Lance Wolder, head of strategy and marketing, PadSquad

For over a decade, “the right person, the right message, the right time” has been a guiding principle in digital advertising. It has been cited in decks, planning documents and strategy sessions across the industry. Even so, it rarely happens in reality. In practice, the industry focus has gone toward refining targeting and timing. The creative experience itself has received less attention.

Advertisers learned how to identify high-value audiences. They learned how to reach these audiences at key moments. However, the quality and relevance of what was delivered during those moments often lagged behind. The ad experience was static, predefined before launch and rarely revisited during a campaign.

The infrastructure for delivery evolved. The infrastructure for storytelling did not.

In most campaign planning workflows, media and creative are still treated as separate domains. Media teams focus on inventory, frequency and optimization. Creative teams focus on storytelling, asset production and brand alignment. The information that connects the two often fails to circulate in a timely or structured way.

As a result, many ad experiences are built without input from audience behavior, real-time performance data or contextual signals. These experiences may align with a brand platform, but they are not always designed to resonate with the people who see them.

Creative outputs are often measured at the campaign level. It remains difficult to isolate which elements of the ad experience contributed to success or failure. This limits the ability to improve future campaigns and weakens the feedback loop that should exist between performance and creative direction.

However, this gap is beginning to close. More advertisers are building ad experiences with modularity, variation and flexibility from the outset. The goal is relevance, not simply personalization. This requires planning creative structures that can adapt to different audiences, mindsets and contexts.

Consider a back-to-school campaign aimed at parents. Rather than launching with a single message, the campaign can deliver distinct experiences for different segments, such as budget-focused families, style-conscious shoppers and first-time school parents. Each experience reflects the same brand strategy but is tailored to specific motivations.

These creative strategies are not based on intuition but on available data, historical performance and consumer insights. AI-powered analytics are increasingly enabling this method, rapidly processing audience signals and performance patterns to surface creative insights that would be difficult to identify manually. Once in-market, they can be evaluated and refined using attention signals, interaction patterns and qualitative feedback.

Recent industry findings underscore this shift: Digiday and PadSquad’s “State of Interactive Video” report found that more than half of advertisers now incorporate interactive features such as shoppable overlays and clickable hotspots into their campaigns. This signals a clear indicator that creative experiences are becoming more dynamic, data-informed and responsive to audience behavior.

Building the feedback loop

For the first time, real-time feedback is changing how ad experiences are designed and deployed. Campaigns can now accommodate mid-flight changes, adjusting visual sequences, calls to action or tone based on audience engagement. This allows advertisers to treat creative as a dynamic asset, not a fixed deliverable.

The result is a more actionable learning system. Each audience interaction contributes to a growing base of insight about what drives a response. This intelligence is valuable across more than just creative teams. Media planners can understand which combinations yield the strongest outcomes. Creative strategists can see which emotional or narrative elements sustain attention. Brand teams can identify which executions most effectively reinforce their positioning.

To support this, organizations are investing in systems that link strategy, media and creative inputs from the beginning. These systems do not just increase efficiency — they enable better decisions about what to say and how to say it.

Strategic relevance starts with the experience

The advertising industry is in a phase of reassessment. After years of optimization around delivery, the focus is shifting toward meaning. Reach is not enough if the experience does not matter. Frequency does not create value unless the content behind it earns attention.

The ad experience is now a measurable component of campaign effectiveness. It can be refined through performance data, aligned with cultural context and structured to adapt. Teams that embrace this approach are building more resilient and more insightful marketing systems.

Advertising does not succeed through delivery alone — it succeeds when the experience itself earns the outcome.

Partner insights from Padsquad