Unlocking the Recipe for Marketing Success: How the Kellogg Company Leverages Creative Effectiveness to Raise ROI

In today’s ever-evolving landscape of digital marketing, understanding what drives successful campaigns has become increasingly complex. This is becoming even more prevalent with the rise of AI and so many various tools right at marketers’ fingertips. Recent studies show that creative quality is responsible for 56% of purchase intent, but how can you know where to start to ensure you’re making the right creative investments? Similar to a cook needing the right set of ingredients to come together in just the right way to create a delicious recipe that will resonate with restaurant patrons, marketers need to combine the right set of tools to build effective creative that works to reach today’s distracted audiences. 

In a recent webinar, Vicky Smith, Client Partner at VidMob, and Nicole Vinson, VP of Global Digital, Media, and Omni-shopper Experience at The Kellogg Company, shed light on the crucial role of creative in marketing and how it can significantly impact return on investment (ROI). The conversation delved into creative effectiveness and its importance, the role of creative data, and how the efforts at Kellogg are creating an innovative recipe to drive business metrics.

Creative Effectiveness: A Cornerstone of ROI

The conversation around creative effectiveness began with a powerful message: Creative is often underestimated by a large portion of marketers. While ROI remains a key metric, it’s imperative to comprehend all the underlying drivers of ROI, which have grown to encompass more than just media placements and targeting. Creative effectiveness plays a pivotal role, making up a significant portion of gross profit ROI. This means that the quality of creative content directly influences a brand’s ability to achieve desired business outcomes.

Unpacking the Power of Creative Data

With creative effectiveness now impacting so much of ROI, it’s becoming clear that creative quality must play a much bigger role than marketers expect it to, which is why it’s really important to unpack what’s working and what’s not. For example, is it that you’re just driving down lower CPMs, or are you truly improving your overall marketing efforts? To know for certain, it’s crucial to channel the power of creative data. Marketers are vying for consumer attention more than ever before, and the creative content must be memorable, relevant, contextual, personalized, and engaging – it’s a lot to think about with so many different channels and places you’re putting your media dollars! Leveraging advancements in technology and data availability, marketers can now gain deeper insights into the aspects of creative data that yield the greatest impact.

As marketing landscapes evolve, media inflation and shifts to more expensive media channels present new challenges. Creative effectiveness becomes a key lever to offset media inflation and sustain brand growth. With various data, technology, and tools available, analyzing historical creative content becomes essential. AI and machine learning can leverage creative data to help identify the elements that drive success, which allows for the creation of brand-specific best practices that inform future campaigns. 

Harmonizing Data and Creativity with AI and Machine Learning

As AI and machine learning technologies advance, the question arises: Will they stifle creativity or enhance it? The general consensus is that AI will transform marketing but not eliminate creativity. AI can aid in tasks like translation and asset transcreation, optimizing content delivery across diverse consumer segments. This technology empowers agencies by providing insights into the components that resonate with consumers, guiding the creative process rather than restricting it.

Quantifying the Impact: The Business Bottom Line

Still not convinced of the importance of creative effectiveness on your marketing efforts? Kellogg has conducted research to quantify the impact of investing in creative on business bottom lines. McKinsey & Company and other pure benchmarking research shows that adopting a data-driven approach to marketing can lead to improvements ranging from 10% to 36% in effectiveness. The resulting improvement in business outcomes, when scaled across brand-building efforts, can be substantial. This realization prompts a shift in perspective, allowing brands to allocate resources strategically for continuous growth.

Recipe for Success: Implementing Creative Effectiveness

So, where DO you start? Nicole Vinson’s role at Kellogg encompasses driving marketing excellence through training, data, technology, and tools. Her advice for marketers at the beginning of their creative effectiveness journey is to start small, addressing specific business problems. Building alignment among stakeholders and showcasing value to the business are essential. Success is built on accountability, incorporating data-driven insights into creative briefs, and maintaining a continuous feedback loop.

A Data-Driven Future for Kellogg

At the end of the day, The Kellogg Company invests substantial money toward building creative because it’s been proven that creative that works drives sales. Marketers should be doing anything possible, leveraging all the tools in the toolbox, to help give creative the best opportunity to be successful and to work as hard as possible. Kellogg’s journey to creative effectiveness involves a transformation toward full-funnel experiences powered by advanced analytics, AI, and machine learning. This transformation aims to enhance predictability and prescriptiveness in business outcomes. Integrating these capabilities seamlessly into operations and upskilling the team are top priorities. As Nicole Vinson emphasized, people remain the most competitive asset, and empowering them is crucial to Kellogg’s success.

In a rapidly changing marketing landscape, Kellogg’s approach highlights the intersection of creativity and data-driven insights. By leveraging creative effectiveness, understanding the drivers of ROI, and embracing emerging technologies, brands can navigate the complexities of modern marketing and position themselves for sustainable growth.

To learn more about Kellogg’s recipe for success, watch the full webinar here.