Barilla’s Key Ingredient for Creative Effectiveness
How Barilla tapped into creative data to transform their marketing measurement.
Written by
Isobel Bruce
December 20, 2023
3
min read
Barilla, a family-held company and world leader in pasta, has almost a century and a half of brand heritage and product excellence. As digital advertising became an increasingly high priority, Barilla wanted to leverage creative excellence as a competitive advantage. With this ambitious objective, Barilla embarked on a creative transformation journey to put data at the heart of their marketing decisions.
Barilla’s Global Head of Analytics, Mariama Kamanda, understood that for Barilla to be a digital-first company, it needed to unlock an objective understanding of the suitability of its ads. As Kamanda puts it, “If you’ve created something beautiful, I want to be able to measure it.”
Evolving privacy laws and consumer media habits meant Barilla’s brands needed new rules for data governance, as well as holistic marketing measurement frameworks to better understand the impact of their media and creative choices.
Barilla partnered with CreativeX to embed data into their creative decisions and measurement frameworks.
“Barilla is known for their strong brands and marketing. We want to add some science behind that art, ensuring every piece of digital creative has the right foundations to succeed, and CreativeX gives us the power to do that at scale,” says Lyndsay Weir, Barilla’s Chief Analytics Officer.
Using the Creative Quality Score (CQS), which measures a creative asset’s media suitability by quantifying the number of creative best practices present within each ad, against the total number of best practices required for an ad to be suitable for each platform.
→ What is the Creative Quality Score?
Adopting the Creative Quality Score across 12 brands in 34 markets has helped Barilla to maximize their media spend efficiencies, measure the impact of creative decisions at scale, and connect improved creative quality to stronger performance.
The Creative Quality Score has helped Barilla to prevent media spend wastage on low quality, media unsuitable ads. The Food and Beverage industry was predicted to waste over $8B in 2023 on creatives that failed to meet platform-determined best practices for media suitability. As Mariama underscored, with so much resource (both time and money) being put into the creative production process, this investment is wasted if the final ad is not suitable for its media placement.
“Imagine if you then put something on a platform and it's not optimized and you've invested tens of thousands in it, it's just not worth it.”
CreativeX’s tool is now used by 12 of Barilla’s brands operating across 34 markets. The Creative Quality Score has enabled global teams to centralize around key workflows and measure the impact of creative decisions at scale. As Mariama explained:
“So when it first started, it was very much, it was a KPI, it was a sanity check, but it's inspired growing out into an ecosystem on how we can streamline workflows and how CreativeX can be one of the bedrocks of that.”
Not only is Barilla ensuring that media spend only goes behind optimized creatives, improving their media suitability has been tied back to improvements in performance. For every 10% increase in Barilla’s Creative Quality Score, they saw a 9.15% cheaper CTVR (completed view-through rate).
“CreativeX doesn’t dictate what should be in our asset [but] ensure[s] that we’re making assets best for the platform that they’re going on. It’s helped us get to the point where our assets are performing better.”
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