The State of Ad Ops: The Best Ad You Never Saw
The campaign everyone loved. It tested brilliantly, won over the client and was destined to become the next standout piece of work. But it never ran.
The media plan changed, the budget shifted, legal came back late, or another version took priority. Before long, the creative everyone was talking about quietly disappeared.
Nobody sets out to make work that never reaches an audience. Yet, data from our latest State of Ad Ops Report (U.S. and U.K. editions) found unused and wasted creative content is becoming a familiar part of advertising.
For this report, XR teamed up with MX8 Labs to survey more than 400 marketers across brands, agencies, production companies, and media agencies in the U.S and U.K. to examine the pain points impacting modern advertising production.
A Third of All Creative Content Never Runs
Unused assets are among the clearest sources of wasted marketing spend. Marketers are pouring millions of dollars in budget into content that never gets used.
We found that more than half of marketers surveyed use less than 70% of the creative assets they produce. Nearly 70% exceed production budgets at least some of the time, while 74% say campaign scope gets reduced before the work is finished.
Where Creative Gets Lost
The biggest reason is simply that campaigns change direction, with 44% of U.S. and 43% of U.K. marketers saying this often happens after production has already wrapped, while 33% (U.S.) and 35% (U.K.) pointed to ads testing poorly.
Technical specs, missed campaign windows, and delayed approvals are also cited as reasons creative goes unused across the U.S. and U.K. None is especially surprising on its own, but together, they reveal how easily creative investment can be lost after the work has already been made.
When Good Work Meets Reality
Creative agencies are no longer producing one campaign for one media plan. Today's creative has to stretch across several formats, platforms, audiences and markets, often while creative requirements for these platforms are constantly changing.
The more fragmented the campaign becomes, the more value can be lost between the original idea and the final asset. Strong creative may survive the pitch and the production process, only to be diluted, delayed or dropped as the campaign expands.
Among the top three advertising production bottlenecks, asset versioning for different platforms ranked third overall for U.S marketers (32%). For brand marketers, however, it was the single biggest reason campaigns stalled.
The People Holding the Work Together
Brands, agencies and production partners all play a role in carrying an idea from brief to audience. Agencies and production teams often feel the strain most directly, absorbing late changes, additional versions, and new delivery requirements while trying to protect the quality of the work and the original intent of the creative vision.
The issue is rarely a lack of effort. It is a lack of connection across planning, budgets, approvals and asset delivery and usage. When those decisions sit in separate places, even the best creative can lose momentum long after production is complete.
Greater visibility across the full process would help everyone protect the value of the work and give each campaign a better chance to run, perform and return value on the investment behind it.
Because the best ad you never saw might have been good enough to win a Cannes Lion. We’ll never know.
This is just one of the operational challenges XR set out to explore in the State of Ad Ops Report. Drawing on research with brands, agencies, production companies and media agencies, the report examines what's changing behind modern campaign delivery and what it means for the future of advertising operations.
Stay tuned for more insights from XR’s State of Ad Ops Report, including a closer look at how brands and agencies are adopting AI to keep pace with growing production demands.
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