• Past Event Highlights
• Article

Creative Effectiveness 2026

On October 14, the ARF Creative Effectiveness conference dove into the challenges shaping creative strategy today. Industry experts explored how marketers can balance short-term results with long-term brand building, measure creative impact, and leverage AI and commerce media without sacrificing brand equity. Attendees heard perspectives on what’s working, what isn’t, and how to connect creative strategy to measurable business outcomes. Following the conference, the ARF David Ogilvy Awards were held to celebrate research- and insight-driven advertising.

• Future States & AI
• Article

When AI Becomes Part of the Consumer–Brand Relationship

• Psychology of GenAI
• ARF; MSI; 3 Standard Deviations

Generative AI is changing more than how consumers discover and compare brands. It is becoming an active participant in how they interpret brand information, evaluate alternatives and make purchasing decisions. The latest report in the ARF and MSI's Psychology of Gen AI series, The Third Actor: How AI Is Entering the Consumer–Brand Relationship, explores this emerging dynamic and what it could mean for marketers. Drawing on a survey of experienced AI users, the research examines how AI's personalized, conversational interactions may influence brand perceptions, consumer preferences and the relationship between brands and their customers.

• Creative & Branded Content
• Article

How Emotions Travel Between TV Programs and Advertising

• JOURNAL OF ADVERTISING RESEARCH

Can the emotions viewers experience while watching television influence how they respond to commercials? And can advertising, in turn, shape their emotional reactions to the programs they watch? New research published in the Journal of Advertising Research examines this two-way relationship using biometric measurements and real-time audience feedback. Drawing on television viewing sessions across four countries, the study explores how emotional responses carry over between programs and advertisements, how commercial placement affects engagement and why certain programming genres may offer advertisers distinct advantages. The findings offer valuable insights for media planners, advertisers and broadcasters seeking to better understand the role of emotional context in advertising effectiveness.

• Research & Data Quality
• Article

What Buyers Want from Retail Media Measurement

• ARF

Retail media promises advertisers something especially valuable: the ability to connect advertising exposure with transaction data. But as campaigns expand across onsite, offsite and in-store environments, advertisers and agencies are finding that measurement remains difficult to compare, reconcile and evaluate. Based on an RFI with 13 buy-side organizations, this second phase of the ARF Retail Media Network Standardization Project examines how advertisers and agencies experience retail media measurement in practice — from incrementality and attribution to transparency, deduplication, in-store measurement and access to underlying data.

• Future States & AI
• Article

How AI Recommendations Are Changing the Rules of Brand Growth

• ARF; MSI

What happens to brand growth when consumers increasingly turn to AI assistants instead of relying on familiar brands or traditional search results? As generative AI becomes a more influential part of product discovery and purchasing decisions, marketers face new questions about how brands gain visibility, enter consumers' consideration sets and compete for attention. In MSI Working Paper, Tri-System Brand Growth: The AI Mediation Layer, researcher Pablo Ulpiano González Castro introduces a framework that adds AI availability to the established concepts of mental and physical availability. Drawing on brand-growth theory, an experiment and cross-category measurement research, the paper examines how AI-generated recommendations may reinforce existing brand advantages or create new opportunities for competing brands, and what these changes mean for marketing strategy and brand measurement.

• Future States & AI
• Article

How Generative AI Is Transforming Advertising Development

• ARF
• CREATIVE COUNCIL

Generative AI is changing how advertising creative is developed—but not by replacing human creativity. Drawing on interviews with industry leaders and a broad review of emerging research, this ARF Creative Council white paper examines how AI is being used across the creative process, from briefing and ideation to personalization and optimization. It explores where AI delivers the greatest value today, the risks organizations continue to navigate and why human judgment remains central to producing distinctive, effective advertising.