How the best brands actually make creative.
Every month, we measure how brands produce creative: what's growing, what's winning, and what separates the leaders from everyone else. Most indexes focus on DTC; one zooms out to the whole platform.
Index 01DTC · monthly
The bar keeps rising.
The typical DTC brand now ships ~17 creatives per month, up from ~7 just 18 months ago.
~7
Ads a month for a typical brand, mid-2024
~17
Ads a month for a typical brand, today
2.5×
More than a typical brand made 18 months ago
Ads shipped by a typical DTC brand, per month
Higher = more creative being made. The line keeps climbing.
Ads per typical brand, per month
"Typical brand" = the middle of the pack (the median), so a few giant advertisers can't skew it. Shown as a 3-month average to smooth the noise. The early-2026 dip coincides with a surge in advertiser growth, before per-brand output rebounds into spring.
Index 02DTC · monthly
It's a video game.
Look at what a typical DTC brand actually makes: video is the workhorse, roughly 60% of total creative output.
~60%
Of a typical brand's creative is video
~11
Videos a month for a typical brand (latest)
~5
Interactives a month for a typical brand (latest)
What a typical DTC brand makes each month, by format
Video sits far above everything else, the whole way through.
Video
Interactive
Image
Median creatives per brand by format, 3-month average. Built on the typical brand (median), not totals, so a few heavy producers of one format can't skew it.
Index 03DTC · monthly
Creative intensity is rising faster than spend.
Across DTC, average video output per advertiser rose sharply while spend per advertiser actually fell. Creative output per advertiser keeps accelerating.
+351%
Average video output per advertiser (~4.5×)
−34%
Average spend per advertiser
+594%
More videos produced per $1M of spend
DTC: video output vs. spend per advertiser — indexed to 100 (Dec 2024)
Output per advertiser climbs while spend per advertiser drifts down.
Avg videos per advertiser
Avg spend per advertiser
Both lines are average per-advertiser measures, indexed to 100, to keep the comparison consistent — median video output shows the same direction and is omitted only to avoid mixing average and median measures. So the creative surge isn't simply explained by more brands or bigger budgets. Consumer / DTC.
Index 04DTC · quarterly
The top 10% ship 6.5× more.
The biggest difference isn't spend. It's output — and most of that output is video.
Creatives per quarter — a mid-tier brand vs. the top 10%
Same picture across every format. Spend is shown on its own scale.
A mid-tier brand
Top 10%
Videos
Images
Interactives
Total
A 90-day snapshot of DTC advertisers by spend tier. The "mid-tier" brand is the median spender — which sits above the bottom half, so it's higher than the all-brand typical in Index 01 (those are different points in the same distribution, not a contradiction). Both bars are medians per advertiser. Spend is on a separate scale (~31× gap); the four creative counts share one scale. Top-10% brands ship ~6.5× the creative — and spend ~31× more. Figures rounded; parts may not sum exactly.
Index 05DTC · monthly
The advertiser boom.
Spend has more than tripled and the number of DTC brands advertising has 5×'d in 18 months. Thousands of new brands have entered the market.
+236%
Growth in monthly DTC ad spend
+406%
Growth in DTC brands advertising
4,300
DTC brands advertising now, up from ~850
Monthly DTC spend and the number of brands advertising
Both lines climb — more brands, more dollars, every month.
Monthly spend ($M)
Brands advertising
This tracks adoption and spend — not returns; we don't claim ROI. The surge in brands is a long tail of new DTC advertisers getting started, while total spend keeps climbing alongside them. Consumer / DTC, Dec 2024 – May 2026.
Index 06All advertisers · beyond DTC
Video dominates the creative mix.
Zoom out to every advertiser on the platform — not just DTC — and the pattern holds. About 3 in 4 creatives are video. The format brands keep choosing is video.
~73%
Of all creative is video, on average
85%
Video's peak share of all creative
3 in 4
Creatives made are video, platform-wide
Share of all creative that's video — every advertiser
Across the whole platform, video dominates the creative mix.
Video
Interactive
Image
This one is platform-wide — every advertiser, all categories, not just DTC — so it's a broader lens than the indexes above. We flag it on purpose. The takeaway is universal: video dominates the creative mix — it’s the format brands overwhelmingly choose to produce.
The state of creative production
A typical DTC brand produces 2.5× more creative than it did 18 months ago. The leaders produce 6.5× more. Most of that output is video. And while advertiser counts keep climbing, creative production is growing even faster than spend.
"The brands pulling ahead aren't winning with bigger budgets. They're winning with more creative."
Methodology
The monthly DTC indexes (01, 02, 03, 05) measure a typical DTC advertiser — the median, never the average, so a few very-high-volume advertisers can't distort the figures — shown as a 3-month average to reduce noise. Index 04 (the creative gap) is a 90-day snapshot by spend tier, reported in quarterly units and kept separate from the monthly indexes.
Index 03 (creative intensity) compares average videos per advertiser against average spend per advertiser across DTC, both indexed to 100 — using averages (not a mix of average and median) for consistency. To check the signal isn't merely the influx of new self-serve advertisers, we re-ran it on managed accounts alone, where spend per advertiser is roughly flat and output still climbs. Index 06 ("Video dominates the creative mix") is platform-wide — every advertiser, all categories, not just DTC. It's a broader lens, labeled as such, and not mixed with the DTC indexes.
Figures are illustrative, based on sample platform data. Internal draft — not for publication.
CS
The Creative Signal
Creative & growth data · Issue 001