AA25058CreativeX

REPRINTED WITH PERMISSION

Tech Power List 2025

Rebecca Dykema helps brands break down ads to their creative core

Rebecca Dykema says AI "supercharged" how brands use data to understand what works creatively. (Rebecca Dykema)

By: Garett Sloane | May 19, 2025

Rebecca Dykema spent three years as senior VP of partnerships and creative transformation at CreativeX, helping brands use AI to analyze marketing content and adjust it to achieve the highest impact on customers.

Brands have always studied the creative elements in their ads and measured the outcomes—whether they resonated with audiences or boosted sales. Now, with the rise of AI and machine learning, they can run those studies with vast amounts of data, using years of ad copy and imagery, Dykema told Ad Age.

“This intersection of data and creativity has really been supercharged by AI,” said Dykema, who was named to Ad Age’s Tech Power List.

CreativeX counts the Brandtech Group, founded by David Jones, as an investor. Brandtech owns and invests in a roster of startup agencies and services that are developing AI tools to manage all elements of advertising.

Dykema pointed to work with Nestlé, which used CreativeX’s services to score its media on Meta, studying what elements in the ads influenced return on ad spend the most. Brands are looking at factors such as how large to make their logos, how to position products, and what angle actors are facing in commercials.

In a video case study, Aude Gandon, Nestlé’s global chief marketing officer, said the brand was introduced to CreativeX through Google and Meta. “It really had a real impact, we believe, on the efficacy of our marketing,” Gandon said.

The idea is to hold “all of your marketers at a global scale accountable to ensuring that content isn’t just being created efficiently, but that that content is good,” Dykema said, “and it’s effective and it’s representing your brand.”

In February, Dykema left CreativeX in part to spend time with her family, she said. Previously, Dykema worked for more than 10 years at Google.

As generative AI leads to a flood of advertising creatives, brands need more automated tools to track what they’re putting out, Dykema said, and that’s where she sees opportunity.

“Brands are looking for independent assessment of content generators to ensure that the content is as it should be,” Dykema said.

What’s the boldest tech bet you made this year?

I had the opportunity to partner with Meta and Kantar to leverage CreativeX AI technology to assess how creative elements impact media performance. There were two big bets that we made in that work:

The first was to think in systems, rather than simple insights. It was tempting to use the tech to search campaigns for one-off insights around creative. But we wanted to enable marketers to see how creative levers performed in the context of the other decisions they make when they design a campaign.

We also started with humans rather than technology. We wanted to inform the creative debates that creative directors and their teams have every day, for every campaign (for example, the inclusion of people versus products, subtitles, pacing, the size of logo, etc.)—to see which of those creative elements drive the broadest impact.

This approach required us to pull a huge amount of data—three years’ worth across five global advertisers—which made the scale of the project significant. CreativeX AI technology allowed us to analyze more than 57,000 individual posts. We found that four key creative levers together were responsible for more than a 200% uptick in ad effectiveness.

What made you confident enough to make that bet?

We had worked with Aude Gandon, the global CMO of Nestlé, on a smaller, more focused study, and had found that making small tweaks to creatives across their global ecosystem had driven global return on ad spend on Meta up by more than 66%. The question was whether this same approach could work across a broader swath of clients and verticals, and whether there was more creative learning that we could take away from the approach.

What piece of technology could you absolutely not live without, besides your phone?

This is going to sound so, so retro, but honestly, I couldn’t live without Google Maps. I live in London and am predominantly a pedestrian.

Trust is essential to a maps product. I will never forget using Apple Maps and missing a meeting because it was wrong. Or finding that you’re on the wrong road and delayed 20 minutes because you’ve accidentally loaded Tesla maps rather than Google.

What’s your favorite blog, TikTok account, podcast, or any must-follows in your media diet?

I’m a massive Scott Galloway fan. He’s controversial and I can’t say I agree with everything he says, but he’s an accomplished voice in the tech and media landscape. RedEnvelope and L2, both of which he founded, were transformational digital businesses. He’s now a professor at NYU and he’s outspoken about the responsibilities of Big Tech, both in terms of their impact on society as well as the ways they often inhibit growth in the broader ecosystem.

Recently, he’s started to speak out more about how to lift the next generation of young people; how higher education needs to evolve; and importantly how to help men feel proud of their place in society as feminism evolves. He’s smart on a broad swath of topics.

Who is your technological hero, alive or from the past, who inspired you the most?

My generation is lucky to have had the opportunity to stand on the shoulders of many female trailblazers in technology and media.

I feel incredibly proud to have worked under three visionary venture capital-backed, female tech founders: Lucinda Duncalfe, a serial entrepreneur with several successes under her belt. She founded ClickEquations and was CEO of Monetate. Victoria Ransom, who founded Wildfire, which was sold to Google in 2012, and Anastasia Leng, who founded CreativeX.

See Ad Age’s 2025 Tech Power List honoring marketing leaders