One of the biggest challenges advertisers face today is cutting through the noise to make a real impact. Yet many still cling to an outdated model, one where media strategy and creative development operate in silos. Ideas bounce from team to team with little collaboration, and the result is almost always underwhelming. If you want to make a mark in a competitive landscape, it’s time to stop treating creative and media like separate things.
Your media plan decides where your message appears, who sees it and when. Your creative is the message itself. So how can either side succeed if they’re developed independently?
Too often, creative teams are briefed first and work in a vacuum with broad audience segments and vague goals. Only after the creative is finalized do media planners step in to figure out where and how it should run. That disconnect leads to campaigns that feel off, with assets that don’t fit the platform, don’t reach the right audience or just don’t land the way they could.
Now imagine the opposite: an integrated approach where media and creative collaborate from day one. Media insights, like platform-specific engagement trends, ideal ad lengths and past performance, can directly shape the creative. At the same time, a great creative concept can inspire a smarter media strategy that amplifies its strengths.
Take social video, for example. You could have the best, most captivating 60-second spot in the world. But drop it into a TikTok campaign and you might be disappointed. That doesn’t mean the creative is bad. It means the placement wasn’t built for it, and the message wasn’t built for the platform.
One of the best early examples of tight creative-media integration came in 2015, when UNICEF Sweden tackled the rise of ad blockers. Instead of throwing more budget at conventional display ads, they worked directly with a Swedish newspaper to hard-code this message into the site:
The result? A 3% click-through rate, five times higher than the industry average at the time, and a 10% conversion rate on those clicks (WSJ). All from users who actively tried to avoid ads altogether.
That campaign was ten years ago. This isn’t new thinking, it’s just not happening nearly enough.
A more recent example comes from VI’s work for Taco Mayo. To promote the client’s new shrimp tacos, the team launched a paid social campaign featuring an Instagram video ad. The creative was built specifically for the placement, a stripped-down, POV-style vertical video that would have looked out of place on TV but felt native on social. Because the creative and media teams planned it together, the video hit the mark. The campaign saw a 31% video view rate and a 1.46% engagement rate, both well above industry averages.
The takeaway? The best campaigns don’t just look good or run wide. They connect. They perform. And that only happens when media and creative work together as one.
