CreativeX Raises $25M Series B as CMOs Shift Focus to Creative Excellence

As investment in creative and data analytics rises, CreativeX secures $25M to help marketers measure their content against four indicators of long-term brand growth: creative quality, brand consistency, compliance, and representation.

CreativeX – provider of an industry-first creative data platform to the world’s leading brands – has today announced $25 million in funding from Guggenheim Investments, on behalf of certain clients, with participation from Beringea, the Brandtech group, and Conviction.

The creative element of marketing is known to have the largest influence on sales uplift (47%, Nielsen) but how it works is the least understood part of the marketing mix. Whilst CMOs have realized their creative work needs to do more as an effectiveness lever (Field) they are missing a confident and effective way to centrally measure, scale, and improve creative work.

This funding round, by far the largest in CreativeX history, is a testament to the impact our technology can have on the advertising industry.

The reasons why are complex: 84% of marketing content is visual (and increasing with the rise of new platforms like TikTok), there is cross-industry internal complexity within marketing organizations, and an incredibly high volume of content being created across multiple platforms, brands, markets and languages.

CreativeX provides a new and unique data source to leading brands such as Nestle, Facebook, PepsiCo and others to measure the creative element of marketing against global excellence goals, with products and workflows from CreativeX to implement change at scale.

CreativeX offers a creative data platform that automatically analyzes all of a brand’s in-flight and pre-flight image and video content to determine how that content stacks up relative to industry best practices – as well as the brand’s own creative criteria for success.

Using this data, CreativeX gives marketers a customizable global view into everything ranging from creative quality to the representation of people in their ads, providing a measurable framework for tracking and achieving creative excellence as content production continues to rise.

Started in 2015, CreativeX technology is now used by 30+ of the world’s largest advertisers, powering creative decision making across 5,000+ brands, 1,000+ agencies, and across 130+ markets. Today’s funding announcement marks an important milestone in accelerating the marketing and advertising sector’s ability to know how their creative drives brand growth.

The funding will enable the business to supercharge its growth across core areas:

• Any Creative, Anywhere: Increase content coverage beyond social to cover display, ecommerce, and TV
• Deeper Creative Insights: Launch new creative measurement capabilities, such as rating content based on its sustainability and accessibility
• Data Portability: Expanded APIs to help marketers export and merge creative data with their existing data lakes
• Push the industry forward: Invest in a data and research arm to accelerate research on creative effectiveness

Anastasia Leng, Founder and CEO, said: “Marketers are waking up and recognizing their creative for what it is: a major untapped competitive advantage to drive media efficiencies and long-term brand growth. CMOs are responding to the overwhelming research surrounding the impact of creative by launching Centers of Creative Excellence and rebuilding their insights and production capabilities to scale content production in a data-backed way.”

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“CreativeX is committed to solving the industry’s most complex problem – how to optimize the creative element to build effective marketing,” said Evan Cummins of Guggenheim Investments. “We are excited to support CreativeX as it shapes the fast-evolving space of data-empowered creative excellence.”

Unlocking a potential advertising spend market of over $200B

Sustaining quality creative has become an unachievable goal without technology. Content production continues to scale, and the rise of new platforms means it’s increasingly difficult to achieve and maintain creative quality across hundreds of thousands of pieces of content.

On average, image and video content first put through CreativeX’s technology meet just 28% of a brand’s own minimum standards for creative quality. For many, this equates to millions in ineffective spend – recent research shows simply including platform best practices (like Facebook’s Brilliant Basics, or YouTube’s ABCDs) has a statistically significant influence on reduced CPMs, CPCVs, and increased Ad Recall.

CreativeX’s products help brands achieve and scale creative excellence – starting with the basics of creative best practice and scaling upwards to building creative that meets long-term strategic goals.

1. Creative Quality: improve media efficiency with content measured for creative best practices cross-platform and worldwide.
2. Brand Consistency: maximize branded moments through measuring content for distinctive elements (from logo to color to packaging) to super-charge brand distinction.
3. Compliance: deliver precision at scale by measuring content against local regulations.
4. Representation: set the agenda for change by developing a global understanding of how people are represented in your content.

But online ads are just the starting point. CreativeX aims to become the mainframe that powers all global creative decision-making, in any format, allowing brands to measure, evaluate and optimize any creative, anywhere.

Anastasia Leng, concluded: “This funding round, by far the largest in CreativeX history, is a testament to the impact our technology can have on the advertising industry, not only by reducing the $10B+ of wasted spend on creative that’s not set up to succeed, but also by bringing a layer of data to help marketers make creative more accessible, more representative, and better for long-term brand growth.”

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