Advertisers Obsess Over the Dining Room. But Who’s Watching the Kitchen?

Advertising bloody loves a metric. CPM, CTR, Reach, Frequency. If an ad runs, there’s a million ways to measure it.

But if you ask a relatively simple question – “what did it actually cost us to make all of this stuff?” – things quickly get murky. For an industry that’s spent the last decade becoming obsessed with measurement, production remains a huge blind spot.

Think of advertising like running a restaurant. The creative and production teams are the kitchen, while your audience and media plan are the dining room. Both matter equally, but for decades we’ve focused almost entirely on what happens in the front-of-house. Who came in, what they ordered, what they liked, how much they spent, and whether they came back for more.

Meanwhile, back in the kitchen, things look a lot different.  

There was a time when creative teams only had to plate a few dishes: a TV commercial, a print ad, and a handful of cutdowns. Today, a single campaign can mean thousands of versions across social, CTV, digital video, and display, adapted for different markets and languages. The menu has exploded, tickets are piling up, and no one is entirely sure what’s heading to which table.

That’s advertising production today.

XR’s State of Ad Ops research found that 81% of marketers are producing more creative content than a year ago, yet only 30% say their resources are keeping pace. In other words: more orders, same kitchen, same staff.

Here’s where it gets interesting. 92% of marketers rate their visibility into production costs as good or excellent, yet 70% still go over budget at least some of the time. That points to a gap between planning for production and understanding what’s actually being made.

What Never Makes it to the Table

Back to the restaurant. Imagine knowing exactly how every dish performs once it reaches the table, but very little about what it cost to make or how much food never made it out of the kitchen. If you owned that restaurant, you’d want to know where all that money was going.

Advertising isn’t much different. Around 40% of finished creative never sees the light of day, for all kinds of reasons. Campaigns change, assets fail testing, budgets shift, specs are wrong, or windows are missed. Some waste is inevitable because advertising production is messy and plans often change. But without connecting what we spend to what we make and actually use, it’s almost impossible to know what’s unavoidable and what we can fix.

Media figured this out years ago. Nobody on the media side spends millions on their media plan, looks at the final bill and calls that measurement. They obsess over where every dollar goes, what’s working and what’s being wasted.

So why should production be any different?

AI is About to Turn Up the Heat

Things will only get worse as AI is applied across production workflows. There will be even more creative, made faster, in more formats and variations than ever before.

But making more doesn’t mean doing it better and more efficiently.

Maybe the question shouldn’t be how much more can we make, but what should we make, what does it cost, and what creates value for the advertiser?

For years, marketers have poured energy into understanding what happens after an ad reaches an audience. And rightly so. But the next big efficiency play might be hiding further upstream, before the media plan goes live or a single impression is served.

Which brings us back to the kitchen.

At XR, we care about the kitchen as much as the dining room. With XR ONE, we’re connecting how ads get planned, produced, paid for, and delivered to how audiences engage with them.

Because a great meal starts long before it reaches the table.