Unifying the Creative Data Ecosystem: Inside the Launch of Datalink
Creative data is often scattered, leading to blurred visibility and poor decision-making. In this post, CreativeX CEO Anastasia Leng introduces Datalink: a new infrastructure designed to unify creative quality, attention, and emotion metrics into a single, interoperable ecosystem. Watch the videos to see how Datalink connects insights from partners like Kantar, Dragonfly, and DAIVID to help media teams optimize performance at scale.
Written by
Elissa Ha
February 17, 2026
10
min read
Over the past decade, the marketing industry has seen an explosion of creative data solutions. From attention metrics to emotional analysis, marketers now have access to more intelligence than ever before. Yet, as CreativeX Founder & CEO Anastasia Leng points out, this abundance has created a new challenge: scattered data.
When creative data lives in silos, visibility is blurred, and decision-making suffers. That is the problem CreativeX, the system of control for creative, content, and media, sought to solve with Datalink, a new infrastructure designed to unify these disparate data points into a single, comprehensive view.
To understand the vision behind this launch, hear from CreativeX founder and CEO, Anastasia Leng to discuss the inspiration, the ecosystem, and the future of creative data.
The High Cost of Scattered Data
For most brands today, creative data is fragmented. You might have performance data in one dashboard, attention metrics in another, and creative quality scores in a third. As Anastasia explains, "Scattered data leads to blurred visibility. When you have blurred visibility, you make some pretty bad decisions."
Datalink was built to solve this problem by unifying all types of creative data in one place. This allows teams to understand their creative at a depth that was previously impossible—combining the "what" (creative attributes) with the "how" (predicted attention, emotion, and potential).
Watch Anastasia discuss the problem of data silos:
For Insights Teams, this means the end of manual data wrangling. Instead of spending hours merging spreadsheets, teams can focus on deepening their creative knowledge.
For Media Teams, Datalink transforms creative into a direct optimization lever. Rather than making separate "go/no-go" decisions on creative and media, teams can now allocate budgets based on the true potential and quality of each asset before it even runs.
The Inspiration: Partnership Over Competition
The inspiration for Datalink came from a simple realization: while CreativeX provides a critical layer of creative data, we aren't the only players in the game. Our customers were already using other valuable tools to measure things like attention and emotion.
"We recognized that CreativeX provided one kind of data, but there were other kinds of creative data out there," says Anastasia. "We didn't want to compete with those folks. We wanted to partner with them."
Datalink creates a pipeline where ads within the CreativeX system can be—with the brand's permission—fed to partners, enriched with their specific data, and sent back. The result is a consolidated view that eliminates disconnected sources and allows brands to act on a complete dataset.
Hear more about the inspiration behind the platform:
Building an Interoperable Ecosystem
Datalink is more than just a product; it is an ecosystem of partners who have committed to making their data interoperable. By structuring data in a way that is compatible across the entire ecosystem, we are removing the friction of integration.
"Think of this as no longer having to bring these different datasets together... having to figure out if there is a common creative ID," Anastasia explains. "All of it is automatically streamlined for you."
We are thrilled to launch with a roster of best-in-class partners, including Kantar, Dragonfly, DAIVID, Realeyes, and Neurons, with many others launching soon.
Explore the Datalink partner ecosystem:
Lifting All Boats
The ultimate goal of Datalink is to demonstrate that the industry can work together to "lift all boats." By banding together to create an apples-to-apples view of creative performance, we are making it easier for brands to access the most comprehensive view of their creative potential.
We invite partners working with attention, emotion, and predictive data to join us. If you are a partner looking to scale, or a brand looking to unify your creative intelligence, let’s build the future of creative data together.
