As marketing moves beyond siloed creative and media, AI is enabling their essential convergence to build integrated campaigns.
Normand Morneau, a Kantar VP, explains how AI finally makes it possible to close feedback loops and build great brands.
To succeed, this approach uses AI to iterate faster, adapt creative by channel, redefine metrics, and build a culture of curiosity.
For marketers to realize the full potential of their AI utilization, it needs to be about more than efficiency or cost cutting. It should be the driving force behind a convergence of market forces that once operated in separate worlds. Smart brands are using AI to forge more integrated ways of working between creative and media teams, collapsing feedback loops from weeks to minutes, allowing for real-time optimization in both creative executions and media channel mix, and creating new organizational workflows. The massive shift is redefining what brand building means today.
That's the challenge facing industry leaders like Normand Morneau, a seasoned executive with over 15 years at Kantar. As Vice President of Global Creative and Media, he and his team lead the expansion of the company's global business and product evolution of its LINK and LIFT portfolios. For him, succeeding in this era means expertly navigating the convergence of creative, media, and data. "AI doesn't just speed up campaigns. It allows us to close the loop between creative, media, and data, bringing everything together so people can build great brands."
This rapid feedback loop demands a new level of collaboration, even if the organizational learning curve for legacy brands is "hard and slow." It's a tale as old as time, where brands move capabilities in-house in the interest of efficiency, but lose out on valuable learnings along the way. Morneau notes that while many large clients have tried to in-house their media buying, the expertise often becomes limited very quickly. This is where agencies still shine.
Faster feedback, smarter iteration: Morneau’s 18 years in the industry have seen creative cycles collapse, allowing for continuous optimization and quicker decision-making within the development process. This speed, now enabled by AI, directly necessitates the integration of real-time data to inform both creative and media strategies. "We went from six-week ad testing to fifteen minutes. That speed doesn’t make it cheaper to make an ad, but makes the execution smarter," he asserts.
Context over everything: The necessity of adapting creative for diverse platforms like YouTube or TikTok means that a single ad no longer suffices across all channels. This forces creative and media teams to collaborate more closely than ever, with data serving as the bridge and providing the common language for contextually relevant messaging. "Because you can iterate and rapidly deploy an ad now, a brand's creative team needs to be talking to the media team so they can know what to change and how the placement of the ads impacts the overall creative execution or cut of the video. Context is king now. The channel drives the creative," Morneau explains.
Media meets creative: Kantar's own research provides a strong empirical basis for why traditional silos are no longer viable. A unified process flow, driven by integrated data, is essential from ideation to evaluation to maximize campaign impact. Morneau says, "Creative is 50% of media’s effectiveness. You can’t separate the two anymore. They need to work as one continuous process."
The metrics for success are evolving, too. There is a growing need to close the feedback loop between creative execution and business outcomes. This is where AI stops being a buzzword and becomes a workhorse, capable of checking creative quality and consistency at a scale that was previously impossible. New tools help ensure brand consistency across platforms while tracking performance beyond clicks, moving toward brand lift and sales impact.
Redefining metrics of success: Morneau points to data coming out of testing creative at scale with tools like LINK AI, which allows systematic assessment of creative elements such as brand presence and color palette. The data extends across multiple points of the growing ad ecosystem and ensures alignment with campaign objectives across numerous platforms, directly connecting creative compliance, media placement, and data-driven outcomes like sales lift. "Marketers need data beyond the click. To really uncover what about a campaign's creative and media execution worked, we need to answer whether an ad stays on brand, in tone, in context and, most importantly, if it drove results," Morneau explains.
The real differentiator isn’t access to AI, but how teams use it. Smart brands ask why, not just what. The ultimate opportunity isn't just in using AI to deliver results, but in using it to ask better questions across the integrated functions of creative, media, and data. Transform AI from a "nice tool to have" into an indispensable part of daily operations, fostering a culture of continuous curiosity and creativity. "Bring AI into every conversation. Set objectives around how data is structured and used. Ask why, don't just deliver results," Morneau advises.
