The Creative Engine
Failed musician turned chef turned ad-tech founder. Eighteen years from intern to Innovation Director at We Are Social to founding Automated Creative, the ad-tech platform proving creative is a measurable, data-driven discipline.
“Marketing is one human speaking to another human.”
Tom Ollerton is the Founder of Automated Creative, the ad-tech platform that uses live performance data to make and optimise ad creative at scale for some of the world’s biggest brands. Eighteen years in the industry from a Gumtree-found intern role through Innovation Director at We Are Social to founding AC in 2018 on the conviction that, as one keynote speaker once told him, AI would one day come down a pipe like electricity.
Tom Ollerton came to advertising late and sideways. A failed musician until 28, then a kitchen chef, his route in was a Gumtree classified for an intern role at a mobile agency five minutes from his house. He talked his way into the role on a Friday, then talked his way into Head of Sales two weeks later. Roles at VI as Head of Business Strategy and Skive as Associate Director followed.
In 2012 Tom joined We Are Social as Marketing Director, rising to Innovation Director by 2015, where he ran the agency’s thinking on emerging technology and ad tech. In parallel he co-founded The Innovation Ramble podcast (2014), co-created Ale 2.0 (a monthly meetup for digital folk who like real ale), and served six years on the IAB UK Social Media Council.
In January 2018 Tom co-founded Automated Creative with Alex Hobhouse, on the thesis that AI would eventually be good enough to support human creativity at scale. Now in its eighth year, AC is the platform behind ad creative for MARS, Diageo, Reckitt, Haleon, P&G, McDonald’s, KFC, Bose, Costa, Boots, Cisco and Beam Suntory. Tom is co-CEO with Rhoda Sell (operations and finance) and Alex Hobhouse (product). He has also published Using Creativity in Data and Marketing, a book of interviews with senior industry figures on the intersection.
“You only get data on the things you test.”
“Best practice is copying. Everyone copies. Then everyone wonders why their ads don’t cut through.”
Pattern-following is how humans evolved, but for marketers it is the route to invisibility. Tom’s baby-formula case study is the example he keeps coming back to: best practice for an ad targeted at mothers is a mum with a baby; the data showed the best-performing ad was a dad with the baby. The platform’s job is not to make better ads inside the existing pattern. Its job is to generate the variants the brand would not have tested, then prove which counter-pattern works in which market on which platform.
“Bring performance thinking to brand and brand thinking to performance. They are one team. Not two.”
The funnel is a model and like all models it is flawed. People become aware of brands through performance ads. People buy products from awareness ads. The split is a managerial construct, not a customer reality. Tom’s argument is that you need a platform, data and a strategy that lets brand cues run through performance creative and lets performance optimisation run through brand creative. The first second of a YouTube ad needs to be optimised, or no message lands, no memory structure builds, no brand lift accrues.
“You only get data on the things you test. Then you understand why your ads work, not just what worked.”
Most brands cannot tell you why their paid ads worked last year. They know what spent and what converted but not what causal element of the creative drove the outcome. AC tags every ad with strategic tags (in alcohol: serve, flavour, ingredients, heritage; in formula: parent, age, claims) and reports back on which combinations drove which outcomes. The CMO can query the dashboard like an LLM. The result is concrete causality: this is what drove conversions in France on Pinterest. This is what drove Add-to-Basket for Gen Z in North America.
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