CreativeX raises $25M to fuel next stage of growth

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Nearly 10 years ago today, I started what became CreativeX. Now it wasn’t CreativeX back then, but rather an ecommerce company, which evolved into a type of customizable Etsy, and eventually shimmied into the creative analytics space in our dogged pursuit to understand what was it about our image and video content that actually worked. Within the creative analytics space, we tried 13 different products over the course of 3 years until one finally stuck, which became CreativeX.

The vision behind the company has stayed steady over the last 7 years: to embed the confidence of data in every creative decision. We had many pivots and false starts, but we kept coming back to the core question that plagued us: how can we extract, and help marketers apply, creative data to inform decisions that they make every day, decisions that have the power to shape their business and also society. 

That question led to the development of our creative data platform, one that's being used by 5,000+ brands and 1,000+ agencies in 130 markets to apply creative data to decisions that have saved dozens of businesses tens of millions of dollars annually, raised brand value by 50% (Heineken), or increased ROAS by 66% (Nestle). It might have taken nearly a decade to get here, but the things that change behavior always do.

And today, this creative data platform gets a big boost: $25M in investment (4X the resources we've had in the entirety of our decade-long journey) to continue demonstrating to marketers just how valuable creative data can be and the many opportunities it can help unearth. 

Our focus remains the same, just more ambitious now, with fuel in the tank to accelerate our ability to get there: make creative data ubiquitous, easily accessible, and actionable. Here’s how we plan to do it: 

• Any Creative, Anywhere: Increase content coverage beyond social to cover display, ecommerce, and TV.
• Deeper Creative Insights: Launch new creative measurement capabilities, such as the ability to label content based on its sustainability and accessibility, as well as to invest further in generating, and validating, client-specific creative hypotheses at scale. 
• Data Portability: Expand our APIs to help marketers export and merge creative data with their existing data lakes and measurement frameworks. 
• Push the industry forward: Invest in a data and research arm to accelerate research on creative effectiveness

I’ve never looked at funding announcements as huge wins: the victories I care about are those where we transform a marketer’s ability to do their job, or to enable them to see something that was previously obscure. That said, founders are known for their tunnel vision (keep what conforms to your views, ignore the rest) while investors tend to be more rational creatures. It’s humbling, validating, and more to have people who are used to measuring companies based on tangible impact and sustainable value tell me that creative data is an untapped competitive advantage that will transform how marketers operate, especially in the context of losing other valuable data signals. I’ve always believed it, but it’s a little less lonely to believe it today.

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→ See how the world's leading brands are using creative data to drive business impact:

• How Bayer Drove Effectiveness through the Creative Quality Score
• How Barilla Tapped into Creative Data to Transform their Marketing Measurement
• How Nestlé drove 66% ROAS on Meta

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