Improving Creative Excellence to Improve Consumers’ Health
How Bayer’s Asia Macuk Built a Global Governance Model for Creative Data
Written by
Elissa Ha
May 1, 2024
4
min read
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In 2021, Bayer Consumer Health didn’t have a consistent approach to, or definition of, creative excellence in their advertising. As Patricia Corsi, Bayer’s Chief Marketing and Information Officer, Consumer Health, describes it, “creative excellence… is a very clear path to best serve the consumers and consumers…[it’s] holding ourselves to the highest standards on how we communicate our brands and what they can do to improve people's lives.”
For Bayer, creative excellence wasn’t just important in itself, it was a means to a broader ambition: reaching more consumers, more efficiently, in order to support their healthcare journey. The issue was how to define and measure it at scale.
For brands, the first step to achieving creative excellence is to understand, measure, and improve their creative quality.
This was the challenge facing Joanna (Asia) Macuk, Global Content Excellence Manager at Bayer. Their team had "worked with tech platforms like Google and Meta to define digital creative best practices for Bayer…based on industry guidelines like (the) YouTube ABCDs and Meta Brilliant Basics.” The challenge was to track and drive the implementation of these best practices at scale across Bayer’s digital marketing efforts. Achieving that would allow Asia’s team to maximize the value of media spend and make each advertising dollar work harder.
"We lacked a common definition and KPI to measure the quality of our digital creatives. Some markets were sharing their best practices along with the briefs but they couldn’t track the implementation of these best practices and had no visibility if these prerequisites were measured or not."
Asia and the team began solving this issue by focusing on alignment: “We decided to have a single KPI, the Creative Quality Score (CQS), that is relevant to all markets and digital channels. We introduced this KPI to our marketing teams and agency partners as a common goal, our common ambition, and in 2022 CQS became…one of our core marketing KPIs.” To track CQS, Asia was introduced to CreativeX, and under her stewardship, Bayer scaled measurement of the CQS to 4 regions, 43 markets, and 59 brands by the end of 2022.
"What I love is that the technology has given our teams a shared understanding of how their creative decisions were impacting the business. This means we’re better able to reach, educate, and serve our consumers. Going from opinions to data-based decision-making is the key that CreativeX helped us unlock, and this is what excites me. It’s been an exciting journey so far, and we are only at the beginning of it. I believe we can leverage our partnership with CreativeX much more.”
Writing out this achievement (scaling to 4 regions, 43 markets…) belies the incredible amount of process building, strategic thinking, change management, and coordination that went into this work. To achieve the global roll-out, Asia understood that she needed to be hands-on, and she remains deeply connected to the creative data today, “I had to understand the technology and roll it out to our teams. I use the tool on a regular basis to communicate with my stakeholders.”
Here, Asia shares how she led a successful pilot of CreativeX at Bayer, scaled the technology, and continues to grow its success.
In 2021 Bayer introduced CreativeX as a pilot across 3 regions. This was a test of the technology, intended to establish their creative quality baseline from which to improve. For Asia, this was introduced as, “[a partnership] to measure at scale in real time, how our digital content on key platforms [such as] Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, adhere to Bayer creative best practices that are based on universally proven guidance from the tech platforms.”
The pilot results affirmed their hypothesis that adherence was inconsistent and, “at the end of 2021, when we finished the pilot and gathered historical data, we saw that not even half of our creatives were adhering to Bayer’s creative best practices, not even 50% of our creatives were excellent.” But they were able to use this data to unite the organization and activate a comprehensive strategy to tackle this challenge. “It opened up the eyes of our CMO, of our regional presidents…we put a lot of effort into [improving] media excellence, but we have to focus on creative excellence, which is the biggest contributor to our communication effectiveness. After we saw the data, we knew we had to scale this globally, so by 2022 our roadmap included an objective to scale to at least our top 15 markets, which we surpassed.”
This wouldn’t be the first time Asia and the Bayer team surpassed their initial objectives.
In 2022, the real challenge began for Asia. After the successful pilot, it was her responsibility to grow the technology’s use, and CQS as a core KPI, to multiple regions, markets, and creative agency partners. “The whole idea… it was a learning curve, we started with basic knowledge. Together with [my colleague and manager] Digital Content & Media Director Deniz Can, we didn’t have any previous experience with this technology so it was a test and learn approach.”
While this was a daunting challenge, Asia was unfazed. “I personally was really excited about the platform and this change management – taking decisions based on data not on opinions only.” Recognizing the potential of this for herself, her team, and Bayer at large, Asia rolled up her sleeves and prepared to work hard, “I put a lot of efforts in 2022, I saw the impact this could drive for the wider organization.”
Asia focused on her experience, took what worked well with the pilot, and leveraged key learnings while scaling the platform to all regions and markets. “We started this journey with EMEA. CQS increased significantly in the region. Bayer teams and Creative Agency Partners were really involved from the very beginning. This was a great learning path for me.”
To achieve this, Asia needed to create clear processes. “With EMEA, I saw what works well and what doesn’t, as there were many stakeholders involved, I had to build a solid governance model so that everyone understands what are the roles and responsibilities. I scaled that approach with other regions working closely with every team member, region and [tech, media and creative agency partners].”
“Our marketers have a lot of day-to-day work, and often when they hear there’s another KPI or a new platform you should now use on a regular basis, they feel overwhelmed. But my objective was to make them feel comfortable and understand, ‘hey–this is beneficial for you, this is an enabler, this is something that will give you data that has an impact on your business.’ Part of my job was to educate the teams on why it matters to have this done and secure support from my side and the CreativeX team, so there are people who will support you with this journey,” said Asia on communicating with each and every region.
She understood, too, that she needed to show the value of the tool to her stakeholders. “I’m working with our partners i.e. Google, Meta, CreativeX etc. to get as many proof points as possible so that we can really prove the business impact and the benefit of the platform.” The sheer scope of the Bayer organization didn’t make this an easy task, “the challenge is the amount of stakeholders [like] media, regions, other kinds of departments, it’s [...] a huge team to manage, so this is [...]where organization becomes important, and my governance model comes in.”
As to how she built up this governance system, she needed to think about the market needs: “every region and the collaboration with each partner is different, some regions are more advanced than the others, the same with markets, so you have to understand what’s their maturity level, where they are in their creative excellence journey and it really requires a lot of organization and flexibility.” She realized that in order to succeed, she needed to create a “digital army [that] had exactly the same knowledge I have so they can support their teams, me, and the roll out.”
Asia also realized that relying on partners, like creative agencies, was the key to success. “We decided to work closely with creative agencies and use CQS as our common goal. CQS became an important KPI not only for Bayer teams but also for our creative agencies. They have to pre-test all digital creatives in scope and ensure adherence to the best practices before ads are published. They have to deliver us an excellent creative [and] make the creative production process smoother and easier for our brand teams. There’s close to 25,000 assets that have been pre-tested by now… our creative partners are very involved with that process, with regions, with markets, with agency partners.”
Even with regional leads in a “Bayer Digital Excellence Army” supporting Asia, partners on board, and the teams understanding the value of the technology, the sheer amount of work was immense. “We have close to a thousand ad accounts connected, more than 60 brands now, more than 50 markets, so you can imagine the challenge this was,” she added with a laugh, “I don’t know how many hundreds of training session we ran last year with Bayer, media partners, agencies, different departments, and so on.”
What else does Asia attribute her successful roll out to? “It’s all about communication, listening to your markets, to the regions, what they struggle with and what works well. Communicate with them on a regular basis, the key to scale is to engage with people. I engaged with the regions quite early so they felt as part of the process. This is important; we’re all partners in this journey.”
Bayer’s Digital Excellence Army is now a well oiled machine. “There’s governance we had to build, every region has a CreativeX lead, and I’m working very closely with regional leads who are streamlining the information to the teams, contributing to platform optimisations and overseeing the KPIs and targets we aligned on. The regional leads are responsible for their region and I’m the global person who supports them, and within regions there are creative and digital champions who are working closely with the brand team. It’s a real digital excellence army that we’ve built to drive this change.”
Of course, establishing the process wasn’t a one time project. “We had to stabilize processes, optimize it and optimize it again then obviously everything went smoother and quicker.” The key was to make this part of people’s everyday process. “I’m a very big fan of [CreativeX’s] in-flight dashboards and thanks to it, I can access all the data…see the strengths and opportunity areas in terms of best practices, channels, markets,” Asia adds. “Our teams need to know where the gaps are, and [with this] consolidated view of our global data we all know where to focus.”
Bayer’s success is measurable. “We have built a digital excellence army, there's around 1,500 users that have access to CreativeX.” Bayer has not only been able to increase usage, scaling the platform to all the regions, but also driven change at a faster rate than an average client by increasing their Creative Quality Score by 24 percentage points globally within one year. “The change is huge. We didn’t only scale it, but we increased the score significantly. You can imagine how big the change is, some of the markets in 2022 were only starting this journey and started with a lower baseline so they had to catch up quite quickly. The teams put in a huge effort to increase the score, and they surpassed our 2022 goal by 6 percentage points, and the industry benchmark by 22 percentage points.”
To really drive creative excellence throughout Bayer, there needed to be a technical solution, there needed to be a process, and a team powering this process–but there also needed to be regular communication throughout the organization. “We always share all the achievements, progress and next steps with not only marketers but also [...] our CMO and ExCo, procurement, our regions, our agencies, our strategic partners, and everyone who is involved,” Asia explains.
“We know that creative excellence is the biggest contributor to our communication effectiveness. Half of it is driven by quality of creative, and by using CQS to increase our digital quality we’ve seen a positive impact on brand and media engagement metrics. We’ve demonstrated brand impact by collaborating with Google and our research shows that optimized creatives with higher CQS have a positive impact on brand lift. On YouTube, adoption of best practices increases average brand lift by 107% in awareness and ad recall.
“We did another analysis that shows that an increase in Creative Quality Score delivers efficiencies in CPM and CPC. Across both Google and Meta, every 10 points increase in CQS we saw a 1.7% decrease in CPM and 1.4% decrease in CPC. I know the numbers [by heart] because I share these numbers on a regular basis and share it with all stakeholders.”
Behind the numbers are the people, and Asia was effusively grateful for her team. “There’s a huge team: the CreativeX team that we’re working with on a regular basis, they helped us to make this change. The project management teams and accounting teams really supported us with driving this change, and there was a huge collaboration between CreativeX and Bayer’s Digital Excellence Team, people helping with ad accounts connections, the tech teams, IT, and so on, so there’s a team that I was leading, but it’s not a one man army.”
“I’m excited about stabilizing creative quality, scaling it, and undertaking new ventures with creative data… to round out our global roll out as well as support Bayer’s continued efforts in brand and performance advertising. We at Bayer obviously always strive for more, so we want to embed creative data and creative excellence to make marketing more data driven, and we are keeping Bayer at the forefront of innovation. We’re invited to shape the product together with CreativeX, which I find extremely exciting, shaping the product with the proper partner is really amazing and is a success for us. Consumer trends and culture are obviously changing which means CreativeX goals are evolving, too. This is a really exciting time and we want to be the preeminent data driven creative excellence team.”
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