• 88% or 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

New WARC x TikTok x LIONS Advisory research: The new creative advantage – How community signals are reshaping creative success in the age of AI. Introducing the S.C.A.L.E. framework for action

July 14, 2026 – Creativity has entered a new era. Generative AI is transforming how marketing ideas are developed, adapted, and scaled. But real advantage comes from creative that is most relevant, resonant, and connected to the people it is designed to reach.

The brands creating the strongest creative outcomes are increasingly combining the power of AI with the power of community. They’re using participation as intelligence, turning cultural signals into activation, and building creative systems that continuously learn from the audiences they serve. This creates an “intelligence loop” that gives brands a compounding creative advantage.

New research by WARC and LIONS Advisory, in partnership with TikTok, explores how community intelligence is reshaping creative success in the age of AI, and why the future advantage belongs to brands that can learn, adapt, and create alongside culture as it unfolds.

Lexi Wolf, Head of Thought Leadership, LIONS Advisory, says: “WARC’s Marketer’s Toolkit 2026 found that belief in the effectiveness of demographic segmentation is waning. 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.”

Andy Yang, Global Head of Creative & Brand Ads, TikTok, says: “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. 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. The future belongs to brands that close the loop by creating alongside culture, not behind it.”

Methodology

The research 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. Additionally, a series of interviews with senior marketers and industry experts was carried out, combined with a review of WARC and TikTok’s global data, industry knowledge, and examples.

Key takeaways outlined in ‘The new creative advantage: How community signals are reshaping creative success in the age of AI’ study are:

In the age of AI, community insights are becoming even more valuable

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.

Demographics remain the most common input when prompting AI, say 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.

As scaling creative becomes easier, the advantage is shifting to brands that are best at learning from community insights and use AI to turn live human understanding into more relevant, resonant creative action. Most marketers (86%) say audience behavior and community signals will influence creative development more in the next three years.

Marcos Angelides Managing Director L’Oréal Lab & Head of AI Operations, Publicis Media, says: “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. You’ve got to have behavioral data. You’ve got to know what people actually do, not just what they say they do.”

The Intelligence Loop turns community signals into creative advantage

Most brands are chasing culture – only catching trends after they break. 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:

1. Participation creates signals: Community engagement generates layered cultural and intent signals.

2. Signals reveal demand: Participation data surfaces leading indicators of emerging creative opportunity before it becomes explicit.

3. Demand shapes creative: Signals are routed into the AI briefing process, changing what the tool is working from.

4. Creative fuels participation: Resonant, community-informed work earns stronger engagement, generating fresh signals for the next cycle.

The real value of the Intelligence Loop is the strategic learning each cycle creates. Brands that feed those signals back into their next brief get sharper by creating improved briefs, more resonant creative, which in turn feed back into stronger product, brand and media decisions.

A framework for action: Introducing S.C.A.L.E.

The S.C.A.L.E. framework sets out five principles for using AI to accelerate the loop, from more precise briefs and creator partnerships to stronger governance, optimization and learning. Each step builds on the one before it.

S: Select: Align media and audience objectives first before briefing the AI, then use platform-native signals to shape what gets made.

C: Connect: Treat creators as intelligence sources, not distribution channels. AI-enabled creative systems can make this process more systematic, helping teams identify creators and creator content based on community fit, cultural relevance, and campaign goals, not just reach.

A: Anchor: Input strong, distinctive brand assets into AI to avoid the output looking like every other brand in the same category.

L: Lead: Brands should lead with internal governance by being transparent when using Gen AI, use clear guidelines, encoded before the brief, that make safety a structural feature rather than a last-minute check.

E: Evolve: Brands should treat every campaign as a live learning system and apply findings from one campaign to another. The brands building structural advantage with Gen AI treat measurement and creation as a single continuous process.

The new creative advantage: How community signals are reshaping creative success in the age of AI report is available to read in full here.