Monks Launches AI Tool to Measure Creative Performance in APAC

For years, the marketing industry focused on targeting the right audience. Reach the right people, the thinking went, and the ad will do its job. Creative quality was largely an afterthought, measured by gut feel and awards judges.

Monks is challenging that assumption with a new tool launched across Asia-Pacific. Creative Intelligence is an AI-powered capability built into its Monks.Flow marketing system. It analyzes video and static ads at a granular level, connecting specific creative elements to actual business results.

Why Creative Has Been Flying Blind

The numbers tell the story. Research from Nielsen and IAB shows that creative content drives an average of 47% of total sales impact across TV and digital. That is nearly half of every campaign's return on investment, yet it has historically been the part of marketing that brands could not properly measure.

Platform targeting, audience segmentation, and reach: these received the precision tools and the budget scrutiny. Creative was treated as a fixed unit, something you produced, ran, and then assessed loosely after the fact. Creative Intelligence is built to fix that.

What the Tool Actually Does

Creative Intelligence works by breaking video and static assets into individual clips and generating metadata across a wide range of attributes. That metadata is then connected to live media performance metrics. The result is a system that can identify which specific moments in an ad, including a facial expression, a product close-up, or a particular background track, are actually driving engagement.

"Creative is the new targeting, and time is the only currency that matters," said Jakub Otrzasek, SVP of Data at Monks APAC. "For years, we optimized audiences to the finest detail while treating creative as a static unit. Creative Intelligence changes that by isolating the specific elements. We are moving from simply knowing an ad performed well to understanding that a specific moment like a 0:04-second clip of a red car drove the conversion. With AI, we can now scale those insights into production instantly."

The insights feed directly back into the Monks.Flow production loop. AI agents can then refine creative briefs, generate new visuals, and adapt content for different markets in real time.

Three Pilots, Three Concrete Results

Monks has put Creative Intelligence through live client tests in APAC, and the results are specific enough to be worth examining.

For a telecom client, the tool identified that expansive shots showing network reach outperformed close-up shots by 61%. The creative team had been producing close-up-heavy executions by default. Now they have a data point that redirects the brief.

In a second test, an unnamed client found that leading a 30-second online video with storytelling rather than price messaging drove 52% stronger performance. The instinct to open with a discount or a price offer turned out to be the wrong call.

A third case compared two versions of a call-to-action. "Online Store" messaging beat generic "Website" messaging by at least 50% across all tactics tested. A word choice. Measurable impact.

Closing the Loop Between Measurement and Production

What makes this approach different from a standalone analytics tool is how it connects to what happens next. Brett Camilleri, VP of Measurement at Monks APAC, framed the capability in terms of the broader measurement ecosystem.

"Creative Intelligence represents a critical advancement in the measurement ecosystem, complementing MMM, attribution modeling, and incrementality experiments," Camilleri said. "It enables a stronger connection between creative-level drivers and measurement models, allowing us to quantify the long-term impact of advertising on brand equity and overall marketing effectiveness, while identifying which elements of creative execution drive ROI."

The integration with Monks.Flow matters here. Most creative analytics tools operate as a reporting layer, producing insights that then need to be manually translated into briefs and production changes. Monks' design routes those insights directly into an agentic production system capable of acting on them without extra steps. For APAC brands managing creative across markets with different languages, platforms, and consumer behaviors, that closed loop between insight and adaptation is particularly valuable.