DiscoverThe Media Leader PodcastCan creative speak the language of media? With Daivid's Barney Worfolk-Smith
Can creative speak the language of media? With Daivid's Barney Worfolk-Smith

Can creative speak the language of media? With Daivid's Barney Worfolk-Smith

Update: 2025-08-11
Share

Description

How to bring creative and media together? It’s a question that has perplexed advertising leaders for years.

The big money in advertising has been shifting away from creative and towards media; from the big creative idea to data-led measurement of a brand’s performance. But it’s also true that it’s almost impossible to succeed without both sides of the coin working in your favour.

Barney Worfolk-Smith is chief growth officer at Daivid, an adtech company that provides creative data to clients, allowing them to measure what it calls the “constituent parts of creative effectiveness”: attention, emotional response, brand recall and more.

Worfolk-Smith argues that creative needs to start being data-led, lest it fall into irrelevance as media becomes dominant. He also unpacks the implications of commoditising creative by turning our understanding of it into 1s and 0s.

Highlights:

3:58 : Testing creative data to improve effectiveness — why winners are differentiated

11:40 : Influencer marketing's "painful adolescence": vanity metrics, eschewed brand guidelines, briefing process

14:49 : Implications of assessing creative at scale

20:28 : Getting creative and media to work more closely together by engaging with data

25:52 : AI anxieties: "the sloppening" is here

Related articles:

Creative process stifled by poor training and feedback

How to hack the attention economy — with VCCP Media’s Will Parrish

Havas Play Network’s CEO is on a mission to bring media and creative back together

---

Thanks to our production partners Trisonic for editing this episode.

--> Discover how Trisonic can elevate your brand and expand your business by connecting with your ideal audience

Visit The Media Leader for the most authoritative news analysis and comment on what's happening in commercial media. 

LinkedIn: The Media Leader

YouTube: The Media Leader

Comments 
In Channel
loading
00:00
00:00
x

0.5x

0.8x

1.0x

1.25x

1.5x

2.0x

3.0x

Sleep Timer

Off

End of Episode

5 Minutes

10 Minutes

15 Minutes

30 Minutes

45 Minutes

60 Minutes

120 Minutes

Can creative speak the language of media? With Daivid's Barney Worfolk-Smith

Can creative speak the language of media? With Daivid's Barney Worfolk-Smith