Sharon Braude has spent more than 20 years in media, data, and marketing technology for brands including Disney, Red Bull Racing, and Virgin Active.
She brings a marketing technologist’s eye to the DesignRush Best Designs Awards, judging the website and app categories alongside creative directors from global brands and agencies.
Every entry she judges receives a published score, showing agencies where their work held up and where it potentially fell short.
In many marketing settings, this kind of expert feedback can be hard to come by.
A Gain Theory survey of 115 Fortune 500 marketing leaders, published in July, found 89% rated their creative effective.
One in four had still lost creative budget within the past two years because they couldn't make a data-backed case for it.
Braude places the fix upstream, in how a business is set up to deliver ideas.
"Operational discipline is what earns the right to take creative risk," Braude tells DesignRush.
In this DesignRush interview, she breaks down the three tests she applies to creative work and what agencies and in-house teams should fix first when creativity and operations fall out of balance.
Who Is Sharon Braude?
Braude is global group director of marketing technology at Virgin Active.
She previously led marketing technology, operations, and CRM for The Walt Disney Company in EMEA, and shaped marketing strategy for Red Bull Racing and the BBC.
Teams she built have won at Cannes Lions and Eurobest.
She also sits on several advisory boards, speaks at industry events, and judges global advertising and design awards.
3 Ways Braude Tests Great Design
Braude’s scores come down to how well a design connects its idea to its audience and to the business that has to deliver it.
Below, she explains what she looks for in every entry and how teams can rebalance when creativity or operations falls behind.
1. Start With the Job the Work Has To Do
Braude opens every review by asking what the work is trying to achieve, and for whom.
With a clear answer in hand, she judges whether the idea is distinctive and whether the execution delivers it clearly and consistently.
Her data background adds checks a purely visual review can skip.
She looks for the audience insight behind the design, the behavior it aims to influence, how intuitive the experience feels, and whether it scales across audiences, channels, and markets.
Braude also describes the scale check as "systems thinking," meaning an idea can evolve, personalize, and adapt while staying coherent as the customer journey grows more complex.
"A beautiful interface is only one part of the proposition; the real test is whether the experience creates relevance, reduces friction, and ultimately delivers the desired outcome," Braude says.
Scalability decides what a design costs over its life. An experience built as a system gets reused in each new market and channel. One built for a single launch gets rebuilt every time the business expands.
August's Best App Design winner shows what clears that bar.
Chop Dawg built Kitchen Stage to ask new users whether they want inspiration, healthier meals, or cooking lessons, then sort the feed to match.
Every recipe carries an add-to-cart button, so a missing ingredient becomes a grocery order.
Braude scored the app a nine out of 10.
Chop Dawg reports a 35% lift in grocery delivery conversions, the kind of outcome her test is built to reward.
The Best Designs rubric scores design, usability, and creativity at 30% each and content at 10%. Braude wouldn't put a similar split between strategy and execution.
"I wouldn't attribute a percentage weighting to strategy versus execution. I'd judge the quality of the connection between them."
For agencies, the brief belongs in the entry. A named audience and target behavior give judges and clients a standard to score execution against, and keep visual polish from carrying the score alone.
2. Let Audience Evidence Overrule Personal Taste
Braude expects data to argue with her.
"I think that is one of the most valuable things data can, and should, do: challenge your instinct," she says.
Her DesignRush jury profile sums up the same habit in four words: "strong ideas, loosely held."
Years as a marketing technologist taught her to separate what she likes from what works for the audience. Work can appeal to her instantly and still fail if the audience doesn't understand it, engage with it, or act on it.
A plainer piece can outperform because it is clearer, more relevant, or better matched to how its audience behaves.
Approval meetings test the distinction hardest, since the person signing off is rarely the customer the work was built for. A website can look expensive and still lose buyers when taste in the room goes unchecked.
Braude says questioning your own view grows more important as AI use and dependency rise.
GWI found the cost of skipping that check.
In a July survey, 55% of UK marketers said their business had made a significant decision on AI-generated insight that later proved wrong or misleading.
AI speeds up the answer, which makes critical review the bottleneck.
Braude still resists reducing creative to a performance metric. Creative work needs ambition, emotion, and a degree of risk, and data's job is to validate the hypothesis behind it.
"The best relationship is therefore not creativity versus data; it is creativity informed by evidence."
Evidence is cheapest before launch, when a change costs a revision. After launch, the same change costs media budget.
3. Make Sure the Business Can Deliver the Idea
"It might be a slightly contentious view, but I believe the operational discipline creates the conditions for creative risk-taking," Braude says.
Her reasoning starts with how creative teams behave on weak foundations.
Unclear ownership, fragmented technology, poor processes and governance, thin data, and unrealistic timelines tell a team its idea will struggle to ship, so the team plays safe.
A well-designed operating model, communicated clearly, has the opposite effect. Teams pitch bigger ideas when they trust the business to deliver them.
The same logic reaches agency partners. An agency briefed by a client with fragmented data and unclear sign-off will scope what it knows the client can ship.
The cost of weak operations rarely appears on a budget line. It shows up in the ambitious concepts teams quietly stop proposing.
Braude also warns against overcorrecting, since "discipline without any risk tolerance can result in safe, often forgettable work."
Forgettable work carries a measurable price.
The UK's Data & Marketing Association found in 2024 that highly creative campaigns delivered four times the business effects of less creative ones, based on over 1,500 campaigns in its effectiveness databank.
Her balance puts enough structure around budgets, technology, data, measurement, and decision-making to free creative teams to make something distinctive.
She describes the target as "disciplined execution around an undisciplined idea."
Few teams have that structure yet. Gartner’s 2025 Marketing Technology Survey found martech utilization had fallen to 49%, so about half the capability marketers pay for sits idle.
In budget terms, money spent on clean data, connected platforms, and clear decision rights buys creative range.
Fix the Weaker Side and Protect the Stronger One
Braude’s advice on balancing creativity and operations depends on which side is weaker.
For a brand that is creatively strong and operationally weak, her first step is to "protect the creativity" and "build the machine around it."
Extra layers of process are likely to dilute the work, so she starts by naming the friction, whether it sits in technology, governance, resources, workflow, decision-making, data infrastructure, or accountability.
A named constraint gets an owner and a targeted fix. A vague complaint about slow delivery tends to produce another approval layer.
The reverse problem is quieter.
A brand can run outstanding processes, excellent data, and sophisticated technology.
“If the idea doesn’t provoke an emotional response or give people a reason to care, the machinery will become redundant,” Braude says.
Her prescription is more room for experimentation and calculated risk, creative thinking brought much earlier into strategic and operational decisions, and testing through live, synthetic, and hybrid audience research.
"There has never been a more opportune moment to robustly test creative with prediction models that can determine performance to the decimal point," she says.
Faster, cheaper pre-launch testing lowers the cost of trying a bolder idea.
A July Strat7 study found synthetic surveys landed within two to three percentage points of real respondents on headline results.
They tracked change over time correctly only 47% of the time, so live user testing still settles the big calls.
Her overarching advice concerns structure.
Creative and operational capabilities should sit close together under a central center of excellence that defines success for both, with no separate silos reporting different KPIs.
Silos are still common.
A 2026 WARC and ANA survey of over 200 senior U.S. marketers found 49% of organizations run separate brand and performance teams, and 65% keep separate budgets.
Separate scorecards let each team hit its own number while the customer experience falls between them.
Braude’s Tests Leave Brands and Agencies With 3 Moves
- Write the goal into the work: Name the audience and the behavior the design should change before review begins, so judges and clients can score execution against something real.
How does that look in practice?
In late 2025, IKEA briefed five agencies pitching for its UK creative account with behavioral prompts on tight spaces, hybrid schedules, and rising costs in place of traditional campaign instructions. - Fund the plumbing behind the idea: Clear ownership, connected platforms, and usable data enable teams to propose work they would otherwise ignore.
eClerx’s 2026 Marketing Data Report found CMOs were more likely than their heads of digital to say their marketing data was fully integrated.
And agencies can catch that gap early by asking both leaders who owns the data and how connected it is. - Test early and let results overrule the room: Run concepts past live or synthetic audiences before media spend locks in, and treat the room's favorite as a hypothesis.
This is why a quick concept test before the budget meeting can settle stakeholder debates.
Each of these three strategies echoes what Braude is after when she assesses entries.
The organizations she admires most combine “the imagination to create something people want, and the discipline to make it work at scale.”
