How Nestlé Translated Creative Quality Score to their Partners to Drive a 207% Increase in their Score

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Nestlé Indonesia had a multitude of digital marketing KPIs to improve but no way to measure either their work or the work of their agency partnerships in 2019. Arush Kochhar, then eBusiness Transformation Lead, and Dienda Andrianie, Head of Media, chose to face this challenge boldly—to be Nestlé’s pilot market for CreativeX, a technology that focused on a radical concept: creative data.

“As soon as we saw it, we knew it would help tackle one of our Digital & Media KPIs (ensure assets are optimized for each platform). We were impressed that this could be automated at scale,” Arush shares. And as to the most powerful part of CreativeX’s creative data platform, “it’s the overall Creative Quality Score (CQS)...with CQS we are able to simplify a large set of rules, percentages and more into a single number (which becomes an excellent KPI).”

Creative Quality Score (CQS) measures adherence to validated best practices for image and video content. It is calculated in real-time by determining the total number of best practices present in a piece of content divided by the total number of best practices tracked. Nestlé Indonesia began their journey with a CQS of 30%. Today, the market’s CQS is at 92%, a 207% increase and the highest score in the Nestlé organization, where CreativeX is live in 2000 brands and 186 markets.

Arush and team achieved this success by translating their KPIs for different stakeholders, because “once you have champions that speak the same language…that’s how you achieve scale,” says Arush. Here are three ways that their team translated Creative Quality Score to cross-functional teams.

Translating CQS for Agencies + Creatives

“Here's a gift from us, let’s all work on it…it’s not [us] shouting at [you] but now we have this impartial way of measuring and fixing.”

When working with agencies, the Nestlé Indonesia team approached it by saying, “we know that we’ve asked you for certain metrics that are hard or impossible to measure, so we’re enabling you with this tool in order to do it…we’re here to make your lives easier,” shared Arush.

CQS helped validate their team’s expectations, “when we were able to justify all the creative guidelines (for example YouTube’s ABCDs)...through data, we knew it would be a game changer,” Dienda added. Nestlé’s expectations of agencies, and how to actually achieve them, became clearer, too, “it brought in a lot of simplicity, so when I say design mobile first, that’s a big statement, what does it mean actually? But now we’ve codified it…there’s no ambiguity, CreativeX is really clear and made things black and white,” said Arush.

This alignment worked because it brought both transparency and empathy, Arush continued, “you need to be close to people, it’s built on trust.” It was important for Arush and team to come to agencies with a message of, “Here's a gift from us, let’s all work on it…it’s not [us] shouting at [you] but now we have this impartial way of measuring and fixing, and measuring and fixing, that’s why Indonesia is still the best in our markets.”

Translating CQS for Regionality

After his success piloting CreativeX at Nestlé Indonesia, Arush now oversees its implementation for KitKat. Adapting his communications scaled the technology successfully across different regions. In Asia, Arush used CreativeX’s technology as a tool geared towards “achieving excellence,” whilst in his current role he translates it into language of efficiency with, “wasted money.”

Arush explains, “in Indonesia and Asia in general there was fast growth… in a part of the world like Europe…it’s not about growth, it’s maintenance, how do you do more with less, and with Latin America it’s about all the competitors, how do you outshine them…how you frame [CreativeX] helps people get it.”

Translating CQS for Executives and other cross-functional teams

“It needs to be a number that the most senior people get, [and what’s unique about CQS], it’s one number, it’s not 15, they don’t need to be experts they just have to understand the broader meaning,”

The beauty of the Creative Quality Score is that it is a metric that contains multitudes of information. It is a measurement of creative effectiveness in terms of spend and also the creation process itself. It can even be a litmus for your agency relationships or broader partnership process, too.

As Arush explains, “so you explain the concept behind it, making the money work harder, and if everybody gets it, everybody loves it,” but you need to tailor the explanation to your audience, he continues, “find the angle most pertinent to your business and focus on that.”

When speaking to executives, in particular, “it needs to be a number that the most senior people get, [and what’s unique about CQS], it’s one number, it’s not 15, they don’t need to be experts they just have to understand the broader meaning,” Arush said. Here, he advises being bold, don’t be unafraid to say, “a low CQS…It means X amount of campaigns failed,” so cross-functional partners can understand the big picture CQS paints.

How Creative Quality Score impacted Nestle’s business

Nestlé Indonesia’s success would create the playbook for Nestlé’s markets worldwide, and these steps can be replicated in any organization. In partnership with Meta, Nestlé’s global team found that campaigns with high CQS had +66% higher ROAS. Regression analysis by CreativeX found that every 10% increase in CQS could see a 10.9% decrease in Cost Per Completed View (CPCV) and a 2.1% increase in ad recall.

This success for Nestlé globally could not have happened without the work of the pioneer market, the Nestlé Indonesia team. And their lessons on how to successfully translate marketing KPIs, like Creative Quality Score, will ensure that the whole organization continues to innovate.

Has the Nestlé Indonesia team’s success inspired you to bring the transformative power of creative data to your team? → Sign up for a product demo today.

Why CreativeX Works | Scale, Alignment, Reality

The creative data platform unlocks transformational opportunities for every organization because it enables scale, alignment, and reality for the whole team. Arush Kochhar saw this firsthand, sharing his experiences:

Scale | Know what works for your brand to be able to scale effective content production - “With CreativeX, we took it to solve this problem [measuring KPIs previously impossible to track]. We’ve always known we need to track these KPIs but we hadn’t been able to before.”
Alignment | Bring teams and agencies together to produce consistently great creative - This tracking “helps you establish a baseline in a basic and impartial way.” CQS worked for Nestle because it was based on “no human emotion, raw data, [and was] algorithm and AI based.”
Reality | Drive continuous improvement by learning what’s making your content work harder in a repeatable, scalable, and actionable way - “We know exactly why [an asset receives a poor CQS], like the branding is missing or the video is too long, and that makes it such a tangible approach because you know what’s wrong and you know what we should try to fix.”