Brand Consistency & Scaling Effective Content Marketing [with Anastasia Leng]

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Anastasia Leng, as they will be discussing ways to build better brands at scale in a responsible way, how to make sure that every produced content is meeting the brand’s quality standards, and also top tips on how to take the quality criteria and build technology that automates every piece of content that a brand produces.

 

Anastasia Leng is the founder & CEO of CreativeX, a technology company that aims to advance creative expression through the clarity of data. CreativeX technology is used globally by Fortune 500 brands like Unilever, Mondelez, Heineken, ABI, and more to help marketers build better global brands by measuring creative efficiency, consistency, impact, and responsibility across all creatives worldwide.

Prior to that, Anastasia co-founded Hatch.co, an ecommerce company that was selected as one of Time Magazine’s Top 10 Startups to Watch in New York, one of TimeOut NY's Best New Shopping Sites of 2013, as well as one of the four most innovative retail companies by the National Retail Federation.

Prior to Hatch, Anastasia spent 5+ years at Google, working in New Business Development and Product Marketing. She led entrepreneurship efforts in Europe, Africa, & the Middle East and was responsible for early-stage partnerships for Google Voice, Chrome, and Wallet.

Anastasia graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a triple major in Psychology, Sociology, and French. She’s been a nomad all her life and has lived in Bahrain, Vietnam, Hungary, Russia, France, England, and the US. She remains a mediocre tennis player and an aspiring writer.

 

Connect with Anastasia:

Website: https://www.creativex.com/ 

Anastasia on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleng/ 

Connect with Andrei:

Marketiu: https://marketiu.com / https://marketiu.ro 

Andrei on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/

Marketiu on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu

Marketiu on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency

Marketiu on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/

Email at hello@marketiu.ro

 

Listen to the episode on your favourite platform:

▶️ Watch the episode on YouTube: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-YouTube

▶️ Apple Podcasts: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show

▶️ Podbean: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Podbean

▶️ Spotify: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Spotify

▶️ Deezer: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Deezer

▶️ Stitcher: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Stitcher

▶️ Castbox: https://bit.ly/The-Marketing-Innovation-Show-Castbox

Episode transcript:

Andrei Tiu

 

Hello, everybody! This is Andrei. Welcome to another episode of The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest for today is Anastasia Lang, the founder, and CEO of CreativeX, an automating creative excellence platform used by brands to measure creative efficiency, consistency, and impact across all of their image and video content worldwide. Today, we'll discuss the current issues we as marketers face in tracking content effectiveness across channels, measuring brand impact, and how to use data to create better content. So without further ado: Welcome to the show, Anastasia! How are you? Let's do this!

 

Anastasia Leng   

 

Hi, Andrei! Thank you. I'm excited to be here. 

 

Andrei Tiu 

 

Thank you. So, let's talk a bit about you because you have a very interesting background, you've done a lot of impressive stuff in the past. I like to let you introduce yourself to our audience a bit. So, all of us can get to know you a bit better before diving into the nitty-gritty.

 

Anastasia Leng   

 

Sure, let's see, where do I start? Well, I started my career in marketing, I spent about six years working in Google first in the marketing team then moved on to do some product and business development work, and then after about six years there, I left Google to start my own company, which was an e-commerce business at the time. We were trying to create a customizable retail experience, and that wasn't working, it was my first experience with starting a company that was ultimately a failed company. But through the process of trying to salvage a business, we started realizing that imagery and video were very important, and we wanted a more data-driven way of understanding it. We started tinkering with some ideas and technologies to make that possible, and that led to the creation of CreativeX. So, out of a failed company came a much more successful one. So, I guess for all the different listeners that are tuning in right now. I've been both an entrepreneur and marketer, I have now fused these two things that I'm doing into one, and I'm an entrepreneur building a company for marketers.

Andrei Tiu   

 

 Amazing! So, that's such a fun experience.  Before diving into the subject today, which is crazy backs, I think it'd be really interesting to find out a bit about the transition period, and like from the hatch, what you learn from there, and how you got to discover this issue. Then to develop it into product and service, and the platform and the business that exists today. I think it's an insightful journey, and I think it will be relevant for many of the people that are listening to us.

 

Anastasia Leng  

 

 Absolutely. So, we've been building hatch for about two years, and we had been trying to do everything to make it work. Now, the hatch was a marketplace. On one hand, we had sellers or in our case makers. And on the other hand, we had, you know, consumers who were buying the product from the sellers. One of the things that's difficult about building marketplaces is that you have to build two sides simultaneously, you need kind of both sides of the coin to be there for the marketplace to work effectively. What we found is we had no trouble attracting makers or sellers to the side but had a lot of trouble getting buyers to sort of at scale, and as a small company, a lot of the tools that brands use to drive consumer demand and demand generation we simply didn't have because we didn't have a lot of money. And as a startup, you have no resources. And so the insight that led to the creation of CreativeX was: we started looking at trying to understand where do I best consumers come from, the folks who like our product, to engage with our products, etc. We started finding that a lot of them were coming from ve: Instagram, Pinterest, whenever we put imagery on Facebook, and the thing that was tricky for us is we couldn't understand what was it about some images that got our consumers to actually click and come to our site and experience our products, and others that looked very similar to us and to make it I didn't quite have the same consumer reaction. And so we had this problem where we had this company, it wasn't working, when we realized I'm looking at what is working, where all of our traffic is coming from - it's from these visually led platforms. But we couldn't piece two and two together, we couldn't figure out how to make them work. That's where we basically sat down and thought about how we can be more objective here? We were always a very data-driven team. At that point, we're predominantly engineers. So, we were trying to figure out, we hate the fact that we're guessing here. So, how can we put a little bit more data into the process? That's what led to the creation of CreativeX. We ended up doing actually at that time as we took a spreadsheet, we put every single image or video we were using at that time, and for the different columns, we put in binary questions. So, things like: Is our logo, MD Image? Does the CreativeX have a person in it? And we had someone manually at that time go through and essentially put a zero or one, depending on whether that image had that CreativeX attribute. As we were putting that data in and combining it with our other data, we started to see patterns. I think there are probably lots of stories like this. It was our kind of unwillingness, as entrepreneurs and founders at the time to admit that the other business wasn't working and our relentless pursuit of something that would get it to work that got us to where we are today, even though obviously, the business we're running today is very different than the business we were running when we first started this thing. 

 

Andrei Tiu  

 

Okay, so what were the early assumptions or findings? So, you pulled all these data together, and you saw some patterns. What were some of the patterns that you identified, that enabled you to think about it at a bigger scale and think: "Oh, actually, there's gonna be probably more businesses encountering these issues.", and kind of shaping the new business out of the insights that you got from the old one? 

 

Anastasia Leng   

 

Well, I actually can't take much credit for this. Because at this point, we were just trying to make the company work. So the fact that we, all of a sudden had this data, we were seeing patterns, we started making decisions based on this data. So the decision you started making like: "What kind of images should we be creating in the first place?", and "How should we think about our content production?", and "How we photograph things?". We started making decisions in the store that our revenue started going up. So what didn't happen at the time was (this was about the summer of 2015), all of a sudden, the business started doing much better.  We had profitable unit economics, all of a sudden, our growth curves are going up into the rate, and so I went out and started fundraising for the company. Because it was great, we figured it out, we're doing much better, we could sort of competing without having as much money as some better-funded companies. So, I went out and sort of fundraising. Basically, what had happened was that several investors pulled me aside. They took a bit of a deeper look into the company and said: "Well, what's happening here? You know, where's this growth coming from? What are you guys doing?", and I'd explained the methodology that we started applying to the way that we were making an image and video decisions. It was the investors who pointed out that this is a much bigger problem. As a founder, I think the problem you have is sometimes you get tunnel vision. So, I was so focused on our company and our problem, that at that time, I didn't take a step back and think: "Hey, do other people have this problem?". It took other people pointing out to me, and I remember we'd explained to one of the investors that we were talking about what we were doing, and he said: "Every company in my portfolio is struggling with this problem.". That's when sort of the piece of luck came in because at that point we had this company. The stuff that we've been talking about was a bunch of spreadsheets and some ideas, we started automating a bunch of it at that point, but it was still very early, and we had an investor who came and said: "Look, if you want to spin this out into a separate company, I will back you, and I will back the company, but I'm now going to back the e-commerce business.". I remember we received a term sheet, and the term sheet said "new company", because we didn't even have a company name at that time. So, I wish I could tell you that I was the one who sort of saw this, but at that point, I was so focused on sort of saving the existing e-commerce business that it took other people pointing it out to me for me to realize that maybe there is something here. When that happened, and when he suggested that they think this is a bigger problem. I did two things: The first one is I went back to the team and I said: "Look, this is what's happening. It doesn't look like we're going to be able to fundraise for this e-commerce business. But we have a couple of people interested in this sort of side hustle we've got going on. How do you feel about this as a team, and at that point, we were predominantly a team of engineers?" The engineering team said that this is much more interesting. This is a much more interesting problem for us to solve. But because we'd had this experience, the last thing I wanted to do was jump into another business without really thinking it through. So, the thing that we did was: I pinged as many marketers as I knew, and said: "Hey, here's some stuff we've been experimenting with. What do you think? Is this valuable?". The response we got was: "Let us know when you launch a beta because we want to sign up. That was the first time, we’re sort of a light bulb went off because we received various strong reactions to this idea, which made us comfortable as a team that if we were to go down this track, there probably is an interesting product that could be built.

 

Andrei Tiu  

  

Okay, so you were faced with the decision of you worked for this much time on these businesses becoming profitable. Many entrepreneurs find themselves in this hassle of getting something up and running, it starts to work, you start making some money out of it, even if it's not enough, and then it's very hard to let it go for another opportunity, even if that other opportunity might be a more scalable one, or so on. So, my two questions here, one of them was: How big was the business in terms of profits or revenue when you had to leave it for this other one, just for the people that are maybe in the same situations to see that they're not alone? If something like this comes along? Sometimes you have to leap of faith, and trust that it's gonna go well. The other one was: Did you have to completely give it up? Or you start you feel around it?

 

Anastasia Leng  

 

 Yeah. So, I can't even remember the numbers at this point, because it's been so long. I think maybe in gross merchandise value we're making a couple of $100,000 a year. It didn’t sort of massive, I would say probably about half a million a year is what we were pulling in terms of GMV. The difficult thing was that e-commerce is tough as space because the margins are very low. So even if you're transacting half a million dollars a year (which again, is not even sort of a gigantic amount) the amount that you get to take back as a company to reinvest back into growth, and all of that is very small, much smaller than that. What was becoming very clear to us at that point in the journey is, we could run the business profitably, but not if we wanted to be a huge business. It felt like the business we created was really a lifestyle business, and that's all well and good, and I think there's a lot of value to building profitable and great lifestyle businesses, but it's just not what we wanted at the time. So when we all sat down as a team, and again, a lot of what our team that early team had in common is, we were a lot of big company conference. Meaning that a lot of us were people who had every intention to leave big, comfortable jobs, to go do something. And what we wanted to do is we wanted to build a rocket ship that could come in the common Silicon Valley. We want to do something that would grow fast, and that would scale, and that would be used by millions, if not billions, of people. What we realized with hatch was that we built a business, and it was a decent business, but it was never going to scale the way that we wanted. I think the other thing that worried us was that if we were to invest in that business and grow it, we could never do it without significant capital at every stage, because of the margins and sort of dynamics of the commerce business. We have this decision to make around and at the time that we started thinking about creating what is now CreativeX, we also thought about sort of selling the company and going in and working somewhere larger that focused on a similar issue, but ultimately felt like we were much more excited about what we have stumbled upon. Now, we did keep the site running to your question. We kept it running for about maybe two years after we stopped working on it, and it paid for itself, it covered all of its costs. But then when creative EQ started to take off, we felt that it was just a distraction. I'm one of those people that need to focus. For example, when I sit down to work, I need to clear my desk before I do something very big because I need clarity and focus, and the hatch was becoming the sort of thing in the rearview mirror that was starting to bother me a little bit just because it's still required a little love and maintenance. Eventually, we shut it down. I think we sold off some of the assets and we reinvested it back into CreativeX. 

 

Andrei Tiu   

 

Okay, super! So let's go into the subject. That is our discussion today, then this was very insightful, I think it helped us all get more context around how CreativeX came about. In the first, in beta or when you first started to put it together and maybe get it out to the first marketers to test. What was the main so the main problem that you were solving? Where was it coming into the marketing stack or marketing tech stack? How are people using it?

 

Anastasia Leng  

 

Yeah, it's funny. All these questions are making me kind of think back to how we felt at the time when all of this was happening. We did launch a beta in about 2017 we spent about a year building the underlying technology, and a lot of the assumptions mean the beta, we're feeling, frankly, very wrong. The assumption we made for the beta was the assumption that catalyzes the creation of creative x, which is that if we could marry creative data with performance data, we could offer marketers insights about what are the creative attributes that perform better than others from a digital performance point of view. So, we were essentially doing with the beta was it plugged into several social media platforms, it analyzed their imagery for hundreds of 1000s of visual cues, right colors, whether or not it had people, dogs, cats, like tons and tons of visual information. Then they could go in and essentially see if there is any performance difference between images that had dogs versus images of cats, images that have people versus images that didn't have people. So provided them this way of understanding a little bit more what was working in those in those images and what wasn't. That was, again, kind of what led to the insight that led to the creation of CreativeX. It felt like a logical step for us to take. But, when we got that beta into the market, what we saw was, it didn't work. There were a couple of reasons why that beta didn't work. The first reason, and then probably really the most important one was, fundamentally, this is not how creativity works. If I tell you that having dogs in your images, or having citrus or lemon in your photos, increases, click-through rate by a little bit. It's a fun insight, and it's cool to know. But ultimately, you're not going to put a dog or a lemon in every image. That is not how things work. And so what we realized was at that time, while there's a lot of value to helping brands be more data-driven, we needed to provide that data at the right level because we didn't want to build technology that killed or hindered creativity, we wanted to do the opposite. We wanted to build technology and say: "Hey, here are some interesting insights that you can then put on steroids.". But because we were being so detailed about the things we picked up on, it led to the kinds of things where people would say: "Okay, that's cool. It's a cool insight. But what can I do with it?". The fact that having green in my image means more conversions, doesn't mean I'm going to make all my images green. That was kind of the first, and it was a really painful realization because, at this point, we'd spent about a year and a half building this, we've spent pretty much all of the seed investment money we had on this beta, and we were following the assumptions that we started with, but we launched it, and it wasn't something that was aligned with how marketers thought about creativity, or how they wanted to use this kind of technology. So, come sort of end of 2017 in some ways, we were back at square one trying to figure out that we have this technology, we have all this data, but we still haven't found product-market fit or that several cases that align with the ways that the marketers we know want to work.

 

Andrei Tiu   

 

So why did you do?

Anastasia Leng   

 

What we did is we went back and talk to as many users as we could, and we went back and we went to every user we had, and we said: "You signed up, you sort of wanted these insights. We've given you these insights, they're not usable. What else can we do? Like when it comes to imagery and video? What are the problems you're trying to solve?." Keep in mind at this point, the people who were experimenting with our products and testing our system tended to be bigger brands. They tended to be sort of Fortune 500 type brands, global in nature, with lots of brands in their portfolio. And as we started asking them what we can do to what we could build for them and what are the problems they were struggling with a pattern started emerging and the pattern that was emerging is a lot of brands had struggled with the same problem, which was as platforms like Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, now TikTok, were growing in popularity. A lot of the brands that where they put their media dollars and the kind of content that created shifted to visual. This is gonna sound obvious now and very dated, but in 2017, image and video production were growing about three to 5x year over year, so brands like them could barely keep up with the amount of image of video content they were creating. But the problem with this proliferation of content is that as you create too much content, how do you ensure that your content follows best practice, stays on brand, is utilizing the latest learnings. What they said to us is like, "Look, it's great that you can tell us if the image has lemon in it. What I want to understand before that is like is my brand displayed correctly? Am I following the best practices? My team, there are all these learnings here about creative best practices, are they being applied to all my content at scale, because when I'm producing so much content, you know, standards start to slip."  We heard essentially a version of that story from pretty much everyone that we talked to. What we realized is that the problem is quite a lot simpler, which is: How do we help brands in force, creative quality at scale, in a way that is customized to their specific needs and their specific organizations? That sort of light bulb led to the creation of our second product, which is now what we call creative governance, which actually, was the product that ultimately got us to product-market fit and got us to a place where we were able to deploy it at scale. And we saw a sort of very healthy adoption and very healthy usage across it, but it took we took a winding road to get there.

 

Andrei Tiu   

 

As it happens. So guys, if you want to find out more information in-depth about CreativeX apart from what we are going to discuss. Here, you have the links in the description of the episode as well as links to and stages platforms and LinkedIn and everything else, if you'd like to get on a personal conversation in terms of collaborations and stuff like this. But Anastasia, just for the people listening to that may be hearing about pretty much for the first time right now. So, how does the platform work? Or what does it enable marketers to do? Specifically, from my understanding, if I was to just judge by what we discussed right now, is it this new version, sort of like a hub, where you can import your brand guidelines and sort of grade some kinds of templates, and then you get recommendations from the platform, in terms of what you can do better to make that content work better for you, based on other insights from other brands?

 

Anastasia Leng  

 

Not quite. Fundamentally, if you take a step back, the goal of CreativeX is really to help build better brands at scale, and to do so responsibly. We spend a lot of time thinking about what we call creative excellence, and the first part of what we consider to be the creative excellence journey is: let's make sure that every content you're producing is meeting your quality standard. So what that means is: when we go into an organization, let's say, Heineken, what we want to do is understand what is creative quality, new to Heineken? What are some of the fundamentals kind of that baseline, before you even start to do crazy kind of cool stuff? What is the baseline that every creative has to have, for it to feel like it has met Heineken's quality bar. What that bar is will differ from whether or not the ad is running on television or Facebook or YouTube. Our first job is to take the quality criteria and build technology that automates their detection, such that we can look at every single Heineken piece of content and say: "Hey, Heineken, this does or does not meet your quality criteria.". What we do with that is we then take that detection and apply it across all the content that our brands are running, and we give them several insights back. The first one is we tell them, not only what percentage of their content meets all of their quality criteria, we break it down on a per criterion level and help them understand what are the things they're good at, what are the things they're not good at. For example, they might be very good at branding their content, but they might be very bad at making sure their content is optimized for being consumed without sound. We help them understand how much money is being put behind content that meets quality standards and content that doesn't. We can even go deeper understand where in the organization, again, you have to take this in the context of you know, these are global brands, 1000s, of marketers, hundreds of agencies, where is their budget being spent least efficiently. So who's producing the most content that doesn't adhere to standards that aren’t meeting best practice, etc. Fundamentally, what we think about is that the value of the tool is a lot of brands have these creative learnings, but applying them at scale is difficult. Making sure all of your creative production is efficient, is also a problem that you just can't solve without technology. So, that's the first step in the journey, and we think of this sort of raising the floor. Let's make sure you're meeting your quality standards, and from there, it gets more complicated, more advanced based on the things that you want to do. So when you have your basic view of quality from there, a lot of brands might say: "Okay, great. Now I want to understand how consistently Am I communicating In my brand, am I using my distinctive brand assets? Am I featuring my spokespeople? How often Am I featuring my brand colours, my taglines." Then there is also part some of our brands, working very regulation heavy environments. So, we also help them make sure that they're always complying with consumer rights protection regulation, so they don't get fined for any of the advertising messages that they do. And then the last part, something that we're working on now is helping brands make sure that when they feature people. The people in their advertising are portrayed in a way that is representative, and that is not perpetuating stereotypes. So, we help them understand both the casting choices they're making, as well as the representation of people, and that's a long journey. But fundamentally, the first step in that journey is always: let's help you make sure that everything is meeting your quality standards.

 

Andrei Tiu

 

So in terms of the business model, you appeal mainly to large corporate kinds of clients that have more hubs, and then they have to ensure the brand consistency across multiple countries, or maybe multiple brands in multiple countries. So that would be kind of like your target market that you address mostly, right?

 

Anastasia Leng  

 

It depends. I think a lot of our problem is the kind of more and more content, and making sure all that content appears is probably more potent across brands that are these big global brands. But the reality is, anyone who is serious about brand building, and anyone who is investing a significant amount of their budget into creative production can probably benefit from making sure that there is an objective automated standard that helps them enforce at scale those creative production efforts.

 

Andrei Tiu  

 

Okay. And in terms of the way that you work with brands, for example, if Unilever or somebody would like to start working with the CreativeX. I don't think it's a completely SAS type of model. So, they have to work with your team to get all these parameters in place and the level of the ground that you mentioned in the beginning before building up their criteria, right?

 

Anastasia Leng  

 

It's entirely a SAS tool. So, we work exclusively on a subscription as a service basis. And there is our team because again, the brands we work with tend to be to some of the biggest brands in the world, our team is involved in some of these things like guiding them to make sure that we're automating the right things, helping them roll out this technology at a global level, but all the insights are delivered via the product itself.

 

Andrei Tiu  

 

Got you. Okay, let's talk a bit about this area of creating a lot of content and having to distribute it across multiple platforms, and basically also repurposing the content in that sense, to better get it out to the audience. What are some of the main issues that you may be found from interviews that you had with your clients? Or from this process? What would be some areas that didn't necessarily have a solution before and maybe CreativeX came as a solution to?

 

Anastasia Leng  

 

The biggest one is just enforcing all of this at scale is very difficult. The average fortune 500 brand produces over 100,000 pieces of content a year, and that number is growing, and it'll continue to get bigger with things like dynamic creative optimization. So, first of all, it's just kind of a volume problem. The second thing that actually amplifies the problem is when you think about creative best practices, or creative learnings back in the day you had a couple of creatives, you would run them on TV for a couple of months, and that was sort of sufficient. Now you need a new creation every day, and you're running across all these platforms. Now, what's tricky about that is, every platform is its own environment that has its own recipe for success. So what Facebook tells you to do to be successful on Facebook is actually even a little bit different than what you have to do to be successful on Instagram, and it's completely different from what you have to do to be successful on YouTube because the consumption patterns are different, the users have different behaviors different. So, not only do you have to make a lot more content, but because it's being distributed across all these platforms. If you create a video that you want to put on YouTube, putting that same video on Facebook is not going to work because the rules of engagement are different.  It is very difficult for a marketer to remember these constantly changing environmental best practices on top of having to worry about their day job and like building their brand and optimizing for their performance, to make sure that they're giving their content the best chance of success. A big part of the problem we solve is not only that sort of scalable problem, but customizing these learnings in the best practices to every environment. So that we can help you quickly figure out if your content is set up for success, and actually, one of the most popular tools that we have is something that we call preflight evaluation. It's exactly what it sounds l it gives our marketers and all their agencies a way to come into the tool, upload any content that they just created, tell us that this is the platform it's going on, and we will very quickly tell them if this meets all the best practice requirements for that platform, or no, it doesn't hear the things you have to fix to even give your creative a chance of being seen and heard in that environment.

 

Andrei Tiu  

 

Okay, is there an element of brand consistency tracking or content effectiveness tracking cross channel, because this is something that we find a lot of brands that we work with, as well struggle with? So, we have this bunch of content, we have these channels that we need to be this content on, and then many times, either they use the customer data platform so that they integrate the insights and then try to drop the insights in one place, but this is not so often happening well, or they have to do it manually, and then try to compile these reports, either internally or with our help. Is your platform getting involved with solving some of these issues at any point in the journey?

 

Anastasia Leng  

 

Yeah, absolutely. We have an entire product just dedicated to brand consistency. What we do for brand consistency is we'll make a brand book, and we'll basically automate it will automate every single element of what brand consistency means to them. So we can tell them very quickly, and in real-time for all the ads are running sort of today: "Here is how often you're using your different brand, that lemons. Here's how that differs by the market by channel, and here's sort of your brand consistency score." All of the data we have, you can combine with performance data. So for every ad or every piece of content that's run live, we pull in performance data associated with that as well. So, in our system does correlations in the background figure out is there a statistically significant relationship between some of these creative best practices or some of these brand consistency guidelines and performance? Now, again, coming back to our earlier conversation, what we're finding, especially when we talk about brand consistency, so let's take a brand like Coca Cola, for example. If I had to guess what some of Coca-Cola has brand consistency attributes, maybe the usage of the color red, and might be the kind of iconic Coca-Cola bottle in my BB, the polar bear, right that they use in their Christmas commercials. So, the way we think about tying brand consistency to performance, it's less about saying: "Hey, here's the impact of the bear on performance". That's not really useful because they're not going to put a bear in every ad, the more about thinking, what is the right kind of amount of branding, in each creative that leads investment, which is why we try and assign a brand consistency score, using all the different elements to figure out how much branding do you need to be successful.

 

Andrei Tiu  

 

Gotcha. What's your biggest challenge at the moment? Because you grew a lot, and you solve a lot of issues so far. What's one that still is on your mind, and you guys are trying to solve or to figure out?

 

Anastasia Leng  

 

Well, for me, personally, the big challenge right now is hiring and recruiting the company basically tripled the size, we were very small last year, and then we're due to double, if not more than that this year. I'm pretty much spending all my days hiring and recruiting and in terms of company and business challenges, I think one of the big challenges we have now is that we now have 1000s of marketers 10s of 1000s of marketers actually using the product. We're having to revisit a lot of the earlier decisions that we've made to make sure that those decisions actually now work at scale, which is a little bit tricky, because even especially at our stage, you just want to grow and build an ad and make the platform return better. But there is some tech debt essentially that we have incurred that we have to make sure we kind of pay off sooner rather than later to make sure that the scaling curve is smooth.

 

Andrei Tiu  

 

From a marketing perspective or go to market or sales, whichever you think is more relevant. What was a catalyst for success for you because you grew a lot and you grew a lot in fortune 500 companies so definitely a big success there? What's helped you be successful from marketing sales perspectives, in this b2b space?

 

Anastasia Leng 

 

I wish there was some sort of silver bullet. We don't really have a marketing team so we didn't have the luxury for a very long time, we're in the process of building a marketing team right now.  To answer your question directly the number one reason for the growth was customer referral and word of mouth and so a lot of what we saw was that once we deployed our technology at someone like Unilever and 1000s of Unilever marketers and do the product one of them, the CMO Unilever, might talk to their friends at Pepsi or their friends at Modeles and end up bringing us up or talking about some of the things they were doing around this problem of content proliferation, erosion of standards, erosion of brand consistency, and that person would have reached out to us. If someone actually left the company to go from Unilever to Nestle within three months we get a phone call saying: "Hey, I'm in this new company now I'd love to bring you guys in and talk about what you could do for a company here". There is a lot of that comes down to people, which is sort of the dirty secret because it's not scalable and I think a lot of entrepreneurs are very focused on a scale but sometimes the things that don't scale that are the most powerful and I think one of the things that we did right, but that we're still trying to do, is that we treat our marketers as the experts until a lot of the product has actually evolved very much on their feedback and so we like to check in with our customers on a regular basis, we actively ask them to criticize our product, we actively try and understand how do they want to work where can our product fit in better. We don't just kind of pay lip service to it, we then go through and build those things, of course, they have to be aligned with our vision all of that, but I guess that the long and short of it is the secret of is listening but I don't think that's much of a secret.

 

Andrei Tiu  

 

I guess it comes down to being very customer-focused in the true way of asking for feedback, listening to, and then implementing it to make the product better to deliver to, right?

 

Anastasia Leng  

 

Yes, although one of the things that I would say that I sometimes nitpick with my team on is I've noticed this tendency that when we ask people for the feedback we ask for feedback and very leading ways because actually, the process of asking for feedback is to get a confirmation for something we already believe or we want to build a very good median and that doesn't work. There is a way of asking for feedback that really leaves the space open for someone to actually tell you what they're thinking and not in a way that asks them to confirm something you're thinking and I think it's those open-ended conversations that actually yield the most interesting insights. One of the things that I always want when my team says: "Oh, I'm gonna ask the customer this and I'm like well..". Let's think about rephrasing that question because even the way we're thinking about asking what you really ask them to do is to confirm you're not asking for their password they actually want, and the more you do that stuff the easier it is to essentially just have people validate your ideas to rather than listening to them.

 

Andrei Tiu 

  

Good point! Okay, as we go into the end of the episode, which was really insightful and  I hope you already are having a look at the tool and see if it's something that you can use for your business. Personally, I think it's something that a number of our clients could make good use of for assuring these brand consistency because as you mentioned many of the team is big. I think this could erase some of the QA steps that have to happen until the content gets to being actually public or using commercials and ads. We like to bring in tips and tricks and hacks to the shelving from different aspects, so, I guess our niche or area here would be this content production kind of faith so from the top of your head from all this data analysis experience of yours that you had with great impacts. So, from your point of view, what would be some tips or tricks for marketers tuning in that produce content in-house that they could use to ensure or to increase the chances of their content being more effective on specific platforms? Here we can bring examples from Facebook or Instagram or Tiktok or Pinterest.

Anastasia Leng  

 

Absolutely! They're all a bit different and there's a little bit of variation by vertical but generally speaking and some of the best practices are they really get mapped to user behavior. So, the first one is, if you think about the average time the average view length of a video on a platform like Facebook, which it's about two seconds, and on YouTube, it's five seconds. The number one learning is you have to brand super early. I think there's sometimes a desire to want to tell a long story and introduce your brand that sort of second 30 but the vast majority of people won't even get exposure to that because the average length of the video is so short and by the way branding early does not mean you got to put a logo on it. There may be other ways to think about branding. Comes back to our brand consistency conversation, which is if you're Coca-Cola it's not about having a logo maybe it's about having that iconic red, maybe it's about having the bottle, maybe it's about having the polar bear. What are those elements that say: "Hey, this is my brand". How do you build them early and upfront so that right away there is brand awareness happening there? The second most common thing that we see a lot of brands get wrong is around framing their asset correctly so this is again where because folks are used to taking assets that are intended for one platform and sort of recycling them on another. So what tends to happen is that you may create a video for Youtube, now the Youtube aspect ratio that's best is sort of 16 by nine, so you might take that aspect ratio and use it for your Instagram ad. You would be amazed at how many times we see that you know you've got this vertical window for Instagram ad and you've got kind of a horizontal ad running which means there's about like 70 to 80% of your real estate that's actually blank space that you're not making up. So even there you've significantly reduced your chances of being seen and heard because you're not actually using the risk. It sounds so basic but you'd be amazed at how many brands get this wrong the second. The third one that's a little bit trickier is: how do you think about sound right because we've been talking about content production that if we look at the trends the majority of content production today is happening is video. If you look at the biggest platforms which are Facebook and Instagram, which I’m going to bundle into one because they're part of the same family versus YouTube, their rules around sound or their best practice around the sound are very different. So, what Facebook says is: I believe something like 80 to 90% of Facebook content is watched without sound. So, if your message is delivered through sound the user is most likely not going to get it, you have to think about you know whether it's subtitles supers or simply how do we tell a story that doesn't require sound to deliver the fundamental message. If you look at it on the Youtube side, the best practices are completely different because the consumption patterns are different. On YouTube, the recommendation is: if you're going to be running content you should be optimizing for sound on consumption. There it's how do you actually amplify your message through the tagline, sonic identities, it's like that sound, you know that's McDonald's, and l don't even have to say anything. How do you amplify that? There are several other ones there is stuff around product placement so you know show your product, show it early, show it being used, and there are several studies that talk about the importance of having cuts just because it stimulates the user to keep watching. One of the best practices we're seeing a lot is to have at least one cut in the first three seconds because that change can actually entice the user to keep watching at least that's what some research indicates. The last one that's very practical is to keep it short and that doesn't mean you know we talked about kind of the average length being the average view length being a couple of seconds doesn't mean your video has to be but actually introducing some constraints your creative production team. If they give you a 62nd video push them to deliver that message in 50 seconds or experiment with different 15-second cuts because that tends to be about the length beyond which most platforms don't really recommend that that you go.

 

Andrei Tiu   

 

Okay. I think this one with the cut, sounds very familiar to me, and I don't remember where I heard it, but it was a while ago. I think it's very valid, because indeed, if you use those words to pre-second, effectively, then you have a much bigger chance of people still sticking around. As you mentioned that the attention span on Instagram or Facebook is very short. So, very good advice here to try to show your branding early, and if the engagement after these two, three seconds as much as possible for this sort of tag. It was a very good insight. Anastasia, I think I kept you long enough here. It was a bit longer than we planned, but this was a very good conversation, and I'm really happy that we managed to organize and meet today. Tell us and tell our guys here, where can they reach out to you? Or maybe how can they see the product? Ask your questions, collaborate if there's an opportunity?

 

Anastasia Leng   

 

Yeah, absolutely! Our website is just creativex.com, and if anyone has ideas or wants to reach out info at Creative X is the best way to reach our team, and we'll make sure it gets routed to the right place. Then we try and do our best to publish some of the universal learnings we're seeing on LinkedIn and on our blog, which again, our LinkedIn is just our company name, and our blog is on our website. If you want some of these more universal learnings, we try our best anytime we see something that we think is interesting, we try our best to publish it. So just keep up on there, and we'll do our best to keep sharing learnings with you.

 

Andrei Tiu  

 

Super. Okay, guys, so hopefully you found this insightful and interesting, thank you for sticking around to the end. As always, if you have any further questions or any ideas of how we might be able to direct the discussion maybe further or explore some other topics together, then feel free to email us at hello@marketiu.ro or reach out to Anastasia directly or to the team at CreativeX. We'll try to make it happen maybe if it's something that you'd find valuable. We try to maybe organize other people together and go into that direction in more depth if the NSA tip will be operated well. Thank you as always, for staying around. Wishing you all the success Anastasia. Thank you again for joining us today, and keep rocking it. Have a nice one and looking forward to meeting again soon. Anastasia, thank you, and wishing you an amazing day as well.

 

Anastasia Leng   

Thank you.