If it wasn't for one really poor ad brief I wrote 4 years ago, Pearmill would no longer exist. We would have lost our clients lots of money and opportunity, and eventually shut down.

When we first started Pearmill, we followed a traditional agency process for producing ads that was lead by the growth strategists - create a brief for the designer > designer produces ads > run the ads > analyse the results > produce another brief > and repeat.

It was an okay process. We were good at establishing a baseline, but had trouble getting beyond it. "We'll get you to an unmoving baseline" isn't exactly a compelling pitch for a performance marketing agency.

We hired a Creative Director (who would eventually become one of our co-founders) and that was the point where our process changed. I sent her a brief for some ads I wanted to see in the account.

‍

"Why do you want me to make these ads?" she asked.

"I think they'd be good ads, based on the last round of performance."

"Show me the performance."

‍

It was something I hadn't been asked by a creative colleague before - not just what the performance was, but to actually walk through the metrics.

After reviewing the performance together, she developed different hypotheses about the ads' success and failure - ones rooted in creativity rather than pure logic. She considered things like the pace of an animated character's motion or the presence of negative space. Insights that would be nearly impossible to catch unless you were the ad's creator.

And doesn't that make sense? We are irrational consumers and even more irrational ad engagers. Successful ads aren't just a formula of value propositions and images. They're weird, sometimes a little off, yet always oddly feel right to consumers. While we may never precisely know why an ad succeeds, creatives have the best intuition to make that success repeatable.

After seeing the results of our hypotheses outperform mine, we decided on a new creative production philosophy:

We Do Not Give Briefs to Our Creative Team

That was the start of a series of events that eventually led to our creative team fully owning the creative process: researching, developing creative strategy, production, and most importantly, analyzing ad performance.

This approach enables us to achieve exceptional results for our clients, driving creative test outcomes that consistently outperform expectations.

‍

How to Get the Creative Team Excited?

We were fortunate that my eventual co-founder has a finance degree and is comfortable with data. But building an agency that only hires creatives with finance backgrounds isn’t sustainable.

So we needed to find a way to get buy-in from new creative team members to both produce ads and dive into the ads manager have have some spreadsheet fun.

We broke down our approach to get them excited into two parts:

1. The Conceptual Sell - how do we get them aligned with this philosphy
2. The Practical Sell - how do we equip them with these skills

‍

The Conceptual Sell: Ownership Drives Creativity

‍The core of our approach was giving our creative team true ownership of their work. Creative ownership means more than just making ads; it means understanding their performance and having the freedom to iterate based on quantitative feedback.

Instead of receiving constrained briefs, we wanted our team to explore: Why are results the way they are? What hypotheses can they develop and prove or disprove? This iterative process taps into what creatives love most - the freedom to explore, play, test, and refine.

Performance marketing offers something unique - immediate feedback. Create an ad, put it out there, and quickly understand its impact. This excited our creatives, especially those who previously felt like mere resources or spent months on a single concept.

Our team's dedicated focus on ad production made instilling this ownership easier. But even for multidisciplinary creative teams, blending creativity with data-driven insights is inherently appealing.

The key is showing that data enhances creativity, not restricts it.

‍

The Practical Sell: Training and Support

Once the team bought into the concept, we moved on to the practical side. We equipped them with the skills they needed to understand the data. Contrary to the belief that creative people can’t be data-informed, we strongly believe they can — and should — be. We gave our team basic training in data analysis, understanding what CTRs, CPMs, ROAS, AOV, etc. are. Alongside this, we developed a glossary of terms and acronyms to ensure they understood the landscape.

We also paired our creatives with ad channel managers who acted as their ad-data guides. These managers would prepare reports that categorized ads into “best-performing,” “mid-performing,” and “worst-performing.” However, the data wasn’t spoon-fed. The creatives were encouraged to dig deeper, analyze the numbers, and make connections. For example, a poorly performing ad might have a high CTR but a low CVR, prompting the creative to ask: "What elements of this ad are driving clicks but not conversions?"

This hands-on learning allowed them to see patterns and trends in the data, which informed their next designs. As they started to see how small tweaks in creative — like adjusting the pace of motion — could significantly impact performance, their confidence in analyzing data grew.

‍

The Long-Term Impact: Creatives Becoming Advocates

After several months of this, we started to see accelerated results for our clients. Not only were  we producing better ads, but the team was more invested in the process. They became advocates for this approach, even selling new hires on the idea of using data to inform creative decisions.

And when the channel management team, and the creative team speak the same language and have the same shared goal - what we end up seeing is a deep, respectful, caring connection between two disciplines that are usually at odds with each other.

This process also resulted in creative-team retention that I have yet to see in another agency. Over 4 years, we have only had 1 person quit. By giving creatives more control over their work and the ability to directly impact results, we created an environment where they can create work they’re proud of. Having a senior creative advocate for this mindset helped immensely in getting buy-in from the rest of the team.

‍

Creative and Data Sitting in a Tree…

Ultimately - “data-driven creative” isn’t just a tactic for better performance — it’s a philosophy that drives innovation. When creatives have the tools and vocabulary to understand the impact of their work, they end up pushing boundaries and creating ads that are a little weird, a little off, and oddly feel just right.

‍

For fun - here’s what our ads used to look like a few years ago:

‍

Here’s what some of our ads look like now: