Alex Collmer, CEO & Co-Founder Of Vidmob, On Impact Of First-Party Creative Data In Marketing

Alex Collmer: We all saw how impactful consumer and audience data were over the past decade. Together, this type of information opened up a revolution in targeting, segmentation, and addressability that made advertising far more effective for marketers who made the right investments. As we head into the AI future, it’s becoming clear that creative data will open up the next S-curve in value creation. In a sense, it will be the recipe for effective communication­—by platform, format, audience, and objective. When every marketer can make anything they want, instantly and for free, knowing exactly what to make to drive your objectives will be what matters most.

Proprietary creative data will be critical for marketers, as it will be how one marketer differentiates from another when everyone is using the same AI tools. Additionally, as advances in foundation models begin to plateau, it is widely assumed that inference data will become increasingly important. Creative data are just that; they are the real-time inference data needed to get the most out of models, providing the recent performance data, brand-specific rules, and other run-time information needed to optimize results. These data provide AI models with the required context to generate content that is not only more likely to perform but is also distinctly aligned with a brand’s identity. This helps avoid the pitfall of generating content that feels generic or interchangeable with that of competitors.

We are already seeing top marketers apply their first-party creative data across the marketing workflow, driving efficiency and effectiveness across planning, production, media decisions, and measurement. Creative data help brands build intelligent toolkits and have more specific shot lists built around the content that they know is more likely to perform. In production, marketers will have knowledge of how content performs and can score compositions before they are rendered for adherence to brand-specific best practices, eliminating waste and rejection. Media teams can improve performance by calling creative scoring APIs in a media pipeline, enabling the ability to identify and filter out content that is unlikely to perform. Lastly, creative data allow for creative quality to be factored into measurement frameworks, dramatically enhancing their attribution accuracy. 

Every digital impression is a learning opportunity today. Marketers with a properly constructed creative data platform will be more intelligent across their content supply chain, and they will get smarter every day, helping to ensure that content remains fresh, effective, and aligned with evolving business goals. In a privacy-focused, AI-driven world, owning this new type of data ensures control, compliance, and a sustained competitive edge.

Alex Collmer:  There is no shortage of KPIs available to today’s marketers. The key is selecting the right ones to optimize, while ensuring they align with the brand’s goals. For some, those will be brand outcomes. For others, sales. And many will choose media metrics due to their near real-time nature. The key is being clear about what the business will be judged on and then building a progression of high accuracy but often delayed metrics coupled with quick-response proxy metrics that allow for more real-time optimization. Decision-makers should prioritize what matters most to their business and ensure their tech stack can capture and analyze data that supports those objectives. 

A universal consideration is return on investment (ROI)—understanding the ROI in AI and data efforts to ensure maximum value. First-party creative data enhance this by enabling marketers to optimize AI outputs, leading to more effective campaigns with measurable results. Importantly, creative data enable creative quality to be provided via export into MMM frameworks, thereby bringing a variable for creative quality to bear for the first time. This enables marketers to have a clear view of the overall ROI of creative investment.

Alex Collmer:  Let’s start by understanding a common content supply chain today. A large global marketer might have dozens of creative agencies around the world (sometimes hundreds). They are frequently disconnected from media teams and usually from each other. Some marketers have centralized creative teams that create for the world and then hand those assets off to regional operations who are then tasked with trying to figure out how to make wildly inappropriate assets work in their market, without upsetting the global team who created them in the first place. There is no shared language around what “great” is, little visibility into performance for the creative teams, and little visibility into what’s coming to the media teams until they get sent it, a few days before the campaign is scheduled to go live.

With this background, it’s easy to see how a creative data platform can help increase effectiveness. First of all, they can serve as a unifying layer, with a shared nomenclature based on data, centralizing insights and providing a single source of truth for creative and media decision-making. By integrating performance data into production workflows, creative teams and AI systems can quickly learn how to improve. When all creative teams globally are using similar insights systems, brand governance tools, and enhanced AI systems, it becomes easy to scale content to meet the needs of today’s market without losing control of brand identity and distinctiveness. 

A true creative data platform will connect to a marketer’s ecosystem of tools. This is an important point that will help in choosing the right creative data platform, as there are many companies today offering little more than creative scoring tools or computer vision tagging systems. These are not creative data platforms, and they will make it difficult for marketers to drive effectiveness across their tech stack. Proper creative data systems make it easy to deploy a marketer's first-party creative data assets into DAMs, any and all generative AI (GenAI) tools, decisioning platforms, media pipelines to make them more intelligent based on predicted performance, intelligence layers of DSPs, and measurement tools. Only through this full activation of creative data will marketers experience a truly intelligent content supply chain that drives effectiveness throughout.

Alex Collmer:  AI and data—specifically creative data as it relates to marketing—enable global marketing and media decision-makers to scale content production while maintaining quality and effectiveness. These data remove the guesswork by analyzing and scoring elements, including visuals, product interaction, production styles, or messaging based on performance, ensuring only high-potential assets go to market. This reduces waste, both in resources and budget, and allows teams to focus on what works. As insights continue to be gleaned from the data, creative assets can be refined in real time, ensuring they stay brand-compliant, differentiated, and fit for purpose.

Alex Collmer:
Inference Data for Enhanced AI Precision
As foundation model advancements slow and the need for high-quality data to drive inference grows, timely, structured, and annotated data have become essential for maintaining performance, brand image, and relevance. By providing AI models with current performance context matched to creative decisions—including information like brand guidelines—businesses can bridge the gap, ensuring outputs are precise, on-brand, and aligned with their objectives. Structured data fuel AI's ability to adapt and deliver meaningful results, especially in an environment where innovation increasingly depends on data-driven insights and where brand consistency requires controls on AI experimentation. Finding the right balance will be key to lasting brand value.

Creative Data Ownership: The importance of creative data in knowing how to communicate effectively with your customers is becoming more apparent, and as a result, it will become imperative that marketers own and control this asset. Top platforms like Google and Meta will likely take the position that it’s too complicated to understand. And agencies will offer solutions. Marketers cannot cede the knowledge of how to communicate to the platforms, and while it will be critical for marketers to share their creative data with their agencies, it should not be owned and controlled by the agencies, for risk of permanent lock-in, which is never good for relationships.

AI Transparency and Ethics: As AI adoption continues to scale, "AI-washing" will face increasing scrutiny. Stakeholders will demand greater clarity around the implementation of this smart technology, the sourcing and usage of data, and transparency in how decisions are made and which AI-generated assets are deployed to market. Companies that thrive in this environment will be those with high-quality, first-party data that embed transparency and ethical practices into their AI strategies.

Real-Time Data for Dynamic Targeting
Shifts away from personally identifiable information will reshape digital marketing, and creative data will become essential for safe and precise audience engagement. By combining real-time performance inputs with creative insights, brands can deliver personalized, relevant experiences without relying on third-party tracking. This approach enables AI to adapt quickly, ensuring messaging instantly aligns with current customer behavior and trends. Combined data and performance metrics, tied to specific product or messaging elements, further enhance targeting by helping brands craft content that better resonates with their audience in the right moments.

Alex Collmer:  AI can generate limitless content and insights, but volume doesn’t equate to meaningful results. To ensure AI investments align with business goals, leadership teams must prioritize the integration of structured and actionable data across marketing workflows. The improvement of any one part of the content supply chain will drive some benefits, but unifying the whole process on a shared foundation of data will have a far bigger impact.

As the marketing and media industries evolve, owning and leveraging first-party creative data are critical. This will enable AI to move beyond generic insights, delivering outputs that not only meet brand standards but will also perform better in-market. AI’s true value in marketing lies in its ability to transform creative decisions into tangible business outcomes, from higher engagement to measurable ROI.

By focusing on creative data and aligning smart technology efforts with clear objectives, businesses can unlock informed strategies, more effective campaigns, and gain a competitive edge in an increasingly data-driven world.

Alex Collmer:  Vidmob has been at the forefront of AI-driven creative technology since its earliest days. This has led to the constant challenge of defining a category and evangelizing a set of solutions, while not getting too far ahead of the market to be relevant for marketers at any given time. For years, we had to advocate for the importance of creativity in driving business results.

After that, we spent years evangelizing the role of data in enhancing creative performance. All of this had to be done in an industry where creative and media had been separated for 25 years, while our platform was focused on bringing these two disciplines back into alignment. To put it mildly, this made life challenging, but it was always clear that we were heading in the right direction based on the results that we saw clients experience as they adopted creative data to improve creative or media effectiveness.

A key milestone in this journey was the development of Vidmob’s Creative Intelligence platform, which pioneered the use of AI to analyze and optimize creative performance. This innovation allowed marketers to gain insights into how specific creative decisions, such as messaging, key elements, or visual styles, impacted outcomes. By linking creative effectiveness directly to business metrics, Vidmob helped redefine the role of data in creative strategy, empowering brands to make informed decisions without sacrificing artistic integrity.

The rise of GenAI introduced another opportunity—and challenge. As GenAI revolutionizes content creation, Vidmob has expanded its focus to help brands build their own creative data asset, guiding these tools to produce outputs that are on-brand, distinctive, and performance-driven. As more and more marketers started using the same tools, generating outputs that looked similar, it became clear that proprietary creative data was the path to differentiation and marketer advantage. This evolution has required continuous adaptation, both in technology and industry education, to ensure this new type of data and the AI tools it powers are used responsibly and effectively.

By prioritizing both creativity and accountability, the company has helped reshape how marketers think about the relationship between AI, data, and creativity. As we enter the next decade as the creative data company, the mission remains to empower brands to develop meaningful connections with their customers through smarter, more impactful creative.