For over two decades, programmatic advertising has been obsessed with one thing: targeting. And honestly, it’s been a good run. We’ve built faster pipes, cleaner data, and more precise ways to serve ads to the right person at the right time.
But somewhere along the way, we forgot about the part of advertising people actually see and take action on — the creative.
It’s time to fix that.
Let’s call a spade a spade: programmatic infrastructure works. We’ve fine-tuned the supply chain. We’ve enhanced privacy-safe targeting solutions. We’ve found ways to squeeze out a few extra basis points of efficiency.
And yet, the definition of premium inventory is arbitrary. Attention is a moving target. And a 0.1% click-through rate is still somehow considered the proxy for good enough.
The problem isn’t who we’re targeting. It’s what we’re showing them.
As Matt Barash recently said, “The part of this industry that’s been most overlooked for the past 25 years? Creative.” We’ve optimized every part of programmatic except the one thing that actually drives attention and engagement.
Throughout the pragmatic era, creative strategy was put on the back burner. Media plans came first. Targeting strategies were perfected. And only at the last minute would someone ask, “What’s the ad going to look like?”
That might have worked when banners and static displays ruled the web. But in today’s attention economy — where users scroll past hundreds of posts a day — creative is your biggest performance lever.
And the numbers prove it. Nielsen research consistently shows that creative accounts for 70% of ad performance outcomes.* Not targeting. Not placement. Not a bid strategy. Creative.
Right now, the adtech world is experiencing a reset. Creative AI is accelerating every corner of the business. Agencies and publishers are rethinking old assumptions. There’s disruption in the air again — and with it, a huge opportunity to rethink how we approach creativity.
Platforms like Nova are leading that shift. Nova makes it possible to repurpose social content people actually engage with — seen on TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube — into display ads and run them seamlessly across the open web. This approach delivers 5x higher click-through rates than standard display.
It’s a simple idea with big implications:
Take creatives that work in the walled gardens and bring them onto the open web.
If you’re still pouring 90% of your effort into targeting and optimization while leaving creative as an afterthought, you’re leaving serious performance on the table.
Here’s where to start:
This isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s where programmatic performance gains will come from in the next five years.
We’ve already perfected the infrastructure. Now it’s time to focus on what flows through it.
