXA incremental new business generation and improved the MMM to enable a prediction of ROI to within a margin of <10% accuracy. Lastly, AXA established that an Attention Potential score of 57/100 for a creative was the threshold for positive business growth.

 

Determining Creative’s Media Cost Efficiency (CPM)
Beyond linking to sales outcomes, PreView’s Attention Potential score demonstrates a reliable inverse relationship with  impression cost on media platforms. In other words, attaining a high Attention Potential score will yield more sales, and do so more cost-efficiently.

Media platforms like YouTube, Meta and TikTok often reward campaigns with lower CPMs when they meet certain creative quality or engagement thresholds. The ad-quality incentive makes sense because better ads drive better business results for advertisers, and create better experiences for users of those platforms. Realeyes doesn’t claim to have cracked the black-box ad auction algorithms, though there is overlap in creative scoring.  

Multiple advertising partners have validated the inverse relationship between Attention Potential and CPM. For example, one advertiser saw that a 1% increase in Attention Potential will decrease CPM by 2.7%. This pattern occurs on auction platforms that include some form of creative quality in their pricing algorithm.

ROI = Sales Effectiveness + Media Efficiency 
Attention Potential is a true ROI-based Creative Score, because it embeds both effectiveness (sales link) and efficiency (media cost). Best of all, it is practical in solving today's advertising challenges with speed, operational simplicity, technical scalability, and economics that justify scoring all ad content within a brand's creative portfolio. Indeed, advertisers manage every single ad to better ROI.  

PreView is a modern system for ROI-Based Creative Effectiveness.