Anastasia Leng, Founder & CEO of CreativeX – Interview Series

Anastasia Leng is the Founder & CEO of CreativeX, a company that powers creative excellence for the world’s most loved brands. By analyzing creative at scale, the technology aims to advance creative expression through the clarity of data.

You learned marketing at Google and stayed for 6 years. What were your key takeaways from this experience?

Marketing at Google is far from traditional marketing. The work I did during my time there from 2007 – 2012 was a mixture of marketing, product, and business development. All of my work focused on launching, positioning, and convincing people to use or buy a new technology or product for the very first time. Here are the top three learnings that I still carry with me today (and annoy our marketing team about):

1. Always put users first: It seems simple enough, but it’s astounding how many marketers treat this as a platitude. Don’t assume that what you want is what your users want (a mistake I see over and over again). In fact, a 2016 Thinkbox study and a 2018 Reach Solutions study compared marketers’ beliefs with those of the general public only to find that we erroneously attribute many of our own beliefs to our customers. The researchers described this as an “empathy delusion” and it really put some data behind the fact that we need to do a better job understanding our users.

2. Always avoid jargon: Google did a wonderful job instilling in us the value of clear and simple communication. Even their terms and conditions were written in a way that someone without a legal degree had a chance to comprehend. As a result, I have a Pavlovian cringe response to terms like “thought leadership” or “omnichannel” and I do my best to push our team, and myself, to articulate our views in concise, human, approachable language.

3. Measure everything: Early on in my Google career, I made the rookie mistake of rationalizing my justification for a decision by saying that “we did it this way in the past, so we should do it this way again here.” I chose comfort and familiarity over truly understanding what the situation in front of me actually warranted, and the response from my counterparts was enough for me to avoid making this mistake again. It is obvious but rarely practiced: use data to inform your decisions.

CreativeX is actually your second start-up, could you share the genesis story behind it?

I left Google in 2012 to start Hatch, an ecommerce company that sold customizable lifestyle products. Our thesis was that the typical online shopping experience was exhausting, with consumers having to scroll through pages and pages of products that weren’t quite right. Small to medium-sized businesses took on the burden of predicting consumer demand and were left holding leftover inventory that didn’t sell. Our solution was to create a customizable retail experience, a place where every product could be tweaked to meet the customer’s specifications while reducing the inventory risk carried by the maker.

It remains an idea I deeply believe in, but ecommerce businesses are tough to get off the ground without significant capital investment. As we were building Hatch, we naturally spent a lot of time thinking about how to get consumers over to our site and we were forced to compete for consumer attention with all the usual suspects (Google, Facebook, etc.) but with a fraction of the financial resources. Given that we couldn’t outbid the major ecommerce players, we started wondering how we could outsmart them. We were making data-informed decisions about everything: our audience, the time of day we were advertising, the keywords, etc. Everything but the creative itself. We realized that creative assets were the most important part of our marketing yet the part we understood the least.

We started to build technology to address that problem, and it was that technology, initially intended for our own internal analytics, that led to the birth of CreativeX. Today, CreativeX…