CreativeX will expand its creative and data analytics capabilities thanks to a $25 million Series B funding round announced on Tuesday.
With this round of funding, the creative measurement and data platform has raised $35 million in total across three investment rounds. The latest round was led by Guggenheim Capital, with contributions from Beringea (which led CreativeX’s Series A round) as well as Conviction (another Series A participant) and the Brandtech Group.
CreativeX will use the funds to broaden its offering beyond its current focus on providing feedback on social media creatives. The company will also launch new measurement capabilities, including solutions for rating a campaign’s accessibility and sustainability. And by upgrading its API, marketers can integrate creative data into their existing data lakes more easily, said Anastasia Leng, CreativeX founder and CEO.
To bring its expansion plans to fruition, CreativeX will grow its roster of engineering talent, and it will also invest in a data and research division, Leng said. The company currently employs about 80 people, and it plans to more than triple its workforce over the next two years.
However, given growing concerns about an impending recession, Leng said she wants to avoid expanding too quickly.
New measurement tools
CreativeX’s measurement suite automatically weighs both in-flight and preflight campaigns against CreativeX’s creative quality score, industry best practices (like YouTube’s ABCDs and Facebook’s Brilliant Basics) and the marketer’s own creative criteria, Leng said.
With its current focus on social media platforms and visually oriented campaigns, CreativeX solutions are capable of analyzing 33% of global ad spend, Leng said. By the end of the year, the company hopes to cover 77% of global ad spend, which would include most global marketing channels (except for non-TikTok platforms native to China), she said.
CreativeX will add TikTok functionality imminently, followed by measurement solutions for display, retail media ads on ecommerce sites like Amazon and programmatic TV. By adding more marketing channels, CreativeX wants to create a centralized system of record for marketers to measure their campaign creative, Leng said.
Once it builds creative measurement tools across all these formats, CreativeX wants to facilitate an ecosystem where marketers’ various measurement partners share data to allow for easier creative decision-making, Leng said.
CreativeX’s centralized system for campaigns currently includes measurement for brand consistency, campaign compliance with local regulations and representation across a diverse range of demographics, Leng said.
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The company’s road map includes adding solutions for measuring the impact of sustainability campaigns (meaning campaigns that promote a brand’s sustainability and green energy initiatives) and the accessibility of ad creative (including features like captions for hearing-impaired audiences and appropriate contrast ratios for colorblind individuals). These tools will launch “in the next couple of months,” Leng said.
Building all these features evolves the field of creative measurement beyond the subjective metrics of “like or dislike,” Leng said.
The value of campaign creative
Improving a campaign’s creative quality improves the efficiency of a marketer’s ad spend, Leng said. “For every 10% increase in creative quality, there’s a 2% decrease in CPM, a 5% increase to ad recall and a 5% increase to view-through rates,” she said.
For example, Nestle improved its return on ad spend by 60% after it worked with CreativeX to increase its creative quality score, and Heineken boosted its brand value on Meta platforms (Facebook and Instagram) by 50% after working with CreativeX.
