Why Interactive Ads Win: Kayzen’s Vision For Data-Driven Marketing

Justin Nield, Creative Solutions Lead, explores the future of advertising and explains how interactive ad formats can be a game changer for performance marketing teams.

Disclaimer: The opinions represented here are those of the individual and do not necessarily represent those of their current or former employer.

In digital advertising, success often hinges on one question: What’s working right now? But Justin Nield, whose extensive resume includes ad tech leadership roles at Kayzen, Liftoff, and Vungle, challenges that thinking with a broader and more sustainable vision. His approach focuses not just on what performs today, but on creating systems and teams that continuously generate performance.

Tap In Digital’s Ted Coxworth sat down with Justin for a conversation on why it's vital to go beyond ad metrics and into behavioral insights, how interactive ad formats unlock powerful new data, and how AI assets may soon be part of your creative team. Together, his insights offer a forward-looking view of what creative strategy will look like in the next 2-3 years, and how marketers should prepare.

Watch the full video below, or read on for a selection of key insights.

Key Takeaways

• Invest in new ideas, even when old ones still work. Avoid letting success turn into stagnation by dedicating energy to innovation. Maintain a creative pipeline that tests fresh concepts while capitalizing on proven performers.

  
  

• Prepare your team for a shift from production to creative management. AI is already taking over much of the content generation, requiring marketers to focus on directing, refining, and aligning machine-generated assets. Start building fluency in managing automated workflows today.

  
  

• Use interactive ads to unlock deeper insights beyond passive video views. Track user choices, behaviors, and engagement within the ad itself to uncover more meaningful data. These signals help refine targeting and improve future creative decisions.

  
  

• Measure signals of intent to guide users through personalized journeys.

  Rather than funneling all users toward a generic CTA, use behavior-based data to route them to experiences that align with their mindset and needs. This real-time adaptability drives higher engagement and relevance.

  
  

• Understand why creative works—not just that it worked. Deconstruct the specific elements that contributed to performance so you can replicate success systematically. Build your briefs based on past wins, not just intuition or assumptions.

1. Always Be Investing In New Ideas
   

Ads typically have a lifecycle with seasonal campaign launches, peaks, and, eventually, retirement. But that’s not always the case, Justin says. Sometimes, ads outperform their shelf life. And while that can sometimes be a positive, it comes with risks for advertisers that aren’t careful.

“We made seasonal creative at Halloween, and it's got a Halloween theme, and it just kept performing…Why would you ever stop spending if an ad's performing, right? And I think that the issue in this specific example, where something keeps going and there is no ad fatigue, [isn’t] a problem.

What happens if the only creative that you have that is performing contains an offer that you no longer want to run, but it's your only performing ad?... You probably want to spend 80% of your money on what's working and 20% of your marketing dollars on testing new ideas, but 80% of your energy in creating new ideas"

A top-performing creative can become a crutch. When an ad is delivering results, there’s a strong temptation to keep pushing spend, but that can lead to creative stagnation. That’s especially true if the offer or context behind the ad no longer reflects your goals. Creative strategy is about proactively generating new ideas.

This is where a system of continuous creative innovation becomes essential not just for performance, but for brand longevity. A recent Temple University study why-interactive-ads-win-kayzen’s-vision-for-data-driven-marketingfound that in categories where innovation matters, newer brands can outperform legacy players simply because they’re perceived as more innovative. Roomba, for example, has been able to capture 20% of the vacuum market against century-old brands thanks in large part to their innovation-forward brand identity.

Top-performing ad creative might keep delivering, but relying on it too long can stall momentum. Brands that thrive don’t just optimize what works. They keep testing, evolving, and signaling that they’re moving forward.

Tap In Digital helps brands do exactly that by combining high-performing creative with a system for continuous testing and innovation. On average, our clients see a 10% lift in paid advertising ROI. Learn more here.

2. Prepare for Creative Agentic AI

   
   

The creative toolkit has expanded dramatically over the last decade. From dynamic ad platforms to automated templates, it's easier than ever to produce content at scale. But Justin is looking further down the road to a time when the tools themselves start acting more like team members.

“The biggest change that's going to happen between now and in three years is not the tools that we have to make creative. We can make interactive creative with fun vibe coding techniques in no time. And we have the tools. There's lots of infrastructure for testing to make sure that it's good.

But I imagine in two to three years, we'll have digital agents, like digital designers, as in an AI designer that we'll have to manage. At the moment I manage designers who are humans who use tools. But I imagine as we move forward into the future, we might end up having to figure out how to manage digital assets. And I'm interested to see where that goes.”

This is more than a prediction: It’s a shift in mindset. If your “designer” is an AI agent that generates dozens of variants in seconds, your role as a creative lead changes. You’re no longer just briefing creatives, you’re training and directing autonomous systems.

This also raises new operational questions: How do you ensure brand consistency across AI-generated assets? How do you review and refine at scale? How do you collaborate across human and machine workflows? Teams that start thinking now about AI fluency will have a serious advantage with the new paradigm.

3. Use Interactive Ad Components To Derive Audience Insights

For years, video has been the format of choice for brand storytelling. But video is largely a passive experience. Interactive creative like playables, quizzes, or interactive end cards invite the user into the ad experience. According to Justin, that changes everything from the user experience to the data marketers receive.

“As soon as you add an interactive component…you can start looking at things like, ‘What interactions are users taking before they convert?’... The interactive component adds such a rich layer of possible data… We could say, what do you feel like doing on Friday night, going out and exploring or staying home and chilling? It's going to give us an indication of a kind of personality trait that might be useful for future advertising.”

Justin explains that interactive creative generates three distinct categories of data: Traditional ad metrics like impressions, CTR, and completions; Engagement metrics like session length, interaction rates, and win rates in playables; and interaction data, specific actions taken inside the creative (e.g. taps, scrolls, product selections).

It’s this third category—interaction data—that’s most valuable and least utilized. It offers qualitative insight at scale, showing what choices users make, not just whether they click. These subtle behavioral signals help shape smarter follow-ups, better segmentation, and more humanized targeting. With that data, advertisers can narrow in on which specific elements of creative are working. From there, it becomes far easier to replicate successful campaigns.

4. Measure Intent to Segment and Personalize

With data extracted, savvy marketers can use this valuable information to drive incremental increases in ROI by personalizing ad experiences. One extreme but emblematic approach Justin highlights is how some sophisticated ad research firms are using physiological signals like the galvanic skin response and real-time interaction to better understand how users respond to different ad components at a biological level. ‘Download Now’ isn’t a one-size-fits-all CTA, and there are plenty of reasons to direct users elsewhere depending on the type of content they're engaging with.

“For example… galvanic skin response tells us what is the specific thing that we need to put in our message… in the same way we can, through using aggregated data, figure out roughly where they'll be and then optimize accordingly.

As a user engages with an ad, we can then choose to send them to a different endpoint… If someone's interested in improving their savings, maybe you want to show them some products about how they could save.”

This kind of emotional optimization goes beyond basic audience targeting. By analyzing aggregated responses, teams can infer which messages are most resonant and then adapt creative for those attributes. This is the future of digital advertising: journeys tailored in real-time based on user cues, not assumptions. It’s a huge opportunity for marketers to shift from fixed funnels to flexible, responsive paths.

5. Seek to Understand The “Why” Behind Creative Success

The final insight Justin offers might be the most essential. Success in marketing can feel elusive, but the difference between luck and strategy often comes down to asking one key question: Why did it work? According to Justin, it’s important to understand the specific elements driving the success of high-performing creative so that it can be re-used in the future. Briefs don’t determine the next piece of content, content determines the next brief.

“It's always more important to understand ‘why’ rather than hitting a bullseye, because that way you can try and replicate the success that you've had before… We can have very clear marketing objectives, but we have to translate them into a creative brief. We've got to figure out how to speak the same language, and that's another kind of challenge that I see advertisers have.”

Too often, teams are so focused on hitting performance goals that they miss the learnings hidden behind the numbers. Was it the creative concept, the format, the placement, or the context? Without clarity, repetition becomes guesswork. Performance is the result, but strategy is the process. And that process only works when teams are aligned across goals, language, and learning.

Good Ads Deliver Insight As Well As Performance

Great ads don’t just convert, they reveal what resonates. As Justin Nield makes clear, the most effective creative strategies are built on a loop of learning: test relentlessly, analyze what matters, and evolve continuously. From extending the life of a seasonal ad to preparing for a future filled with AI-driven design and interactive formats, his approach is about turning short-term performance into long-term possibilities.

Tap In Digital has a similar mentality. If you’re ready to move beyond isolated wins and start building a creative system that scales, adapts, and learns, let’s talk.

If you want to see how Justin’s team can help you, explore Video+ by Kayzen. With Video+, you can extend full-screen video with custom interactive experiences. It’s a smarter way to drive engagement and capture richer user insights, without sacrificing reach or speed.