February 16, 2023

The Challenges of Scaling a Brand Today (and how creative data can solve them)

As brands grow, they risk losing insight into key creative processes. Creative data enables brands to focus on improving creative effectiveness at scale.

Michael Murray

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Read part one – Why Brand Size Matters: Brand Building, Scale, and the Secrets of Market Share – here.

Everyone wants to be a big brand.

Their advertising benefits from economies of scale. The bigger a brand’s market share, the more efficiently its advertising works – and the easier it is to remain big. Bigger brands tend to have higher loyalty and retention rates, as well as generate more profit through higher prices.

Once brands have grown and reached a certain scale, the challenges change.

Combating scale inefficiencies and shifting measurement at scale

Once brands have achieved some scaled-up success, two more key challenges come into play:

Finding a way to reliably evaluate the actual effectiveness of all of your ads.
Sharing this standard with everyone involved in the ad process – across teams, functions, and geographies.

The root of the problem (& the opportunity): Measure creative effectiveness at scale

Each of the scaling challenges faced by brands stems from a process problem: they can’t accurately measure the creative effectiveness of their ads. Without validated creative insights that deliver repeatable results and a framework to scale adoption of these into content production, the outcome is simple: creative suffers.

Without an objective way to measure creative effectiveness, brands don’t know how well their ads are performing—and they can’t track how specific changes made them perform better or worse.

As companies have to commit more time and resources to achieve scale—spending more on new content, hiring new marketers in new roles, expanding the reach of their content, or integrating new tech to help with the new workload—this problem becomes more and more pronounced. Eventually, it becomes a bigger problem than most brands can afford (especially in an economic downturn), and brand scaling becomes yet another liability at a time when it was supposed to be the opposite.

If marketers want to scale up their brand’s market share, they need to find a way to measure creative quality. Luckily, this is also an opportunity, and not just for scaling.

Solving brand scaling problems with Creative Data

Marketers at brands like Heineken, Nestlé, and Mondelēz use CreativeX’s creative data platform to develop customized, automated Creative Quality measuring systems. The data provided by these systems help them understand exactly how they can maximize the Creative Quality of each and every ad they produce.

Step 1: Shift from subjective to objective

First, define an accurate metric for quantifying creative effectiveness. There are several proven ways to accomplish this:

Heineken started by using CreativeX technology to analyze hundreds of their image and video elements across 190 campaigns, looking at 15 key creative elements (including if branding was present in the ad) and evaluating the objective impact of the elements on the results of the ad.
Nestlé analyzed the impact of advertisements across their many brands to settle on a single KPI that truly measures an ad’s effectiveness. “We were really looking for one solution, which would be valid across the different platforms to obviously simplify the life of our brand builders around the world,” said Nestlé Global CMO Aude Gandon.
Mondelēz used CreativeX technology to identify nine common elements (such as framing for mobile, displaying branding early, and more) that their most demonstrably successful ads tended to share in common.

How marketers define creative effectiveness will depend on their particular goals and KPIs. Creative data will help simplify any unique definitions of effectiveness into a single “creative quality” metric that can be monitored in real-time.

Step 2: Align all teams around a shared reality of what drives impact

After defining what creative quality encompasses for your brand, you need to ensure everyone working on your marketing understands it.

Heineken, Nestlé, and Mondelēz each used CreativeX findings to develop sets of creative guidelines that would ensure future creative contained the elements identified as having the greatest impact on advertising success. This simplifies their creative team’s processes and ensures total brand alignment across departments and markets. “Now we have all guidelines from the different platforms aggregated in one place. So we have everything in CreativeX,” said Mondelēz Global Digital Senior Manager Laetitia Lacour.

Step 3: Scale learnings across the entire organization and agency partners

Technology like the CreativeX platform is able to automatically monitor the guidelines derived from earlier findings and input by the creative team. Whenever the team passes creative through CreativeX, machine learning scans the media for the appropriate guidelines and assigns it a score based on how effectively they are represented.

“We just got data from the Meta platforms showing that the ads with a higher Creative hygiene score [this is what Nestlé calls the score provided by CreativeX based on guideline adherence] scored 66% higher ROAS … it's pretty dramatic in the impact—on the quality of the views, of our messaging, on our major efficiency,” explained Gandon.

The need to scale up and the seemingly inescapable challenges of doing so right now are both problems created by today’s technology, but technology also can offer solutions to them. As these success stories demonstrate, it finally has: with creative data.

Part one spotlights data on the value of brand consistency, part two explores the science of brand consistency, part three explores the value of Distinctive Brand Assets, part four unpacks how to develop brand consistency, part five highlights why brands are adopting Creative Quality, part six looks at brand alignment, part seven breaks down the importance of scale, part eight reveals how brands are managing scaling challenges, part nine looks at how brands are scaling their marketing efforts.

The next article in this brand consistency series explores how three brands used creative data to achieve brand consistency. Read it here to explore a framework to overcome these challenges and grow brand consistency.