Cheil Australia: Sherrah’s 2026 Data-Creative Vision

Cheil Australia hiring Pete Sherrah as Creative Director is a clear signal they’re getting serious about sharpening their creative, especially for data-heavy campaigns. Everyone’s talking about the need for leaders who can look at a spreadsheet full of analytics and somehow turn that into a compelling brand story. The real question for us in the trenches is how you get that sophisticated creative direction to actually work with a tough campaign management framework and deliver something you can measure.

Step 1: Defining Campaign Objectives and Creative Briefing in Google Ads

Good creative direction starts with knowing what the campaign’s objectives are in no uncertain terms. This means defining success in a way you can actually measure, not just asking for ‘more clicks’. A classic mistake I see all the time is a brief that asks for “brand awareness” but doesn’t specify the metric. Is that unique reach? Is it impression share? Viewability? A big part of Pete Sherrah’s job at Cheil Australia will be to take those high-level business goals and turn them into directives his creative team can actually execute on.

1.1 Working through to Campaign Creation and Goal Selection

Okay, open your Google Ads account. On the left nav pane, click Campaigns. You’re looking for the big blue plus-sign icon that says New Campaign. Click it. The first thing it’ll ask is for a campaign goal. You’ll see options like Sales, Leads, Website traffic, and all the rest. If you’re running a performance-focused campaign, you’ll almost always want to start with Leads or Sales, because choosing one of those goals opens up specific optimization strategies inside the platform that you want to have access to.

1.2 Choosing Campaign Type and Setting Initial Parameters

After you pick a goal, Google asks you to “Select a campaign type.” Your main choices are Search, Display, Video, Shopping, and App. This decision dictates exactly what kind of creative assets you’re going to need. For a Search campaign, your creative is all text, headlines, descriptions, extensions. For Video, you need video files. Let’s say you pick a Search campaign. You’ll click Continue and then start plugging in your initial settings like networks (stick to the Google Search Network, uncheck Display), locations like “Sydney, New South Wales, Australia”, languages, and your budget. This basic setup gives the creative team the box they need to work inside of, defining the scope and audience.

Pro Tip: Aligning Creative with Goal Intent

When you’re picking a goal, you have to think about the user’s mindset. A “Leads” campaign is trying to get someone’s contact info, so your ad copy or visuals must give them a really good reason to hand it over. A “Brand awareness” campaign, on the other hand, might just need a memorable image or a catchy line. A Statista report showed digital ad spend in Australia hit around $13.9 billion AUD in 2023, and a huge chunk of that went to performance campaigns. That’s why there’s so much pressure to make sure the creative is built from the ground up to hit a conversion goal.

Step 2: Developing Creative Concepts and Asset Preparation

Once the campaign skeleton is built, the creative team, led by someone like Pete Sherrah, gets to work. This is the brainstorming, the message crafting, and the design of visual assets that will actually connect with the audience. But it’s not about making a pretty ad. The ad has to *work*. I’ve seen too many campaigns with beautiful creative fail because they looked nice but had a weak call to action or were totally irrelevant to the audience segment. The best creative directors demand a tight feedback loop with their media strategists right from the start.

2.1 Brainstorming and Message Framework

Kick things off with a brainstorming session. For a Search campaign, that means coming up with a bunch of different headlines (up to 15), descriptions (up to 4), and site link extensions. You should be thinking about unique selling points, customer pain points, and strong calls to action. If you’re promoting a financial service, for example, your headlines could be “Secure Your Future,” “Expert Financial Advice,” or “Personalized Investment Plans.” The key is making them distinct enough from each other so you can run a real A/B test later on. And don’t forget Google Ads has tight character limits, 30 for headlines, 90 for descriptions, so you have to be concise.

2.2 Asset Production and Quality Control

For a Display or Video campaign, this is where you’re designing banners in Adobe Creative Cloud or producing video content. All assets have to stick to the platform specs for things like image dimensions, video length, and file size. A really common mistake is forgetting about mobile. With about 70% of web traffic in Australia coming from mobile, your creative has to look perfect on a small screen. You need to do thorough QA checks for typos, broken links, and brand consistency before anything goes live.

Common Mistake: Ignoring Ad Copy Relevance

A frequent error I see is generic ad copy that doesn’t match the keywords you’re bidding on. If someone searches “best home loans Sydney,” an ad with the headline “Great Loan Rates” is way less effective than one that says “Best Home Loans Sydney: Low Rates.” The second one shows immediate relevance and is much more likely to get the click. It’s the creative director’s job to enforce that kind of granular alignment.

Step 3: Implementing Creative Assets in Google Ads and Meta Business Suite

With your creative assets finished, it’s time to upload them into the ad platforms. This is the technical part where you’re working through menus and making sure everything is in the right place with the right targeting. This is where strategy meets execution, and I’ve spent countless hours debugging campaigns where a simple disconnect here, like assets assigned to the wrong ad groups, killed performance.

3.1 Uploading Responsive Search Ads (RSAs) in Google Ads

Inside your Google Ads campaign, find the specific Ad group you want to work on. Click on Ads & extensions in the left menu, then hit the blue plus-sign icon and pick Responsive search ad. You’ll be asked for your Final URL first. Then you can start adding your assets, up to 15 headlines and 4 descriptions. Google’s whole deal here is that it will automatically mix and match them to find the best combinations. You can “pin” headlines or descriptions to certain positions by clicking the pin icon, but I’d advise against doing it too much because it restricts the algorithm’s ability to optimize. You want to give it enough raw material to find the highest-performing ads on its own.

3.2 Configuring Creative Assets in Meta Business Suite for A/B Testing

For visual campaigns on Facebook or Instagram, you’ll be in the Meta Business Suite‘s Ads Manager. Go to your campaign and ad set, and at the “Ad” level you’ll see options to “Add Media.” Upload your images or videos there. To do a proper A/B test on your creative, you really need to use the Experiments feature. From the main Ads Manager dashboard, click Experiments on the left, create a new A/B test, and pick “Creative” as your variable. Then you can set up different images, videos, or text to run against each other. Give it enough budget and time to run so you can get a reliable result, Meta recommends a test with at least 80% power.

Pro Tip: Dynamic Creative Optimization

Both Google and Meta offer dynamic creative optimization. In Google Ads, it’s baked into Responsive Search Ads and Responsive Display Ads. In Meta, you can enable Dynamic Creative at the ad set level. This is a great feature because it lets the platform automatically combine your different images, videos, text, and CTAs to build custom ads for each user. This kind of approach fits perfectly with a data-driven creative philosophy, since the algorithm learns and adapts without you needing to constantly intervene manually, which is a huge deal when you’re trying to scale campaigns.

Step 4: Monitoring Performance and Iterative Creative Refinement

Launching the campaign is just the start. The real measure of your creative direction is how it performs over time and how well you can adapt based on live data. This is a constant process of monitoring, analyzing metrics, and making small improvements to your creative. In 2026, a “set it and forget it” creative strategy is just a recipe for failure, especially with how fast consumer tastes and platform algorithms change.

4.1 Analyzing Creative Performance Reports in Google Ads

In Google Ads, go to Ads & extensions > Ads. You’ll get a table of your Responsive Search Ads with a “Performance” column that gives ratings like “Poor,” “Good,” or “Excellent.” To see the good stuff, click on an ad and go to “Asset details.” This report is where you see how every single headline and description is performing, and it’s gold for figuring out which combinations are driving clicks and conversions. The “Combinations” tab is especially useful because it shows you the exact top-performing ad variations the system has built. If some headlines are always in the “Poor” category, swap them out. If a certain combination is killing it, make more ads like it.

4.2 Using Meta Business Suite’s Creative Reporting

Inside Meta Ads Manager, go to the Ads tab. You can customize your columns to show all the standard stuff, Reach, Frequency, CPC, Conversions, etc. But the real insight comes when you use “Breakdowns” and select “By Asset.” This lets you see a direct, head-to-head comparison of how your different images, videos, or primary text versions performed. This is incredibly valuable for figuring out what your audience actually responds to. It makes sense when you consider a 2023 Nielsen report that pointed to creative as the single biggest factor in an ad campaign’s success, responsible for nearly 50% of the outcome. That’s why you have to keep optimizing it.

Editorial Aside: The Human Element in Data-Driven Creative

Even with all this platform data, don’t forget the human element. The numbers tell you *what* is working, but a good creative director like Sherrah is always asking *why*. Why did that headline get all the clicks? Was it the emotion, the specific offer, or just that it was shorter? Figuring out the ‘why’ is what leads to smart iteration instead of just blindly chasing numbers. Sometimes an ad that’s “poor” performing on clicks might have a strong brand message that just needs a tweak, not to be thrown out completely. It’s a balance of raw data and creative instinct.

Step 5: Implementing A/B Test Learnings and Scaling Creative

The whole point of monitoring and analysis is to learn what works and then scale it. This last step is all about applying those insights to make your current campaigns better and to inform your next round of creative. This iterative loop is what separates effective creative direction from just making one-off ads.

5.1 Updating Ad Assets Based on Performance

Go back to your Google Ads “Asset details” report and find those headlines and descriptions with “Poor” or “Low” performance. Click the pencil icon on your RSA, cut the losers, and replace them with new ideas based on your top performers. For instance, if a headline with “Free Shipping” did really well, you could test new variations like “Fast & Free Shipping” or “Free Shipping on All Orders.” This kind of incremental testing is how you build on success. It’s the same on Meta: if your A/B test proved that one image gets way more engagement, you should update your live ad sets to use that image, or maybe even build a whole new ad set around it.

5.2 Scaling Winning Creative Across Campaigns

Once you’ve found a creative asset that’s a consistent winner, you have to think about how to scale it. Can you take a winning video concept and adapt it for a different product? Can you rephrase a killer headline from Search and use it in a Display ad? Say a specific video ad on Meta is getting you a 25% lower cost per lead. You need to break down its core elements, the first three seconds, the messaging, the call to action, and then replicate that successful formula in new videos for other audiences or campaigns. This is how you make sure the money you spent on creative development gives you the biggest possible return across your entire ad strategy. When you see a marketing operation integrating creative insights across platforms like this, you know they’re a mature team.

The appointment of Pete Sherrah at Cheil Australia just puts a spotlight on how creative leadership has to evolve in a data-obsessed marketing world. By systematically defining objectives, developing and testing assets, and constantly refining based on performance, agencies can make campaigns that don’t just get attention but actually drive real business results.