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There are digital marketing KPIs that are ubiquitous, regardless of industry or brand. Millions of search results enumerate guidelines for marketers to follow, like optimizing for mobile or building vertical first. The real challenge is not in knowing these guidelines but rather in how to measure adherence to these best practices. And the more complex your organization is only exacerbates the challenge of measuring creative at scale.

In 2019, Arush Kochhar, then eBusiness Transformation Lead, and Dienda Andrianie, Head of Media, faced this exact problem at Nestlé Indonesia. Their teams were tasked with improving digital and media KPIs for the region. This focus was one of their top pet peeves, as Arush tells it, because, “it’s impossible to track, so we’d always put it in KPI sheets and we’d never actually track it.” Their solution? CreativeX’s data platform.

“When we saw how poorly our assets were performing (something we had always assumed, but now we had the raw data), we knew the value of CreativeX. Now we could set targets, track almost in real-time and verify if our agency partners had the right approach to asset creation.”

That year, Dienda shares, “we were offered to be a pilot market for CreativeX and we took that opportunity as we saw that it could bring so much value to us.” Arush added, “when we saw how poorly our assets were performing (something we had always assumed, but now we had the raw data), we knew the value of CreativeX. Now we could set targets, track almost in real-time and verify if our agency partners had the right approach to asset creation.”

As the pioneers of creative data for Nestlé, the Indonesia team began with a Creative Quality Score [CQS] of 30%. CQS measures adherence to validated best practices for image and video content. By using CQS as a rallying point across the organization, today, the market’s score stands at 92%, a 207% increase.

Their success helped pave the way for Nestle to implement the technology across 2000 brands and 186 markets, with a recent MMM study showing that ads with higher CQS had a 66% higher ROAS on Meta.

3 Key Takeaways from Nestlé Indonesia’s Success

Nestlé Indonesia’s success would create the playbook for Nestlé’s markets worldwide, and these steps can be replicated in any organization.

1. Build New Processes that Implement The Technology

It’s essential to either meld CreativeX into existing processes or create new ones that’ll familiarize and empower your teams to use the creative data platform.

At Nestlé Indonesia, Arush shared that massive changes happened: “we set up new processes, new reporting, new guidelines and cascaded these changes to our agency partners.”

When first implementing CreativeX and each time a new agency is brought on, teach the basics about the technology, explain key metrics, and share how it has driven success. At Nestlé Indonesia, Dienda says as a rule their media team, “ensures both brand teams & agencies are fully aware and updated on the guidelines, and we also set clear KPIs internally and externally on CreativeX.”

At Nestlé, it’s changed how they work with agencies everyday, “we bring CreativeX rules earlier in the agency briefing than ever before to ensure we achieve the scores,” Arush said. He also advises that organizations be insistent when necessary: “you have to be firm, this is the tool and process we want it to be.”

2. Communicate Often and Broadly

Consistent and broad reporting is important to build a shared comprehension around creative data. “Once you have champions that speak the same language…that’s how you achieve scale,” shares Arush.

“In digital sometimes there’s too much data, too many metrics, people don’t know which ones to look at...so the beauty of CreativeX is that you explain it once or twice and then everyone gets it…and they don’t need to be experts to understand,” said Arush of the rallying power of the CQS for the whole organization. This creates a coalition around creative data that is highly engaged, Arush continues, “I get a lot of emails because nobody wants to look like they don’t get a basic, and CreativeX helps you establish a basic in a basic and impartial way.”

For Dienda, consistent reporting helped drive visibility and transparency, now colleagues both “recognize the work and improvement areas for the markets.” Arush adds this transparency had a second benefit in that it “inspires some healthy competition,” and that this competition helped Nestlé improve CQS globally.

3. Translate the Data for your Audience

Depending on your audience, it is important to translate CQS into the macro outcomes this metric drives. “In every business that’s how you crack it, what’s the problem, how’s CreativeX helping, and don’t say Creative Quality Score… but what do you say instead?” shared Arush.

When working with agencies, for example, 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.

Read more → How Nestle translated Creative Quality Score to partners and drove a 207% increase in their score.

How Creative Data Impacted Nestlé’s Business & What’s Next:

“We were able to do it at the country level and the brand level, and that scalability is key.”

Arush is currently overseeing CreativeX’s growth for KitKat, one of Nestlé’s billionaire brands. At the beginning of this year when he joined that team, KitKat averaged a 30% CQS. Within eight months they were at 80%. “We’ve proved CreativeX works at a country level, and that’s cool because [Indonesia] is a big market but KitKat is a massive international brand. We were able to do it at the country level and the brand level, and that scalability is key,” he shares.

Both Arush and Dienda are still using creative data to innovate at work. Arush is looking forward to maximizing Quality Spend Rate [QSR], while Dienda is looking to link CQS to BLS and brand performance. With their success felt worldwide throughout the organization, their work will continue to be an example not just at Nestlé but for all marketers.

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.”

Start your creative data journey:

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.

→ 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

Notes and sources

Acknowledgements:

Arush Kochhar, Global Digital Confectionary Lead, Nestlé
Dienda Andrianie, Head of Media, Nestlé Indonesia