Creative tech to bridge creative and media

In the rapidly evolving landscape of digital advertising, a significant challenge has emerged: advertisers are not fully leveraging available data due to a lack of creative variables to show different targeted groups. This deep research explores the various facets of this issue, drawing insights from industry reports, public discussions, and analytics.

The promise of data-driven advertising

The digital advertising industry has seen tremendous growth, with global ad spending surpassing $1 trillion for the first time in 2024 and expected to continue growing in 2025. This growth is largely driven by the promise of data-driven targeting and personalization. According to McKinsey, 72% of consumers expect businesses to recognize them as individuals and know their interests.

The creative personalization imperative

A recent survey of 100 leading marketers revealed that 96% believe creative will become even more critical in advertising campaigns over the next decade. Furthermore, 65% of respondents selected creative personalization as the campaign variable with the most potential to drive brand growth and business outcomes, compared to 19% for audience targeting and 16% for bid management.

The data dilemma

Despite the recognition of creative personalization's importance, advertisers face significant challenges in fully leveraging data:

1. Limited availability of quality data: marketers struggle to access high-quality data sets that provide comprehensive insights into customer behavior, market trends, and competitive landscapes.

2. Data silos and fragmentation: stitching together disparate data sources to create a 360-degree view of consumers remains a significant hurdle.

3. Privacy regulations: The growing number of privacy regulations impacts how marketers can collect, acquire, and use data for commercial purposes.

4. Cookie deprecation: The elimination of third-party cookies has forced marketers to seek new solutions for gathering consumer data.

The creative bottleneck

While data availability and quality pose challenges, the primary bottleneck appears to be in the creative execution:

1. Lack of creative variables: advertisers struggle to produce enough creative variations to match the granularity of their data-driven targeting capabilities.

2. Resource constraints: creating multiple versions of campaigns with personalized elements for different audience segments is time-consuming and resource-intensive.

3. Real-time adaptation: the ability to make real-time adjustments to creative based on consumer reactions remains a challenge for many marketers.

Emerging solutions

To address the data-creative gap, several approaches are gaining traction:

1. Templated creative: marketers are adopting modular creative elements that can be easily adapted to create multiple ad variations, reducing development time.

2. Dynamic Creative Optimization (DCO): this technology allows for real-time assembly of ad creative based on data signals and audience characteristics.

3. AI-powered creative: artificial intelligence is being leveraged to generate and optimize creative variations at scale.

4. Customer Data Platforms (CDPs): these platforms are emerging as a solution to unify customer data and improve marketing effectiveness.

The path forward

To fully leverage data in advertising, marketers must:

1. Invest in high-quality, diverse data sets and ensure rigorous quality assurance processes.

2. Develop creative strategies that allow for modular, easily adaptable elements.

3. Embrace AI and machine learning technologies to scale creative personalization efforts.

4. Foster closer collaboration between data analysts, creatives, and media buyers to ensure alignment between targeting capabilities and creative execution.

5. Continuously test and optimize creative variations to improve performance and ROI.

By addressing the data-creative gap, advertisers can unlock the full potential of their data-driven targeting efforts and deliver more relevant, engaging, and effective campaigns to their audiences.

Empowering creative teams with seamless automation

At the heart of creative automation is the ability to design templates that can be reused and adapted across countless formats, audiences, and campaign types. Instead of building every ad from scratch, teams can generate hundreds or even thousands of creative variations using connected data feeds, dynamic elements, and scalable workflows. Both Viewst and Celtra offer powerful tools in this space, allowing marketers and designers to collaborate, iterate, and launch ads more efficiently.

Viewst focuses on making automation accessible and efficient, especially for teams that value simplicity and predictability. The platform allows users to create master templates, customize variations, and manage content libraries — all within a centralized workspace. One of Viewst’s standout features is the ability to create brand books or content libraries, where design teams can store and reuse approved brand assets like logos, fonts, and colors. This ensures every asset remains on-brand, no matter who’s building it. Celtra does not offer this native brand book capability, which can make it harder to enforce brand standards consistently.

Another key strength of Viewst is its easy integration with ad accounts. Users can directly connect to platforms like Google Ads or Meta, enabling seamless export and publishing of creatives. In contrast, Celtra requires custom development or API work to enable similar integration, which may not be feasible for teams without technical support.

However, Celtra holds an edge when it comes to in-platform feed editing. It allows users to modify data feeds (such as pricing, product names, or CTAs) directly within the platform — a huge benefit for dynamic or e-commerce campaigns. Viewst currently requires users to reupload updated feeds, though it plans to roll out editable feed tables in Q3 2025, which will close this gap.

Pricing is another major differentiator. Viewst keeps things simple with a seat-based pricing model — you pay per user, and that's it, no matter how many creatives you produce. This is particularly advantageous for high-output teams generating large volumes of assets. Celtra, on the other hand, charges both per seat and per exported creative, which can become costly for agencies or performance teams producing thousands of variations each month.

Despite their differences, both platforms offer key automation features: centralized review and collaboration tools, the ability to instantly update campaigns with refreshed assets, and support for importing mockups from Figma or Photoshop, so design work doesn’t need to start from scratch.

In summary, both Viewst and Celtra help marketing and creative teams automate, scale, and optimize their ad production workflows. Viewst is ideal for teams looking for straightforward pricing, easy ad account integration, and built-in brand management tools. Celtra, meanwhile, may better suit organizations that require robust feed editing and are equipped to handle more complex integrations and pricing structures. As creative demands continue to grow, platforms like these will be essential in keeping teams agile, consistent, and performance-driven.