Beiersdorf, a German skin care company whose brands include Nivea and Eucerin, runs huge campaigns featuring hundreds and hundreds of creative assets.
Until recently, though, the company could only determine which creatives performed well, but not why.
“I could make a hypothesis” about why one asset worked over another, said Adam Wright, head of digital at Beiersdorf Northern Europe.
Beiersdorf recently started partnering with a startup called Automated Creative, which uses AI to test different elements of a brand’s creative assets, such as visuals and messaging, to improve media performance.
The “magic” of Automated Creative’s technology, Wright said, is that all the individual creative assets are tagged in the background. This tagging helps Beiersdorf understand why a given ad worked with a specific audience.
“You’re able to understand the DNA of a top performer,” he said, “exactly what’s working and why.”
Make it pop
Understanding the reason an asset is popping means that Beiersdorf can produce more creative that’s similar to those top performers in the next sprint or iteration, including templates.
Automated Creative’s approach differs from traditional dynamic content optimization providers because it constantly learns from in-market data and adjusts creative assets based on which variations are performing best, said Dan Moseley, managing director and head of North America for Automated Creative.
“We remove that level of strategic hunch or creative ego from the process,” said Moseley, who was appointed to lead the charge on Automated Creative’s recent expansion into the US and Canada.
“The creative team has been servicing a number of clients in North America” over the last 12-plus months, Moseley said. “Due to the success of those client relationships, it just felt right to establish a presence here” and work face-to-face with people in the same time zone.
Sprinting toward success
Automated Creative and Beiersdorf first got on each other’s radars because of a podcast.
The two hit it off in May 2021 after Automated Creative Founder Tom Ollerton invited Wright to be a guest on his “Advertisers Watching Ads” podcast, where advertisers discuss and review other brands’ ads.
Beiersdorf has since worked with Automated Creative on multiple projects.
Their first project together, in September 2021, centered on the Nivea Skin Guide web app. The AI-based selfie scanning tool pulled in more than 12 million images from 10,000 women to provide product suggestions and advice based on photos of users’ skin.
The Nivea Skin Guide app had already launched, but Beiersdorf was struggling to attract first-time users. Automated Creative analyzed Nivea’s bank of creative assets and various skin care-related conversations on social media and generated ads around the themes that came up in their social listening.
Beiersdorf modified the visuals and text of ads in flight through creative sprints that considered real-time responses.
“We found a way of bringing people into the tool for the lowest cost per click or cost per action,” Wright said.
For another project in January 2022, Automated Creative created a suite of creative assets for Nivea to use across its social channels to promote Nivea lip care products, which had been losing market share.
By testing many different versions of the creative and pairing visuals with “functional” messaging (for example, “So small it fits in your handbag”) Automated Creative was able to determine what worked best on social.
Nivea later used the best-performing assets from social media for its out-of-home creative.
Cracking the code
Other projects have ranged from messaging for a new brand launch to lead generation for Nivea’s CRM database to driving traffic to Nivea’s website.
Working with Automated Creative decreased Nivea’s cost per lead by 40% for a lead generation campaign. Nivea also saw a 60% drop in cost per quality visit after a social traffic campaign and a 20% increase in return on ad spend for an ecommerce campaign.
As for what’s next, Beiersdorf is looking to expand its partnership with Automated Creative into retail media through its Amazon business, where the company invests heavily in display. Beiersdorf is also exploring whether Automated Creative can offer insights to help it crack influencer marketing.
Marketers may have entered 2023 with tight budgets and feeling “a bit bewildered by the world of AI and automation,” Moseley said, because “everything looks shiny and everything feels urgent.”
But when evaluating AI technology, he said, the question companies should focus on is this: “What is my business challenge, and how can I use automation to help me get better data?”
