Creative Marketing runs an internal AI marketing lab at its Rochdale headquarters. Every AI-first product idea must clear three gates — research-grade evidence, six-week prototype, three-client live test — before it gets called a feature, ships to a client, or appears on the website.
Roughly one shipped feature per twenty ideas survives all three gates. Six in ten ideas die at the research gate, three in ten at the prototype gate, half of what reaches the live-test gate becomes a shipped feature. The failure rate is published deliberately because credibility requires it.
Four standing rituals govern the lab: Monday Brief, Wednesday Tear-Down, Friday Ship-Or-Kill, and a quarterly Public Post-Mortem. The first 2026 Public Post-Mortem publishes in May.
Five rules are enforced inside the lab: nothing ships without surviving all three gates, marketing language is not allowed, the killer of an idea names the next attempt, the author of the brief gets the last word but not the decision, and failed ideas get a one-page autopsy filed within two weeks.
The reason Creative Marketing publishes the engine behind the work is that the audience for an agency website in 2026 has read enough decorative how-we-work pages to be immune to them. Publishing the actual mechanics — gates, rituals, rules, failure rate — is what makes the engine credible.