Creative intelligence
It reads every creative like a strategist — not a tagger.
Creative is the single biggest driver of a campaign's sales — 49%, more than targeting (11%) or reach (14%) [NCSolutions / Circana, 2023]. It is also the layer most tools only tag.
Adgent reads every live ad the way a senior buyer would: its DNA, the story scene by scene, and exactly where viewers leave. No upload step — it reads what is already running.
A tag says what is in the ad. A read says what the ad does.
Most creative analytics stops at attributes: this ad has a person, a kitchen, a price overlay, a voiceover. That is a filing system. It tells you what you already knew when you briefed it.
- Has: product close-up, female presenter, text overlay
- Format: 9:16 video, 14 seconds
- Hook rate 71%, hold rate 12%
Two scalars and a list of nouns. Nothing here tells you which second to change.
- Retention holds through the demo and collapses at 0:07 — the second the price overlay lands, before the benefit is stated.
- The hook is doing its job. Losing viewers at seven seconds is not a thumbnail problem, and changing the opening frame would fix nothing.
- The fix is order, not content. The same four scenes, with the price after the payoff instead of before it.
Same ad, same data. One of these is a decision you can hand to an editor.
Presenter states the problem, demonstrates, then the offer. On-screen text carries the price before the benefit lands.
- 0:00Hook · question to camera−9% viewers
- 0:03Demonstration−12% viewers
- 0:07Price overlay−38% viewers · biggest drop
- 0:11Offer and end card−6% viewers
Creative fatigue — hook wear-out
DNA, the story, and where they leave.
Two ads can share a format, a length and a hook rate and still be built from different arguments. The DNA is the part that makes them comparable — what the ad promises, how it proves it, and in what order — so a winner can be repeated on purpose instead of guessed at.
Creative DNA
What the ad is actually built from — its structural pattern, its promise, the shape of its argument. This is what lets one account's winners be compared with each other rather than ranked by spend.
The storyboard, scene by scene
The ad decomposed into its beats, in order, with what each one is doing. A fifteen-second video is not one thing; it is five decisions, and usually only one of them is wrong.
The hold curve
Where viewers leave, joined to what was on screen when they did. This is the join that matters: a retention chart without the scene under it tells you people left, not why.
A creative wearing out shows up in the read before it shows up in the CPA. Frequency climbing while hold rate falls is a creative running out of road — and by the time the cost per acquisition confirms it, you have paid for the confirmation.
Creative is 49% of what drives the sale, and a quarter of tagging instead of reading is a quarter of spending against the wrong half of it. The ad above loses 38% of viewers at 0:07 — the price overlay landing before the benefit.
Nothing in a hook rate or a hold rate says which second to change, so the next brief is written from the same two scalars as the last one. Three more months of that is three more months of reshooting the parts that were working.
Hook rate says whether. It never says which second.
So the next brief gets written from the same two scalars as the last one, and the creative that follows is a guess with better production values.
- 49%of a campaign’s sales are driven by the creative itself
- 0:07the second this ad loses 38% of its viewers
- 4scenes read individually, not one average
The creative read lands in the same place as everything else.
It arrives in the morning verdict, ranked with everything else competing for your attention — and what you decide about a creative is remembered the next time one like it appears.
Pick the ad you can’t explain. We’ll read it.
Point us at a live ad whose numbers do not match your instinct, and we will send back the read: its DNA, the story beat by beat, and the exact second viewers leave.
- Scene-by-scene, joined to per-moment retention
- Reads what is already running — no upload step
The hold curve against the storyboard, and a plain answer to which second is losing you the viewer — usually not the one people guess.
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