New research finds marketers are undervaluing creative’s contribution to sales lift by a factor of two, and have been every year since 2020. For radio, the finding is both a vindication and a sales pitch that could help budgets flow back to over-the-air.
A February 2026 Advertiser Perceptions study of 304 marketers and media agency buyers, conducted in partnership with Cumulus Media/Westwood One’s Audio Active Group, finds a disconnect between how the industry allocates campaign resources and what research shows actually moves product.
The study asked respondents to assign percentages across five campaign attributes: creative, targeting, reach, brand, and recency. It then benchmarked those perceptions against Circana’s analysis of nearly 450 advertising campaigns measuring actual sales lift across major media platforms.
Creative is the largest single driver of sales lift by a wide margin, accounting for 49% of campaign contribution according to the Circana data. Marketers and agencies together placed creative’s value at just 23%. For radio, which has long positioned its live, local, and personality-driven spots as a creative advantage over programmatic inventory, the finding carries direct sales implications. The misallocation has been consistent: marketer perceptions of creative’s contribution have held in a narrow band between 19% and 21% every year since 2020, never rising to reflect what the effectiveness data shows.
The overestimation runs in the opposite direction for targeting.
Marketers assigned targeting 23% of campaign contribution; agencies put it at 22%. Circana’s data places it at 11%. That perception has held firm across seven consecutive years of the Advertiser Perceptions tracker, averaging 25% among marketers since 2020. The persistence of the targeting premium in advertiser perception helps explain budget flows that have favored digital and programmatic platforms, which compete primarily on targeting precision, over broadcast audio, which competes on creative, reach, and brand.
Reach and recency are also overestimated. The combined study group assigned reach 21% and recency 14%; Circana’s measured contribution is 14% and 5%, respectively. The reach overestimation is notable given radio’s documented strength in that attribute: Nielsen consistently measures broadcast radio reaching more than 90% of American adults weekly, a figure that outpaces most digital and streaming competitors. If buyers are already overvaluing reach as a sales driver, radio’s lead on the metric matters less to budget allocation than it might otherwise.
Brand is the one attribute where perception and reality align: the study group assigned it 20%, against a measured contribution of 21%.
The divergence between marketers and agencies is most pronounced at the top of the rankings. Among the 122 marketers surveyed, targeting ranked first at 23%, with creative third at 21%. Among the 182 agency respondents, creative led at 24%, with targeting second at 22%.
The full findings are available via the Audio Active Group.
