Goldfish Snacks Raise a Smile – and Testing Enters the AI Age

Make creative your competitive edge; unlock insights and inspiration from 100,000+ ads, rooted in emotional response, to predict and improve your creative’s business impact. Access every Ad Of The Week in our Topical Ads categories.

This is an Ad Of The Week with a difference. Not only do we have a 5-Star ad for you from snack brand Goldfish in Test Your Ad Pro, but we have the same ad in Test Your Ad Screen, our new creative asset screening tool. It’s also our newest step in applying AI so marketers can make more decisions, faster and better.

Test Your Ad Screen uses AI to predict the results of our three key Test Your Ad metrics – long-term Star Rating, short-term Spike Rating, and rapid-recognition Fast Fluency. Test Your Ad Screen gives a broad indicator of likely performance and helps you narrow down your strongest creative assets, which you can build on by testing with real audiences using Test Your Ad Pro.

So for Goldfish’s latest ad, Test Your Ad Screen’s AI-driven analysis predicted high scores in all three metrics. “The Snack That Smiles Back” stars a cheesy goldfish snack showing its best side in a modeling studio, posing with that Goldfish smile in a hat and a necklace before being fished out of the Goldfish packet by a boy’s hand. It’s an entertaining joke about the Goldfish snack’s trademark smile being for the camera, driving emotional response through humor and by bringing the snack to life.

In the Test Your Ad Screen report you can view the ad and see how the AI model evaluates it. Unlike some AI research tools, we’re not using synthetic data or respondents here. Instead, we’re using the entire Test Your Ad Competitive Edge database, our set of hundreds of thousands of emotional responses to ads.

For Test Your Ad Screen we’ve used those responses to build a model that “watches” the ad and works out where the human response is likely to fall. The results in a Test Your Ad test match the Screen predictions 9 out of 10 times, giving more granular results and full diagnostics. With “The Snack That Smiles Back”, for instance, Goldfish scored an exceptional 5.1-Star Rating in the Pro test, alongside a strong Spike Rating and Brand Fluency. That’s all in line with how Test Your Ad Screen rated the ad.

Test Your Ad Screen isn’t designed to replace testing, but sharpen it by making sure brands test and refine their strongest creative assets. It’s a tool designed to quickly assess multiple creative assets and paths, so marketers can find the likely best performers and take them onto further testing and improvement with the all-important human samples.

Test Your Ad Screen takes even more time and guesswork out of creative decision-making. And as with this Goldfish ad, it can spot a winner, because it’s been trained on real emotional responses by hundreds of thousands of real people.