See How Mars' AI-Led Digital Strategy is Leveling Up Creative Quality

By NCS Marketing

If you’re looking to boost your CPG campaign’s business outcomes, it’s worth obsessing over your creative. “The quality of advertising is what makes or breaks your campaign,” says Laurie Sommer, Sr. Manager, Communication Lab at Mars.  

And she’s right: Creative quality—including clear, authentic messaging, platform-native approaches, and compelling visuals—drive nearly half (49%) of the incremental sales delivered by advertising, according to NCS research into the top drivers of advertising effectiveness. “Not all creative is equal. Excellent creative delivers higher incremental sales than weak creative,” says Deirdre McFarland, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer of NCS. “When brands take steps to raise the quality of their advertising creative, they’re more likely to achieve better outcomes.”

That leads to a big question: How do you define great creative? Forward-thinking CPG brands like Mars are leaning into AI tools to bring objectivity to creative quality and make smarter marketing decisions. Nearly three-quarters of digital marketers see improved testing, learning, and measurement models as key opportunities in 2025, according to the latest Digiday and NCS State of the Industry Report—and Mars has pursued these opportunities in a big way.

A Scalable Solution for Rating Creative

Mars and their agency, EssenceMediaCom, collaborated with CreativeX, a creative measurement platform. Their goal? Scale a creative excellence program across 50 brands and 65 markets over five years—and build a system that empowers brands to make more impactful creative decisions, grounded in data. 

Mars used CreativeX’s AI technology to build a creative assessment tool that plugged into their global content production ecosystem, spanning platforms, agencies, media partners, and measurement teams. “Mars was already very advanced in its measurement,” shares Paul Brown, Global Client Partner at CreativeX. “Their challenges were to scale that measurement across all of their digital advertising and take those insights to drive impact across the organization. That's where CreativeX came in.”

Loads of Learnings From Thousands of Creative Assets

Mars used CreativeX to analyze more than 300,000 creative assets, integrating this analysis into their content production. As a result, they optimized their workflow, resulting in millions of dollars in media savings. “Mars leaned in early in establishing internal processes that define creative quality through to effectiveness,” says Matt Rooney, Head of Measurement, Global Accounts at TikTok, a key social platform for Mars.

For campaigns running on TikTok, Mars analyzed assets according to the platform’s creative best practices. CreativeX assigned each Mars asset a Creative Quality Score (CQS). NCS then measured how the campaign translated to incremental sales, using our flagship Sales Effect studies. Across 30 NCS-measured Mars campaigns run on TikTok from 2023 to 2024, creative assets that followed four or more of TikTok’s creative guidelines consistently outperformed others, the results were clear: 33% higher NSV (Net Sales Value) ROI on TikTok for campaigns that had an excellent creative quality score (CQS)*. “What's important is being able to quantify how much impact creative quality has for brands such as Mars... and unlock greater effectiveness through creative data,” Rooney says. The data left no doubt: dialing up creative quality directly led to stronger sales outcomes for Mars.

“Mars was able to elevate the quality of its creative, which fueled more incremental sales,” explains McFarland. “This access to granular details empowered Mars to make decisions that drove consumer engagement.”

“Creative works better with data science, when brands marshal the insights of platform, sales effectiveness, and data partners they gain a better understanding of what’s working and why,” says McFarland.

It’s an approach that Sommer plans to build on at Mars’ brands. “Mars wants to be recognized as an amazing advertiser... an advertiser that understands that marketing is a mix of art and science. I can say that we were and we are still ahead of the pack in understanding creative excellence.”

As for the takeaway for CPG marketing leaders, TikTok’s Rooney has this to share: “Brands should focus on the process... where CreativeX has strength is the tooling underpinning that process. By focusing on how you build the process and how you establish a common currency from ideation through to execution, it helps all the different silos in the marketing process come together and ultimately unites quality and outcomes.”

Want to level up your brand’s sales outcomes? Download our report, Five Keys to Advertising Effectiveness.