The CreativeX Glossary

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What is the Creative Quality Score (CQS)

The Creative Quality Score, or CQS, measures an ad’s digital suitability. CQS is calculated by tracking the presence of statistically validated digital suitability fundamentals, which are the common denominator across the biggest digital online platforms, and serve as the floor for effective digital ads. 
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How do brands use the Creative Quality Score? 

How do marketers manage an evolving set of creative best practices with ingredients for success that vary by platform, objective, format, and more?

The Creative Quality Score consolidates digital suitability fundamentals from advertising platforms into one combined score to help brands:

• Raise the floor for effective digital ads by scaling adoption of these fundamentals, worldwide.
• Maximize media spend behind content that meets the baseline for effective digital ads.
• Spot where guideline adoption is low across their brands, markets, & agency partners and correct in real-time.

As brands have dramatically increased their content production (and learned that repurposed TV ads were proving ineffective at generating necessary digital effectiveness), they’ve struggled to manage rising levels of inefficient media spend. Brands wanted a single metric to understand if their ads were fit for the various digital platforms they were intended for. 

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The Creative Quality Score can be used as a barometer for digital suitability at various parts of the campaign cycle: 

1. To get started: The majority of brands start with a historical analysis to understand their baseline CQS by looking at adoption of these digital creative principles across their last 6-12 months of content. By understanding their starting CQS, and how it varies by brand, market, platform, and even agency, marketers typically set a goal to increase, and stabilize, best practice adoption across 80-90% of their content and their media investment. 
2. Pre-Flight: To help stabilize CQS, teams embed a way of checking pre-launch ads for best practice adoption to determine if they meet the “creative floor” of the platform they’re intended for. This serves as a quick and final check before an ad goes out the door to make sure it’s fit for that platform, and to reduce media investment behind ads that stand a statistically lower chance of success. 
3. In-Flight: Once the content is live, marketers can understand, in near real-time, the volume of content they’re running that has not been setup for success for the platform it’s on, and how much of their media spend is being allocated to low vs high quality content. They can then take steps to address it before incurring additional media costs that are tied to lower ROI. 

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What creative attributes make up the Creative Quality Score? 

Each digital media platform, whether YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, or more, is heavily involved in determining and recommending the core creative principles for their platform. Some of these are known as the Facebook Brilliant Basics or the YouTube ABCDs, but together, they map to the Creative Quality Score.  ‍

Platforms are constantly evolving to reflect changing consumer behavior and business needs. This balance means what people see is determined by what they like. Platforms have codified this user behavior through years of research (using different methodologies like MMMs, Brand Lift studies, etc.) into how people engage with content and ads on each platform. ‍If consumer behavior is the same (e.g., scrolling), marketers can apply best practices across channels/formats. 

As such, these are the 6 digital suitability fundamentals that are the common denominator for all digital platforms and comprise the CQS: 

1. Brand early
2. Frame for Mobile
3. Optimal length
4. Optimize for Sound Off Consumption 
5. Supers Present
6. Safe Zones

Today, only 20% of an average Fortune 500 brand’s ad incorporates all 6 basic digital best practices, and around 70% of their digital budget is invested into content that has a low CQS, leading to millions in wasted spend.   

As brands become more sophisticated and consistent in applying these fundamentals, they can add 5 more core principles to their CQS. These are:

1. Brand Audio Mention
2. Close Up
3. Pacing
4. CTA: Platform Button
5. Thumbnail Branding (Meta only)

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Why do these principles make up the Creative Quality Score?

These digital suitability guidelines are creative fundamentals that have been validated in some fashion by platform partners, 3rd party research providers, CreativeX, and our clients. These guidelines are the common denominator for all platforms and represent the industry norm – when it comes to improving ad performance via digital suitability.

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They are relevant for all industries, markets, and objectives. As such, these guidelines have been described as “the frame” and are designed to help brands maximize their chances of driving digital performance without restricting creativity. They are an essential — but on their own insufficient — part of creative excellence, providing brands with the fastest en ramp for building their creative database and leveraging creative data at scale.

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How do I know what my Creative Quality Score is? 

It’s tough to predict what a specific brand’s Creative Quality Score will be before reviewing their data, but an analysis of 1M ads and $1B in ad spend showed that the average Fortune 500 brand has a 20-30% CQS. Only 20-30% of their content has incorporated basic digital creative best practices.  ‍

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CreativeX has helped some of the most sophisticated brands in the world track and improve their Creative Quality Score, including the likes of Nestlé, Diageo, Bayer, Unilever, and more. These brands have improved their CQS from ~20% to 80%+, which has, in turn, contributed to measurable improvements in marketing effectiveness and efficiency. If you’re curious about your CQS, reach out to us here and we’ll be able to help.  

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What are the performance implications of optimizing for the Creative Quality Score? 

Brands who’ve stabilized their Creative Quality Score have improved their media efficiency, shifting as much as 60% of their budget from digitally unsuitable ads (low CQS) to digitally suitable ones (high CQS). By shifting budget to ads that are fit-for-platform, many have seen significant cost and ROI improvements: 

• Sales Lift: Nestlé increased its Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) by 74%.
• Brand Lift: By increasing the percentage of digital content that was branded upfront, Heineken saw a 50% brand lift on Meta.
• Engagement: Bayer, for every 10% increase to their Creative Quality Score, saw a decrease in CPM and CPC of 1.7% and 1.4%.

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Does having a high Creative Quality Score guarantee my ad will be successful? 

There is no replacement for good strategy, brilliant insights, and strong marketing fundamentals that make creative work excellent. The Creative Quality Score is a frame, or canvas, that ensures your creative is set up for success on digital platforms.

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Creative quality is the first step to achieving creative excellence. By stabilizing creative quality, marketers can set up a strong foundation for maximizing the power of their creative ideas across all digital platforms. This framework can be reused repeatedly to drive creative excellence at scale. At some point in their creative excellence journey, brands will graduate from tracking digital suitability; having raised the floor for effectiveness at scale. Brands will then begin leveraging custom scores to maintain their competitive advantage by correlating their definition of creative excellence to efficiency & effectiveness gains across all their assets worldwide.

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How does CreativeX measure the Creative Quality Score? 

CreativeX measured the Creative Quality Score in 3 steps: 

1. By connecting all of a brand’s digital ad accounts to CreativeX, the platform can grab and analyze all your historical and current image and video content. 
2. All your content is labeled and tagged for the platform-specific creative attributes that comprise the Creative Quality Score. The CreativeX platform uses a combination of visual, text, and audio detection to determine and analyze the creative variables that are present. Once all a brand’s content is tagged, they can see not only how much fit-for-platform content they’re producing but also how much they’re investing into content that’s in line with digital best practices. Marketers can explore how that varies by brand, market, platform, agency, and more.
3. Using the CreativeX Pre-Flight tool, advertisers’ internal and agency teams can test any new content before it goes live to ensure it’s set up for success before any media budget is invested in promoting that ad. By integrating pre-flight checks into their workflow, advertisers can raise their Creative Quality Score and shift their media budget to fit-for-platform content. 

By stabilizing their Creative Quality Score, brands can quickly build up a large repository of all their digital image and video content, as well as their corresponding performance data. By having all this info in one place, brands can graduate beyond the basics and measure how many other creative decisions they’re making impact their overall marketing efficiency and effectiveness. 

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