New research from WARC and LIONS Advisory, in partnership with TikTok, suggests that brands combining AI with community insights are producing stronger creative outcomes than those relying primarily on traditional demographic inputs.
The study, titled The New Creative Advantage: How Community Signals Are Reshaping Creative Success in the Age of AI, includes findings from a survey of 400 marketers across the UK, US, Australia, and Brazil, conducted in May 2026. All respondents are directly involved in decisions about how marketing creative and content are produced.
The research also includes a series of interviews with senior marketers and industry experts, combined with a review of WARC and TikTok’s global data, industry knowledge, and examples.
“The brands winning today are not the ones using AI to generate the most content. They are the ones learning the fastest from the people they serve,” said Andy Yang, Global Head of Creative and Brand Ads, TikTok.
“We call it cultural intelligence, and it is fast becoming advertisers’ most durable competitive advantage. Yet the research for this report shows that most brands are briefing powerful AI creative tools with weak inputs: static demographics and legacy assumptions, resulting in creative that scales efficiently but fails to connect.”
Yang adds that “The future belongs to brands that close the loop by creating alongside culture, not behind it.”
AI Output Is Rising Faster Than Quality
Most marketers (90%) agree that AI has quickly become part of the creative toolkit. However, while 88% of marketers say Gen AI has increased creative volume, fewer than half (45%) say it has significantly improved quality.
88% of marketers say Gen AI has increased creative volume, fewer than half (45%) say it has significantly improved quality.
Demographics remain the most common input when prompting AI, according to 67% of marketers, despite 59% agreeing that traditional demographic segmentation is no longer effective, according to WARC’s Marketer’s Toolkit 2026 survey. Only 17% of marketers always incorporate community or audience insights into Gen AI workflows.
Highlights
- 88% of marketers say AI has increased creative output, but only 45% say it has improved creative quality
- 86% believe real-time audience behavior and community signals are important to creative development
- 67% rely on basic demographic data, despite 59% agreeing that traditional demographic segmentation is no longer effective
- Only 17% of marketers always incorporate community insights beyond demographics into Gen AI workflows
The report said that as AI makes content production easier to scale, competitive advantage will increasingly come from brands that can translate community insights into more relevant creative work.
The brands winning today are not the ones using AI to generate the most content. They are the ones learning the fastest from the people they serve.
“Where the advantage comes is the data that you use to train those models, because AI is only as good as the data it’s trained on,” said Marcos Angelides, Managing Director, L’Oréal Lab and Head of AI Operations, Publicis Media.
“You’ve got to have behavioral data. You’ve got to know what people actually do, not just what they say they do.”
Turning Community Signals Into Creative Inputs
According to the report, many brands are still chasing culture, only catching trends after they have already broken.Participatory platforms surface shifts in behavior and cultural momentum while they are still emerging. Community participation continuously generates signals that help creative systems learn, adapt, and improve over time. This becomes an Intelligence Loop: a four-stage cycle in which community participation and AI creative reinforce each other over time.
Participation creates signals, as community engagement generates layered cultural and intent signals. Signals reveal demand, as participation data surfaces leading indicators of emerging creative opportunity before it becomes explicit. Demand shapes creative, as signals are routed into the AI briefing process, changing what the tool is working from. Creative fuels participation, as resonant, community-informed work earns stronger engagement, generating fresh signals for the next cycle.
Most marketers (86%) say audience behavior and community signals will influence creative development more in the next three years.
According to the report, brands that feed those signals back into future briefs can improve creative relevance while informing broader product, brand, and media decisions.
The report also introduces the S.C.A.L.E. framework, a five-part model designed to help brands incorporate community signals into AI-driven creative development. The framework covers audience and media alignment, creator collaboration, brand distinctiveness, governance, and continuous learning.
“WARC’s Marketer’s Toolkit 2026 found that belief in the effectiveness of demographic segmentation is waning,” said Lexi Wolf, Head of Thought Leadership, LIONS Advisory.
“Yet this study with TikTok found that demographics were still the number one input marketers used to brief AI. Meanwhile, participatory media environments are giving us something far richer: real-time signals from people who search, comment, share, remix, create and buy. The opportunity isn’t to make the existing system faster. It’s to build a better one: one that helps brands learn from people more continuously, respond with greater speed and relevance, and turn efficiency into effectiveness over time.”
