Creative Salience & Distinctive Brand Assets

Whose brand is it,
anyway?

Creators, platforms, and AI are scaling content faster than brands can control it.
We analyzed $2B in advertising to learn what keeps a brand recognizable.

Creative Salience & Distinctive Brand Assets

Whose brand is it,
anyway?

Creators, platforms, and AI are scaling content faster than brands can control it. We analyzed $2B in advertising to learn what keeps a brand recognizable.

What we found

You're spending billions building
someone else's brand.

Creators, fragmented platforms,
and GenAI have stripped your
Distinctive Brand Assets (DBAs)
from your digital paid media.

As a result, a significant portion of your media investment is not being attributed back to your brand. Your ads are seen, but not remembered as yours. Marketers are donating money to building categories, not brands. At the core of this issue is the inconsistent use of distinctive brand assets: the brand cues you've spent years and millions building, from your logo and colors to packshots and taglines.

What we analyzed

sample size

paid ads

spend analyzed

investment

brand assets

coverage

brands · markets

What's a Distinctive Brand Asset
(DBA)?

DBAs are the brand cues consumers use to recognize you in the 1-2 seconds your ad gets in-feed. Our research tracks seven brand cue categories across 1.4M ads. Let's see how they show up in the wild.

Wordmarks and brand marks. Most-used cue across the dataset, and also the most over-trusted.

Audio mnemonics, the Netflix "ta-dum," Intel chime, McDonald's "I'm Lovin' It" jingle.

A single ownable hue, Tiffany blue, Cadbury purple, T-Mobile magenta.

Repeating motifs and graphic systems, Burberry check, Vans waffle, Louis Vuitton monogram.

Product-in-hand or hero shot of the actual physical product. The single highest-impact DBA when paired with logo.

A short, ownable verbal cue. "Just Do It." "Think Different." Instantly recognizable without the logo.

Characters and creatures, gecko, duck, dough boy. Distinctive and memorable, yet rarely deployed in performance advertising.

Brands are losing value in how
their ads are built and deployed.
Let's see how.

1. The Attribution Gap

Most ads aren't built to be remembered as yours. 37% of ads use fewer than two DBAs, and only 25% hit the elite mark of four or more. Stacking assets pays: 4+ DBAs drive +28% ad recall, +88% VTR, and -45% CPCV.

Ad RecallAd Recall Index (baseline = 100) Ad recallView-through rateCost per completed view

0-1 DBAs

Baseline

2 DBAs

+14% vs baseline

3+ DBAs

+17% vs baseline

4+ DBAs

+28% vs baseline

2. The Multiplier Effect

Brand cues don't work in isolation: combined, they drive disproportionate impact. Logo + Packshot alone drives +86% ad recall, yet appears in just 58% of ads.

Presence in Ads

Ad Recall Impact

present in just 23% of ads

Tagline + Packshot

+5% effect on ad recall

present in just 22% of ads

Logo + Tagline

+20% effect on ad recall

present in 49% of ads

Color + Packshot

+34% effect on ad recall

present in 58% of ads

Logo + Packshot

+86% effect on ad recall

3. The Loaned Brand

Creator content rarely uses brand cues, so your media spend builds the creator's brand, not yours. Creators use logos nearly half as often as brand-led content (40% vs. 70%) and taglines less than half as often (13% vs. 29%). 45% of creator spend on Meta is unbranded and not watched past the first three seconds, making it effectively wasted.

BrandCreator

Taglines

Brand

Creator

Color

Brand

Creator

Logos

Brand

Creator

Packshots

Brand

Creator

Case Studies · Bayer Bayer

What happens when you turn brand consistency into a system?

For over a century, Bayer's brand equity has been a proxy for trust. By codifying 160 years of heritage into digital Brand Codes, Bayer has bridged the gap between rapid production and rigorous brand standards. They've moved from static guidance in PDFs to an agentic, real-time system of control.

This ensures their content is built to succeed and be remembered as theirs, no matter how it's made or who made it. Bayer exemplifies when brand consistency is operationalized, every asset contributes to both performance and long-term brand equity.

Logo usage

Lift in CVV+12.1%

Reduction in CPCV−7.9%

Brand color

Lift in CVV+6.2%

Lift in favorability+86.4%

Lift in consideration+24.3%

Lift in recall+7.5%

Case Studies · Mondelez Mondelez International

Iconic assets only stay iconic if they're used consistently.

The Glass and a Half visual has been used in Cadbury marketing campaigns since 1928, and is one of the brand's most iconic DBAs. When the Glass and a Half DBA is used in Cadbury ads, the impact on long and short term performance is evident.

This ensures their content is built to succeed and be remembered as theirs, no matter how it's made or who made it. Mondelez exemplifies when brand consistency is operationalized, every asset contributes to both performance and long-term brand equity.

Purchase intent+11pp

Awareness+6pp

Recall+3pp

Consideration+3pp

Completed video views+30%

The Playbook

Protect your hard-earned brand
equity in 3 steps.

1. Assess

Do you have visibility into how your brand shows up across all content?

Are you setting a clear standard for brand cue usage?

2. Act

Audit your advertising to identify where brand cues are missing.

Apply a consistent standard across all assets, including creators and GenAI.

3. Systematize

Move from brand books to AI-enabled systems that enforce brand consistency at scale.

Creative Salience is the end-to-end system that ensures every ad is recognizably yours, compounding brand equity across every market, every agency, every platform, before a dollar of media runs.

Bring Creative Salience to your brand

Stop diluting your brand equity. Start compounding it.

Creative Salience puts your brand to work across the entire creative lifecycle.

Know it's yours before it runs

Before media runs, every ad is automatically scored for its creative salience (its optimized use of brand cues), so you know it's built to be remembered as yours.
Media only goes behind the creative that amplifies your brand.

And after, you can see exactly what percentage of your portfolio and spend is actively building brand equity, in metrics your CFO understands.

Talk to our team.

A 30-minute call. We'll walk you through a sample DBA audit on your category and show you what Creative Salience would catch.

Whose brand is it, anyway?

Whose brand is it, anyway?

You're spending billions building someone else's brand.

What's a Distinctive Brand Asset (DBA)?

Brands are losing value in how their ads are built and deployed. Let's see how.

1. The Attribution Gap

2. The Multiplier Effect

3. The Loaned Brand

What happens when you turn brand consistency into a system?

Iconic assets only stay iconic if they're used consistently.

Protect your hard-earned brand equity in 3 steps.

1. Assess

2. Act

3. Systematize

Stop diluting your brand equity. Start compounding it.

Whose brand is it,
anyway?

Whose brand is it,
anyway?

You're spending billions building
someone else's brand.

What's a Distinctive Brand Asset
(DBA)?

Brands are losing value in how
their ads are built and deployed.
Let's see how.

Protect your hard-earned brand
equity in 3 steps.