New report: How to drive performance through creative optimization

A new report produced in collaboration between Meta, AppsFlyer and Dentsu Creative provides a comprehensive look into the key drivers of ad creative performance in 2025.

We already know that AI is revolutionizing the creative process. But to truly harness its potential, understanding where AI adds value across the creative journey is crucial.

While AI has democratized creativity, allowing a high volume of ad variations to be generated quickly and efficiently, this means marketers are often scrambling to find creative winners among countless options. And with increasing competition for audiences’ attention across the same platforms, intelligent measurement and creative optimization is now more important than ever to avoid simply generating more output while having little impact.

But creative optimization is more than just tweaking basic ad elements like placement, color or copy. It’s about understanding emotional and psychological triggers that capture and engage audiences. And today, advanced AI can help to decode these signals at scale and provide marketers with unprecedented insights to guide their creative strategy.

A new report produced in collaboration between Meta, AppsFlyer and Dentsu Creative, The State of Creative Optimization – 2025 Edition, leverages AppsFlyer’s AI-enabled Creative Optimization solution to analyze 1.1 million creative variations and uncover the key patterns, emotional triggers and user motivations that determine what makes a stand-out ad.

Alongside strategic insights from Creative Shop and Marketing Science at Meta, and storytelling guidance from Dentsu Creative, the report is a cross-functional guide for marketers, brands, and agencies looking to scale creative performance with intelligence, speed and emotional resonance in this new age of AI.

It offers in-depth insights and creative examples from a wide range of verticals — including gaming, finance, dating apps, social media and more. Some key insights from the report include:

• Matching creative volume to audience complexity helps you reach more people.
  Just 2% of creatives in gaming categories account for 53% of total ad spend, highlighting a continued focus on quickly scaling top-performing assets. Advertisers in non-gaming categories are increasing creative output by 18% year-over-year, with the top 2% of creatives accounting for a slightly lower share of spend (48%). This reflects a shift toward broader creative variety, driven by the need to combat fatigue, reach diverse audience segments, and continuously feed learning models across channels.
  
• Mastering creative essentials helps boost performance.
  Advertisers should begin with core creative building blocks: include 9:16 video with audio, and layer in emotional storytelling, human presence, and text overlays. Internal data from Meta shows campaigns using this combination saw a 16% lower CPA, 29% higher conversion rate, and 11% greater reach across Reels, Feed and Stories.
  
• Harnessing the “language of Reels” helps turn attention into action.
  Using emotional hooks in the first two seconds, multiple audio elements, and the presence of real people help make content feel more authentic and engaging. Reels that featured a person on screen along with expressive audio saw 8% more conversions per dollar than those that didn’t.
  
• Creative diversification is essential.
  Paired with data-driven refresh cycles, creative diversification ensures content stays relevant, drives better results, and sustains performance longer. Data from Meta shows that campaigns using a diverse set of creatives across formats and messaging types saw up to a 32% improvement in CPA and a 9% increase in incremental reach.
  
• Generative AI is driving performance and efficiency.
  At Meta, over 4 million advertisers use at least one generative AI-enabled creative tool each month to help them scale creative output quickly and intelligently. In internal tests from Meta, ad campaigns using AI-generated images saw an 11% higher click-through rate and a 7.6% higher conversion rate compared to those that didn’t.

You can read the full report here now.