In short: Global ad spend in 2026 exceeds $1 trillion, but effectiveness is collapsing. System1 Test Your Ad data show the share of ads rated 3+ stars — the threshold of measurable business impact — has dropped below 20%. The IPA Effectiveness Databank and Binet & Field document that creativity amplifies ROI by 10-20x, not 2x. Generative AI is accelerating the production of cookie-cutter creatives that the consumer brain ignores.
- System1 — Predicting Profitable Creativity: only 5-star ads produce meaningful market share gains
- IPA — Effectiveness Databank: more than 1,500 peer-reviewed case studies since 1980
- Cannes Lions 2025 — Effectiveness Track WARC analysis: short-termism remains the biggest brake on impact
For years the industry has swept an uncomfortable fact under the rug: the average creative quality of advertising has collapsed. This is not an aesthetic perception. It is a fact measured by independent labs that test thousands of ads every year with real consumer panels. System1, Kantar, Nielsen and IPA converge on the same diagnosis: budgets are rising, impact is falling. And the culprit is not the digital channel, but the quality of the messages flowing through it.
This article lines up the evidence: what System1 says about star ratings, what the IPA Effectiveness Databank measures, why Binet & Field talk about a 10-20x multiplier and where generative AI is accelerating the drift toward cookie-cutter output.
The paradox: bigger budgets, less impact
Global ad spend is growing at double-digit rates per year and passed the $1 trillion mark in 2026, according to Marketing Dive estimates. Yet indicators such as brand recall, attention, organic engagement and purchase-intent lift are moving in the opposite direction. The Morningstar/PR Newswire report from October 2025 spells it out: emotional connection with consumers is fading while spend accelerates.
The most common reading — "it's channel fragmentation" — hides a deeper problem. Multi-channel campaigns do not fail because the channels are too many: they fail because 70-80% of creatives do not clear the minimum quality thresholds documented in the literature. According to the IPA Effectiveness Databank, very large business effects (the campaigns that deliver the highest share and profit gains) have collapsed since 2014: a decline that the best analyses of the database, echoed by WARC, attribute to hyper-focus on short-term activation and compressed brand budgets.
Put differently: we are spending more money to produce advertising that the consumer brain has learned to ignore in 1.3 seconds.
What System1 says: the star-rated ad test
System1 is an ad-testing lab that measures the instant emotional response of consumer panels (about 150 per market) to video, print and digital ads. The score ranges from 1 to 5.9 stars and predicts the long-term effect on market share with a robust correlation validated on tens of thousands of cases. The model is documented in the Predicting Profitable Creativity report, co-authored with the IPA and Peter Field.
Results, updated to 2025, paint a brutal distribution:
- 1-1.9 stars: no measurable business effect. About 40-45% of tested ads land here.
- 2-2.9 stars: minimal effect, not enough to offset media cost. Another 30-35%.
- 3+ stars: threshold at which the ad begins to drive share growth. Fewer than 20% of ads clear it.
- 5+ stars: real long-term impact. Under 2% of the total.
Translation: if your campaign draws at random from the market's average distribution, there is a better than 4-in-5 chance it is producing zero incremental share. It is not an opinion: it is what people declare and do, measured on tens of thousands of ads.
IPA + Binet & Field: creativity as a ROI multiplier
Drawing on the IPA database, Les Binet and Peter Field calculated that campaigns with high-quality creativity produce large business effects up to 12 times more often than mediocre ones, for the same media budget. The result is condensed in their maxim "creativity is the most effective lever in marketing", revisited in the report The Next Chapter for The Long and the Short of It.
Kantar, with its meta-study The Creative Effect 2025, reached the same conclusion from a different angle: analysing more than 18,000 ads in the Link database, it quantified that creatives in the top quality quartile deliver up to 4x the brand impact of the bottom quartile, and multiply overall ROI by 10-20x when combined with adequate reach. Not 2x. Not 20%. An order of magnitude.
The table below summarises the creative quality x ROI relationship based on aggregated System1, IPA and Kantar data.
The correct reading of the table is this: the difference between a company that grows and one that stalls lies almost entirely in those 2-3 stars of creative quality, not in the media budget. A 5-star campaign with 100k in media can beat a 2-star campaign with 1M in media. The effect is not linear: it is multiplicative.
Why AI amplifies cookie-cutter creatives
Generative artificial intelligence has cut marginal production cost almost to zero. In theory, it should free up time to think up bigger ideas. In practice, the industry is using this lever to churn out more mediocre creatives, not better ones.
The problem is structural: generative models are trained on the average of the past. They output the statistically most likely response to a prompt, which by definition coincides with what audiences have already seen a thousand times. It is no coincidence that a Kantar 2025 analysis found that ads partially generated with AI perform on average worse than human-made equivalents on long-term memory and brand linkage, except when AI is used as an execution tool on a strong strategic idea.
Orlando Wood, chief innovation officer at System1, put it bluntly in a keynote at IPA EffWorks 2024: contemporary creativity has become "left-brain" — abstract, textual, conceptual, low in sensory input and devoid of characters. This is exactly the kind of creativity AI finds easiest to generate. It is also the least effective on the human brain, which is wired to remember stories, faces, places and voices.
The systemic risk of 2026 is not that AI will steal creatives' jobs: it is that AI will industrialise mediocrity until it becomes the operating default, and brands that fail to enforce quality filters will pay the difference in lost market share.
How to rebuild evidence-based creativity in 2026
The operational question is: how do we go back to producing 3-star and above ads? The literature converges on five levers, all with empirical evidence.
1. Systematic pre-testing. System1, Kantar Link and Nielsen Ad Effect offer pre-tests at modest cost (from 2k to 15k per ad). Using them before spending the media budget is the single highest value-for-money lever in the funnel. A brand that does not pre-test is gambling, not marketing.
2. Distinctive brand assets. The Ehrenberg-Bass Institute documents how consistent colours, fonts, characters and sounds over time amplify brand linkage, the metric that System1 identifies as the most robust predictor of advertising ROI. Continuous visual rotation = zero mnemonic accumulation.
3. 60/40 brand vs performance split. The Binet & Field rule is not an opinion: it is the empirical optimisation that maximises combined ROI at 2-3 years on thousands of IPA cases. More on the split in our article Wasted marketing budget: the data mirage.
4. Narrative and characters. Orlando Wood points to right-brain storytelling (places, faces, dialogue, humour) as the pattern most correlated with 5-star ads. AI can help with production, but the narrative subject must remain human.
5. Social proof and verified authority. In B2B and considered-purchase segments, social proof remains the most robust lever. We cover it in Social proof: what scientific experiments say and in Persuasive content for social ads 2026.
Need evidence-based creative campaigns?
Deep Marketing designs campaigns starting from creative pre-testing: we assess asset quality with System1-style methods, select formats that clear the 3-star threshold and optimise the brand/performance split following the Binet & Field model. Request a creative consultation or explore our content and social consultancy.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why is advertising less effective despite bigger budgets?
Because average creative quality has collapsed. According to System1 and IPA data, more than 80% of ads do not clear the 3-star threshold, below which business impact is minimal or zero. Budgets therefore finance more distribution of messages that the consumer brain has learned to ignore in 1.3 seconds. The bottleneck is not media buying: it is the quality of the creative asset.
What is the creative effectiveness gap?
The creative effectiveness gap is the widening divergence, documented by IPA and Kantar from 2014 onwards, between global ad spend (rising) and measured business effects on campaigns (falling). In 2025 campaigns with very large business effects are roughly half what they were a decade earlier, while spend has almost doubled. It is the statistical signature of the "bigger budgets, less impact" phenomenon.
How does System1 measure creative quality?
System1 exposes panels of about 150 consumers per market to each ad and measures instant emotional reaction, emotional intensity and brand linkage. The result is converted into a score from 1 to 5.9 stars that predicts market-share growth. The model has been validated on more than 100,000 ads and is documented in the Predicting Profitable Creativity report, co-authored with the IPA.
Does AI worsen or improve creativity?
It depends on the use. As an execution tool on a strong strategic idea, AI amplifies productivity without reducing quality. As an autonomous concept generator, it tends to produce output aligned with the average of the past: visually cookie-cutter and "left-brain". Kantar 2025 tests show that AI-only ads perform worse on memory and brand linkage than human-made equivalents with AI-assisted execution.
How should we split budget between creative and media in 2026?
The Binet & Field 60/40 rule (60% brand, 40% performance) remains the IPA benchmark. Inside the 60% brand share, investing 10-15% of the total budget in creative pre-testing (System1, Kantar Link or Nielsen) is the lever with the highest value-for-money ratio: a 3-star campaign with 100k in media usually beats a 1-star campaign with 400k in media, with a favourable economy for the investor.
Sources and References
- System1 + IPA — Predicting Profitable Creativity
- IPA — Effectiveness Databank (1,500+ peer-reviewed case studies)
- Binet & Field — The Next Chapter for The Long and the Short of It (IPA)
- Kantar Link — The Creative Effect 2025
- WARC — Cannes Lions 2025 Effectiveness still struggles with short-termism
- Morningstar/PR Newswire — Is Creative Impact in Crisis? (Oct 2025)
- Marketing Week — Orlando Wood on the left-brain creativity crisis
- Marketing Dive — Marketing Trends & Outlook 2026
