The Benefits of Pre-Testing Super Bowl Creative

The Benefits of Pre-Testing Super Bowl Creative

With the regular NFL season kicking off soon, it’s the perfect time for brands to think about how they want to show up during the Big Game. After all, there’s less than six months until the Super Bowl and both Disney and ESPN have sold out of their ad inventory, breaking previous pacing set by NBC and Fox.

How do the smartest advertisers de-risk their Big Game investment before the creative airs? The answer is pre-testing.

Why Super Bowl Advertising Is a High-Stakes Bet

The Cost of a 30-Second Spot

While prices for Super Bowl LXI haven’t yet been disclosed, 2026 commanded an $8 million average for a 30-second spot and some reports have hinted that 2027 may see prices of $9 or $10 million for the same length. In our recent blog, we explored whether Super Bowl ads are truly worth the cost with a deeper dive into how to make the most of the highly priced advertising slot.

In addition to the cost to secure the primetime slot, there’s also agency and production fees, talent, possibly music licensing and plenty of other costs to consider. That means that these ads far exceed the published price for a Super Bowl media buy.

One Shot, No Second Chances (unlike always-on digital campaigns, there’s no iterate-in-market option)

The stakes are incredibly high with Super Bowl commercials. Once they go live, the public debate begins, with ads often falling into the ‘love it’ or ‘hate it’ category, or possibly worse yet, the ‘immediately forgettable.’ Unlike what often happens with digital campaigns, with frequent finetuning of copy, CTAs, targeting and budget, the Super Bowl TV buy gives brands one shot to get it right.

The Risk of Getting It Wrong

And there are plenty of risks when brands get it wrong. Most ads leave audiences neutral, a complete lack of feeling. Meanwhile, consumers can’t recall the brands associated with 1 in 5 Super Bowl ads. Too often, Big Game commericals blend into a sea of sameness or confuse viewers, leaving them unable to remember the brand or the storyline. Entertaining, emotional creative can only work hard for a brand if it’s also distinctive. Otherwise advertisers are simply wasting media spend.

What Is Ad Pre-Testing?

The Core Purpose of Pre-Testing

Creative pre-testing measures an ad’s effectiveness before it goes to market. Ad effectiveness testing can help marketers predict and improve the commercial impact of their full suite of creative assets, from TV and CTV to digital, out-of-home, audio/radio and print. By keeping the customer at the center of marketing, pre-testing helps reduce risk, allowing brands to see which assets deserve investment and which need further refinement or are simply better left on the cutting room floor.

What Pre-Testing Measures

The most predictive type of pre-testing measures emotional response, because how people feel is the best predictor of their future behavior, the choices they make, the brands they buy, etc. Look for a pre-testing solution that predicts both short-term effects and the potential for long-term profit and market share gain. The most successful marketers understand that not every buyer is in market at the moment. Balancing the long and the short with a mix of showmanship and salesmanship messaging is key.

In addition to short- and long-term measures rooted in behavioral science, ad testing should measure recall. Brand recognition is always important, but even more so when there is pressure on a Super Bowl campaign to stand out and deliver a return on investment.

Pre-testing can also go beyond how people feel and the types of happiness creative evokes to explore the reasons why they feel the way they do. Verbatims and second-by-second emotional response give marketers a clear understanding of how emotion shifts as their ad progresses and areas where emotional resonance may need further finetuning.

And finally, pre-testing can deliver a read on key associations audiences make with the creative, what distinctive brand assets they recognize, showmanship and salesmanship features present in the ad and how results and predicted commercial impact differ based on the audience segment. Together, this data give marketers richer and deeper insight to inform the final version of their ad.

Pre-Testing vs. Post-Campaign Analysis

While marketers must measure the impact of their Super Bowl creative, reviewing website traffic, new customer acquisition rates and costs, revenue and profit and more, only relying on post-campaign analysis can end up costing brands millions. Pre-testing enables brands to get a read on creative ahead of launch, gather customer insights and optimize for the best result.

The Benefits of Pre-Testing Super Bowl Creative

Reducing Financial Risk on a Multi-Million-Dollar Investment

When a Super Bowl investment is on the line, it’s important to give your brand time and space to consider the metrics and qualitative insights, make edits to address the feedback and re-test to see how these changes have shifted the outcomes.

Predicting Short-Term Sales Impact and Long-Term Brand Building

How people feel about creative predicts the long-term brand building potential of a campaign, with positive emotions like happiness and surprise delivering the greatest impact. Negative emotions can play a role, especially in creating a dynamic emotional journey, but should be resolved by the conclusion of the ad.

Meanwhile, the intensity of the emotion, how strongly people feel happiness or anger or another emotion, plays into short-term potential. This is combined with the speed of brand recognition to predict how likely people are to visit a website or store, complete a form or make a purchase or donation.

Identifying Emotional Response Before Air Date

Being able to review consumer feedback before a Super Bowl ad hits YouTube, social and TV is crucial. Marketers can accurately assess how emotional response to the ad will translate into commercial effects in an environment built for feedback. It’s a much clearer and calmer setting compared to the echo chambers of Reddit, TikTok and more, where the opinion of a few can seem much louder than the wider audience’s feelings.

Benchmarking Against Competitors’ Creative

Pre-testing also enables brands to benchmark creative effectiveness against the competition using category-specific norms linked to key metrics. With so many brands advertising during the Super Bowl, it’s a competition for attention. The game also often welcomes many brands from the same category, which can further confuse viewers and negatively impact ad recall. Pre-testing showcases the predicted short- and long-term impact, the level of brand recognition and, most importantly, how these metrics compare to your category so you know where you need to land to exceed the competition.

Optimizing Branding and Brand Recall

It’s all too common that a Super Bowl ad is forgotten as soon as the next one airs. In some cases, viewers like the storyline but the ad is simply not distinctive enough to properly signal the brand. Marketers investing in the Big Game need to maximize the short-term ROI and support long-term brand building. This can’t be done if the brand gets lost within the ad. Pre-testing helps signal brand recognition and pinpoint where and how distinctive brand assets need to be dialed up further.

What Great Pre-Tested Super Bowl Ads Have in Common

Narrative Clarity and a Single Clear Idea

There are many things that make a Super Bowl ad successful. First, audiences love to be able to follow a story with a clear beginning, middle and end. A complete narrative often delivers the most dynamic emotional journey. By incorporating peaks where happiness can hit a high and troughs where negative emotions like sadness or fear can emerge, advertisers can keep viewers engaged from start to finish.

Emotional Resonance Over Rational Persuasion

Everyone wants to sell, but the Super Bowl is the stage for showmanship. These are right-brained creative features like a clear sense of place, characters interacting, dialogue, one scene unfolding with progression, melodic music, distinctive assets and references to the past or other cultural works. They support long-term brand building. Salesmanship features include voiceovers, words on the screen, freeze-frame effect, audio repetition and rhythmic soundtracks. These left-brained features appeal more to those already in the market to buy and support short-term sales. However, System1 research finds that ads that aim for the long often achieve the short. The reverse is true less often.

Early and Consistent Branding

Why do so many Super Bowl ads get forgotten? Consumers can’t recall the brands associated with 20% of Super Bowl ads immediately after watching. Imagine how much this increases in the days and weeks following the Super Bowl. The most well-branded ads often land the brand in the first few seconds and continue to incorporate distinctive brand assets throughout the ad. This may take the form of packaging, jingles, audio cues, familiar characters or scenarios, typeface, logos, taglines and more.

Simplicity of Message

Ads that are overly complex and try to cram too many ideas into the span of 30 seconds risk failing to land the key message and, most importantly, the brand. Focus on an easy-to-understand story that a viewer could explain to someone else and potentially follow along with just the sound or without the sound at all! Super Bowl watch parties are filled with distractions so the simpler the message is, the more likely it is to be successful, as long as it’s balanced with humor and showmanship.

How System1 Approaches Super Bowl Ad Pre-Testing

Test Your Ad: Predicting Short- and Long-Term Commercial Effects

System1’s Test Your Ad platform measures how people feel, the intensity of these emotions and the speed of brand recognition to deliver a Star Rating that predicts long-term potential and a Spike Rating that predicts short-term potential. The Fluency Rating measures the percentage of people who correctly identify the brand after watching the ad, while Fast Fluency measures the percentage of people who correctly identify the brand within the first two seconds (crucial for performing well on Spike).

Competitive Edge: Benchmarking Against Other Ads

Our Test Your Ad Competitive Edge database is comprised of more than 120,000 ads, including more than 450 Super Bowl ads. Pre-testing showcases how your metrics compare to category norms and we can also spotlight how the performance compares to prior Big Game commercials.

From Insight to Action: Refining Creative Before the Big Game

The most strategic marketers leverage Test Your Ad early and often, testing scripts, animatics and drafts of creative and optimizing based on the insights during every stage of the process. Super Bowl ads don’t have to feel like a bet when you have the time to refine them based on real emotional response data and System1’s 25+ years of creative effectiveness insights.

Key Takeaways: Why Pre-Testing Is Non-Negotiable for Big Game Creative

Pre-testing Super Bowl ads offers numerous benefits, including:

• Reducing the level of risk associated with the high price tag
• Providing marketers with predictive insights rooted in emotional response
• Keeping the customer at the center of the process
• Maximizing the short- and long-term impact of the campaign
• Understanding whether the Super Bowl creative is distinctive enough
• Benchmarking against your competitive set
• Helping teams narrow down creative routes from an early stage
• Providing a clear pre-launch assessment with which the post-campaign analysis can be coupled

FAQs About Super Bowl Ad Pre-Testing

How do you test an ad before it airs?

Pre-testing tools recruit consumers to participate in surveys, during which they watch an ad. Rather than relying on facial coding or eye tracking, System1’s Test Your Ad platform asks consumers how they feel, when their emotion shifts, the intensity of their emotion and which brand the ad was for. Then we take a deeper dive into other questions like the distinctive brand assets and key associations they link to the ad and why they feel the way they do. All of this translates into a comprehensive report complete with quantitative and qualitative insights rooted in emotional response.

How long does ad pre-testing take?

System1’s Test Your Ad platform delivers results from 24 hours, making it an incredibly efficient solution.

What’s the best way to test creative before the Big Game?

Some brands will film their commercial and put a draft or several different iterations and lengths into testing before the Super Bowl. Sometimes this is the best course, especially if it’s a last-minute media buy. Other brands will start the pre-testing process months in advance, from either the script or animatic stage. This provides early-stage insight that can be incorporated into the production process, helping to maximize commercial impact.

Can smaller brands benefit from pre-testing too?

Brands of all sizes benefit from pre-testing. Challenger brands can outperform category leaders if they get creative quality right. Entertaining, emotional creative that’s distinctive is the goal. Challenger brands benefit from seeing not only the predicted commercial impact, but also how the metrics compare to the rest of the category.

You can access our Super Bowl hub here and contact our team to discuss pre-testing your creative. Whether it’s for the Super Bowl, another occasion or key moment in your marketing calendar, the team at System1 is here to help you Create with Confidence®.