Kellanova, in partnership with data firm Vidmob and MMA Global, has found it can more quickly connect the dots between campaign creative and business outcomes by leveraging artificial intelligence to power predictive impact scoring, which crunches past performance data to pinpoint creative criteria for driving specific KPIs.
In an analysis of more than 443 Kellanova creative assets, the marketer of snack brands Pringles, Cheez-It and Pop-Tarts found that predictive impact scoring can forecast three-second view-through rates (VTR) with 83% accuracy, improve performance by more than two times and contribute to an 11% increase in ROI.
“Predictive impact scores are like creative fingerprints – unique to our brand, actionable and incredibly powerful for driving both brand distinctiveness and performance,” said Charisse Hughes, senior vice president and chief growth officer at Kellanova, in a statement. “At scale, these go beyond growth and drive transformation, and with AI we can do this with increased speed and accuracy.”
The study, conducted between March 2024 and March 2025, analyzed assets that ran across Meta platforms in the U.S using Vidmob’s Aperture technology. The analysis was used to pinpoint 19 company-wide and 11 category-specific scoring criteria that are now being used to inform Kellanova advertising creative moving forward.
“Creative has always been a little bit subjective, a little bit art and science. But now, with the ability to process large sets of data at scale and be able to build more advanced analytics and modeling on top of that, we can get to more precision and more predictiveness of business outcomes,” said Nicole Vinson, vice president of digital, media and omni-shopper experience at Kellanova.
Inside the process
Kellanova’s latest predictive scoring work began a few years ago when the company implemented Vidmob’s fit-for-platform best practices and scoring capabilities — a first step in adhering to the basics required by each digital platform to ensure creative performance. When MMA Global approached Kellanova about testing predictive scoring, the company was prepared to connect scoring with specific KPIs.
“The advantage that you have as a marketer is that you can unlock specific insights that are specific to your brand and your distinctive brand assets. That's your own secret sauce. That's your competitive advantage versus my next competitor that's using a similar tool,” Vinson said.
The study looked at high-production value, branded creative assets from 10 brands in Kellanova’s North America business across Meta platforms, analyzing more than several billion impressions over the year. The use of Vidmob’s AI tool allowed Kellanova to winnow down 20,000 creative decisions — like including positive emotion in the first several seconds of an ad, having audio or text overlays, the presence of brand logos and characters or consumption cues, for example – into 19 variables.
“As you think about the power of this, it's not to create a paint-by-numbers solution for our creatives and our content production partners,” Vinson explained. “It's to help them to understand what are those variables that have the highest predictability of improving performance so we can then start to inform future creative decisions, operationalize that and scale that across our business.”
After analyzing its creative on Meta platforms, Kellanova has run the exercise using the same framework and methodology across all digital media platforms and rescoring creative against new criteria to acknowledge, for example, what works better on Facebook compared to TikTok. The recursive process is allowing Kellanova to drill down into what works for specific brands and audiences.
“How do I then start to understand the recipe, if you will, for those drivers of effectiveness, so that we can then put it back into those best practices to help inform the creative development process and the concept production process,” Vinson said.
The work also analyzes funnel stage and business objectives. As with platforms, upper funnel creative has different needs than middle or bottom funnel creative, with regard to calls to action, product focus and beyond. In addition, Kellanova hopes to use the data to generate audience-level insights at some point.
“The power behind this is pretty exponential,” Vinson said. “We’re just scratching the surface right now — there's so much possibility in what this can start to unlock for us.”
Internal, external teams
Along with Vidmob and MMA Global, Kellanova relied on a cross-functional team that spanned insights and analytics, media operations and full-funnel marketing leads that represent different brand categories for the predictive scoring analysis. The teams worked to establish clear goals, objectives and methodologies at every step of the journey.
“Everyone gets a little nervous when there's something new out there, and they have to trust something new, especially when AI is involved — ‘But my gut tells me it should be this,’ and we're like, ‘No, we're trying to get to more data driven decisioning on your business,’” Vinson gave as an example. “What people say that they want to do is very different than how they actually behave.”
After determining the 19 variables that provided the clearest connection to outcomes, Kellanova prioritized the list — must haves, nice to haves, ones to watch and so on — and met with brand marketers, insights and analytics teams and media teams to work through the criteria. The company also is now briefing its agencies on how they will be held accountable to utilizing the insights.
“As they are now running any pre-flight creative, they know it's being scored against that criteria now, and there's a certain threshold that we're holding our agencies accountable to in meeting those best practices when they do that scoring,” Vinson said.
Kellanova plans to pull agency scorecards every quarter and have conversations around what’s working, what’s not and how to move forward. The process is intended to be a constant feedback loop, especially as platform algorithms, consumer behavior and campaign goals change over time.
“I'm not trying to grade everyone's homework, but if we don't do these things, we're leaving money on the table, especially in a very challenging environment right now, from a business perspective across the globe,” Vinson said. “You want to be a responsible steward of your brand budgets, and you want to give every opportunity to improve your effectiveness and your success rate of driving net sales volume.”
