From Every Perspective, Creative Intelligence Is the Competitive Edge

Key Insights from POSSIBLE 2026

Katie Arena, Head of Marketing at Clinch

At POSSIBLE 2026, Clinch sat down with leaders from Snap, Publicis, The Trade Desk, and Within to talk about where advertising is heading…without saying “AI will just change everything.”

Across every conversation, one theme was constant: Creative isn’t about quantity. It’s about how intelligently that creative can respond.

AI increases volume. But more assets, faster timelines, and cheaper production don’t mean better creative. Creative that responds to context, signals, platform behavior, and live performance will be far more valuable than thousands of iterations on an ineffective asset.

Whether the discussion was DCO moving upstream, signal-driven optimization, AI-enabled exploration, or platform-native creative with Snap, all our guests were aspiring towards creative execution that factors where it appears, who it is speaking to, and what the moment requires. Here are some key takeaways..

DCO Belongs at the Beginning

Roey Franco, Head of DCO at Publicis, shared his company’s unique upstream strategy for DCO. Traditionally, creative is optimized after the campaign is planned. The strategy is written, the media plan is set, the creative framework is approved, and then DCO goes to work adapting the creative to different audiences, channels, and placements.

But Publicis is working with brands to use the agency’s data and insights to plan how their creative should respond to audiences, locations, moments, and contextual signals. 

A channel-first approach asks, “What do we need for CTV? What do we need for social? What do we need for retail media?” A context-first approach asks, “What does this moment tell us? What does this audience need? What should the creative recognize?”

Creative intelligence applied upstream makes each asset more aware of the conditions that will shape it.

AI Should Expand What Brands Can Learn

In the conversation with Joe Yakuel, CEO of Within, brought the agency perspective. He acknowledged that AI can absolutely help brands create more variations faster and with fewer manual steps. But if that is the only ambition, he feels brands are underusing the technology.

Yakuel feels that AI raises the marketing ceiling. As brands produce, personalize, and learn at a scale that was previously impossible, it must be tied to a real creative strategy.

That means brands need to do more than iterate on what works. If every asset is just a slight variation on the best performer, AI can accelerate campaigns while narrowing them. The brand will only become more efficient at repeating itself.

He suggested balancing proven performers with “wild card” exploration. True creative intelligence means knowing when to scale a winning idea, but also when to leave space for something unproven. It means using AI to produce more and discover more.

Media Signals Are Only Valuable If Creative Can Act on Them

The conversation with Kendra Manzo, General Manager, Enterprise Growth at The Trade Desk,

brought the media side of creative intelligence into focus.

Manzo stressed the importance of bringing planning, activation, and reporting closer together, so campaigns are not guided only by historical assumptions but by what is happening in market.

Advertisers have more data than ever, especially in categories like CPG, where purchase data, retail media audiences, marketplace signals, and campaign performance inputs all exist across a fragmented environment. But data does not become useful simply because it is available. It becomes useful when informing the brand.

For creative, that changes the role of performance signals from an answer to a prompt. Creative now has to turn those signals into decisions that impact the message.

Platform-Native Creative Requires Better Instincts, Not Just More Assets

Fintan Gillespie, Global Director of Ad Partnerships at Snap, added another dimension to the conversation by suggesting that creative intelligence also means understanding the room you are walking into.

Gillespie stressed that, on Snap, creative does not win because it looks the most polished. It wins when it feels native to the way people actually use the platform. The environment is fast, camera-first, personal, and built around close friends, creators, and raw expression. In that setting, overproduced creative usually feels disconnected. Less polished creative feels more authentic.

For many brands, that is a hard truth. Traditional brand instincts often push toward more control, more finish, more polish. But platform-native creative sometimes requires the opposite: looser execution, faster refresh, more immediacy, and a better understanding of what feels natural in the feed.

And in a full-screen, tap-to-skip environment, feeling natural is crucial. As spend grows, brands need more creative throughput and faster iteration. But again, volume is not enough. More assets will not solve the problem if those assets do not feel like they belong.

Creative intelligence means knowing how a brand should show up differently without losing itself. It means adapting to the platform’s behavior.

The New Creative Advantage

The multi-faceted conversations at POSSIBLE suggested a clear shift in how advertisers should think about creative, and the common thread is intelligence.

Creative intelligence is the ability to know what a message should do in a specific moment. It is the ability to connect performance signals to creative choices. It is the ability to scale without flattening the work. It is the ability to move faster without simply making more of the same.

The volume of creative has been central to the conversation on AI, but the real advantage is knowing what creative works - fast enough to capitalize on it.