• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 10, 2022

CreativeX, a technology company that helps brands make decisions on creative elements based on data, announced $25 million in funding from Guggenheim Investments with participation from Beringea, the brandtech group, and Conviction.

The funding, announced earlier this week, adds to the approximate $9 million previously raised since the company was founded in 2012 as an ecommerce business. It pivoted to focus on the creative in 2015.

“We turned down acquisition offers because we believe in the focus,” said Anastasia Leng, founder and CEO. “The company really came into its own within the past three years.”

CreativeX plans to expand on its data resources and sources to support brands such as PepsiCo, Nestle, Mondelez, Unilever and Heineken, as well as some of the platforms such as Amazon, Facebook, and Google.

Nestle saw a 60% higher return on ad spend by optimizing campaigns to gain a higher creative quality score, for example. 

Leng considers data that is specific to creative pieces a category of its own -- for example, sales data, programmatic data, keyword data and audience data, she said. Not until now that marketers have had the ability to embed creative data into the process.

“For the core technology to extract the data, you need to think about all the core questions marketers think about to reach their goals,” she said. “You can extract the visual data, such as colors in a video or an image. You can extract the audio, the sound files. You can extract the text data, the words on the screen. The magic happens when you tie all back together.”

CreativeX plans to invest heavily in the focus of “any creative anywhere” by expanding from mostly social into other areas such as display and ecommerce. The ability to access deeper insights to extract data through every piece. Started with creative quality in brands, expanded into compliance and representation, and will move into sustainability and more.

The funding will also help the company invest in its APIs, and testing and research.

Today, the company employees about 80 people, including 15 engineers. The goal is to hire an additional 15 engineers this year, with plans to double the engineering headcount through 2023, depending on the economy.

About 30 advertisers use the company’s technology to power creative decision 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.