Is 60% of Your Creative Work Going Unused?

It’s a stat that should stop any marketer in their tracks: up to 70% of creative work never gets used.

That’s not a typo. PR Daily report a staggering majority of content produced by marketing teams ends up unused. Our internal data aligns to this reality. Not because it wasn’t good. Not because it wasn’t on-brand. But because no one could find it. Or no one even knew it existed.

This is the silent killer of marketing ROI—waste hidden in the lifecycle of your creative work. And it’s everywhere.

The Cost of Invisible Work

Think about what goes into a single campaign: strategy, briefing, reviews, production, delivery. Multiply that by the number of teams, brands, and markets. Now imagine more than half of that effort collecting digital dust in a folder no one checks.

Creative doesn’t fail at the point of execution—it fails when there’s no visibility across its lifecycle.

If you can’t track what’s being made, where it lives, and whether it’s actually being used, you’re not managing creative—you’re gambling with it.

Why It Happens

Most teams don’t plan for waste. It creeps in because:

• There’s no single view of what’s already been created
• Creative doesn’t connect back to performance, so reuse feels risky
• Processes are fragmented, especially across large or global teams

And the bigger the organization, the easier it is for this waste to become normalized—“just the cost of doing business.” It’s not.

Don’t ‘Burn It to the Ground’ to See What’s Happening

Here’s the trap too many enterprises are falling into: trying to solve visibility by tearing everything down.

They rip out tools. Launch 2-year transformation projects. Hire armies of consultants to “rearchitect” their entire marketing operating model—just to understand what’s happening.

But visibility doesn’t require reinvention anymore. It doesn’t need to start with a blank slate.

It can start with the stack you already have—by layering in smarter, lighter-weight technology that connects the dots across workflows, people, and performance. Not after 24 months. Not after another six-figure audit. But now.

Small changes can create huge leaps in clarity—without burning it all down to see the fire.

What Smart Teams Are Doing

Leading brands are starting to ask:

• What are we actually producing?
• Where is it going?
• Is it making an impact—or sitting unused?

They’re using this lens not just to reduce waste, but to unlock hidden value. Often, the best-performing creative already exists—it’s just stuck in the wrong part of the lifecycle.

As Colleen DeCourcy, Chief Creative Officer at Snap, recently said:

“Great creativity scales itself.”

It’s true—but only if the organization can see it, share it, and use it.

See It. Use It. Scale It.

Creative isn’t cheap. And in today’s market, no one can afford to waste it. If you want more out of your campaigns, you don’t always need more assets—you need more visibility.

​According to McKinsey, effective marketing spend management can free up as much as 20 percent of a marketing budget, allowing for reinvestment in high-growth areas.

That’s where a Medialake comes in.