CreativeX technology helped Unilever to increase digital asset compliance by 2X in just six months—and automate real time monitoring.
As a multinational company and a leader in consumer marketing, Unilever has developed key creative guidelines that drive performance across different asset types and social channels. The company’s challenge is to ensure these digital mandatories are used by the thousands of marketers within the company across regions around the globe – and to continually monitor digital suitability in a scalable way.
“It’s an incredibly complex organizational structure. We work with up to 1,500 creative agencies globally, with hundreds of employees working on each account across the world. This complexity means we need ways to remind and enforce consistency in asset creation.” —Ram Vythilingam, Senior CMI and Content Lead, Global Beauty Personal Care at Unilever
In addition to educating thousands of employees and agencies about the digital mandatories and their importance, Unilever needed a way to measure ongoing adoption of these mandatories at scale. Initially, Unilever undertook manual reviews to establish their baseline adherence to these proven digital mandatories.
“The manual audit that happened wasn’t scalable or sustainable,” Vythilingam said. “That was done as a one-off, ad-hoc project. If we wanted an ongoing read on how we were doing, we needed something that could be automated.”
Unilever’s initial manual audit showed a 28% compliance rate across the company. In an effort to increase this percentage, Unilever partnered with CreativeX to take advantage of its technology and leverage its Creative Quality product, which measures ongoing adherence to digital suitability through the Creative Quality Score, to scale and automate the creative review process.
To onboard Unilever, CreativeX programmed Unilever’s digital mandatories into the platform, building artificial intelligence-powered models to recognize whether each guideline had been met by a particular branded asset. Unilever then connected its media channels to CreativeX directly, so CreativeX could perform an creative audit and measure historical content adherence – as well as how closely new assets follow these guidelines. Through these tools, CreativeX gave day-to-day asset creators the confidence to launch assets that were compliant, while senior managers could maintain a birds-eye view of performance across teams and regions.
The effectiveness and simplicity of CreativeX’s Pre-Flight Evaluation Tool allowed Unilever to scale usage of CreativeX across 6 continents and hundreds of markets in just six weeks. Currently, over 2,000 employees across the globe actively use the tool.
“Once people start using the CreativeX system, we don’t see any resistance at all. It’s just so simple and easy to use. Teams are able to make changes and incorporate feedback very quickly. Our marketers are using the tool to learn and understand what they can improve.” —Ram Vythilingam
Within six months of deploying the Creative Quality Score in combination with CreativeX’s automated technology, overall adherence to Unilever’s digital mandatories jumped by 200%.
Given the success of working with CreativeX to promote brand guideline adoption, Unilever plans to deepen its partnership with CreativeX, using data to strengthen and refine Unilever’s existing brand guidelines. Leveraging CreativeX’s AI technology, Unilever will be able to drill down to the brand and market level to identify which criteria (e.g., style, color) within the brand guidelines drive the largest impact on performance, helping further refine existing and new best practices for each team around the world.
“Now everyone has top of mind awareness of what the digital guidelines are and their importance. The CreativeX tools simplifies that process. It’s not another thing to do. It’s a fairly simple thing. When people are creating assets, they’re able to very quickly check the asset for compliance. If it’s not compliant, they’re able to make a decision about what needs to change. As a result, the compliance number is now over 50%.” —Ram Vythilingam
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