The food and beverage giant set out on an aggressive strategy in 2021 to run all of its creative content. Through an AI platform, the company will score ads according to their eligibility for various digital platforms and extract the essential components needed for optimum ROI.

Early experiments produced transformative results, revealing that ads that adhere to the new creative standards produce a noticeably greater return on ad spend. This approach resulted in a set of “rules” for effective campaigns.

Today, all creative materials must be run through the system to ensure they fit the new rules before they can execute. 

Nestle has 15,000 marketers who operate around 2,000 brands in 200 locations and this is a challenge when it comes to online marketing.

Nestle aims at shifting from being a TV-first to a digital-first advertising

Aude Gandon, Nestle’s senior vice president and global chief marketing and digital officer, is in charge of the campaign. Her aspirations for internet marketing to make up 70% of Nestle’s media mix led the company to make the decision to reassess its creative strategy. She desires a shift from being a TV-first to a digital-first advertising. The company must, therefore, ensure all of its online advertisements are as powerful as possible due to its significant investment in digital media.

According to Gandon, this is different from TV-first, where content can be edited and posted on various online platforms.

“We have to make marketers aware of the new guidelines for creative interaction across various media. The marketing department at Nestle is extremely complicated, involving thousands of marketers from hundreds of different regions as well as additional agency partners. We required a method to provide direction and a framework because of the evolution and development of media as well as Nestle’s complexity,” she explained.

Gandon was also very conscious of the “wasted time” that occurs when creatives obsess over tiny differences between online platforms. She asserts that pre-determined guidelines for producing internet content will allow marketers and agencies “the space to talk about the creative again.”

Creative Quality Score assesses content according to its performance on various platforms

Gandon enlisted the aid of CreativeX, a business that develops creative data platforms for businesses and plugged thousands of past campaigns into its AI. This would assist in examining the advertisements to identify the components that produced better results. After analysis, the business developed a new metric called the Creative Quality Score that assesses assets according to how well they would work on various platforms like Meta or YouTube.

Anastasia Leng, the chief executive and founder of CreativeX, explains that Nestle needed to understand if an advertisement met the requirements for success in its particular setting. “Creative Quality Score is necessary, but not sufficient, for exceptional creative work,” according to the study. She claims that an advertisement that doesn’t blend in with its environment is like a car without wheels and can’t achieve its target.

One illustration of the different learning styles is bringing sound to the appropriate platforms. For example, whereas 90% of content on Meta is watched without sound, on YouTube, the sound is an amplifier.

Nestle put the technology into the platforms where it was running ads after the study was over and the Creative Quality Score adopted.

Nestle’s content must first pass the set standard before it’s executed

Presently, in order for an ad to run, Nestle’s marketers and agency partners must upload fresh content into CreativeX and review the score to ensure that it satisfies the criteria. Also, each marketer working on Nestle ads will be required to apply new rules as soon as they are put into CreativeX.

Leng adds that in the past, someone would have had to conduct a roadshow to persuade each creative agency that the logo needed to be moved and that it was effective. Today, every new product marketers produce is automatically verified, and a report that details what was done correctly and incorrectly in accordance with Nestle’s requirements is generated.