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Creative Best Practices to Unlock the Full Potential of Your Advertising

In a Performance-Driven World, Creative is a Brand’s Right to Win

Cannes

June 22, 2026

Gina Reduto, Executive Vice President, Strategy, Advertising & Partnerships, NBCUniversal shares practical guidance marketers can use to strengthen ad creative before it even reaches the market: 

As the media landscape expands and fragments, the race for attention is at an all-time high. Across the premium video ecosystem, more than 60K advertisers competed for 526K ad spots in 20251. Breaking through that clutter is now every marketer's top priority, and ad creative is the real differentiator. It's a marketer's right to win. 

Using AI to analyze tens of thousands of ads across live sports, tentpoles, and immersive Peacock formats, NBCUniversal’s proprietary Creative Ad Engine surfaces what drives attention, engagement, and outcomes. Marketers can leverage these insights while creative is in development, learning what to refine, emphasize, or test before launch. Our in-house creative team, Rock Studios, puts these insights and others into practice to develop marketing solutions designed to resonate with the fans who love our culture-driving content and deliver impact for your brand.

The principles outlined below are grounded in that intelligence, translating it into practical guidance to strengthen creative before it reaches the market. 

Connect talent & IP to drive creative performance:  
When it comes to talent in creative, relevance to the content matters more than star power. Creative performs best when talent and IP feel connected. For example, ads featuring talent aligned to the content drove +49% message memorability, compared to creative with no talent2. And for live sports, creative that featured athletes drove +29% higher message recall compared to ads with no athletes3. 

Position ad creative alongside sponsored in-show moments and integrations to fuel memorability: 
Sponsored in-show moments and integrations give brands the chance to connect with consumers through must see IP. Running relevant ad creative alongside these moments drives creative performance: adjacency to in-show moments drives +38% message memorability4.   

Brand early and often to drive clarity and recall: 
In high attention, premium environments, the first few seconds matter. Creative that heroes who you are and what you offer in the first :05 and is repeated often throughout the creative, gives the message a chance to resonate with consumers. Advertisers who branded immediately drove 2.8x higher aided ad recall5.  And when that branding is repeated, there is an additional 1.4x lift in ad recall6. 

Use succinct messages and clear visuals to capture attention in static visuals:  
For static creative that doesn’t leverage sound or movement, marketers need both a clear message and a strong visual presence to capture customers’ attention. Static creative with fewer than 10 words delivered +21% greater message memorability. When products are shown in context, rather than as an isolated image, there is a +24% message memorability.7

Industry fragmentation and heightened competition are variables far beyond the control of any marketer. Ad creative, on the other hand, is something brands fully own. And it’s a marketer’s chance to make an outsized impression and create lasting impact.

SOURCING 

  1. MediaRadar for advertiser count; iSpot for total linear and OTT ad airings; 
  2. Likeability via MarketCast, measuring creative sentiment/brand perception 
  3. NBCUniversal proprietary research via Olympics Ad Engine, based on 2016-2024 Olympics Standard Ad Performance via MarketCast 
  4. MarketCast, NBCU prime networks (including Versant), 25-26 season to-date, P18-49 
  5. Measured Performance of CTV SMB Creative templates, in collaboration with Universal Ads and Canva. Data as of 1/21/2026. N=450 respondents
  6. Mediaprobe NBCU Database, based on 20,664 ad airings, Oct 2021–Oct 2024 
  7. NBCUniversal proprietary research via Peacock Ad Engine (Pause Ad Model). Data based on 599 Pause Ads, with 63 tagged ad elements across creatives spanning 12 quarters. Message Memorability via Marketcast, measuring recall of the creative messaging. 

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