How Pre-Testing with System1 Strengthened Branding and Search Performance for Breeze
Dating app Breeze set out to challenge the conventions of a crowded online dating market with a simple but powerful proposition: helping people move from online matches to real-life connections. By removing endless messaging and encouraging users to meet sooner, Breeze is redefining what modern dating can look like.
At the heart of its new TV campaign, “Love is Worth the Leap”, was the belief that taking that first step offline can feel daunting. Breeze wanted to show audiences that the leap into real-world dating can be exciting, rewarding and worthwhile, positioning the brand as the confidence-building catalyst that helps meaningful connections happen.
As a growing challenger brand, Breeze aimed to increase brand awareness, consideration and search interest across the UK. To maximise the impact of this significant investment, Breeze turned to pre-testing to benchmark the effectiveness of its animatic, ensuring the campaign resonated with audiences and was well placed to deliver against its key objectives before launch.
Breeze partnered with System1 to evaluate and optimise its campaign at the animatic stage using Test Your Ad, System1’s advertising effectiveness platform. By measuring consumers’ emotional responses to advertising, Test Your Ad provides a robust indication of a campaign’s potential to drive long-term brand growth.
At the heart of the methodology is the Star Rating, a measure of emotional response scored on a scale from 1.0 to 5.9 Stars. Validated against long-term market share growth, the Star Rating helps predict a campaign’s ability to build brands and influence future consumer behaviour. For Breeze, this provided an early benchmark of how effectively “Love is Worth the Leap” could increase consideration and strengthen brand perceptions once live.
Alongside long-term brand-building metrics, System1 also measures short-term activation potential through its Spike Rating, which predicts a campaign’s ability to drive immediate behavioural responses such as brand searches and website visits. This was particularly relevant to Breeze’s objective of increasing search interest and consideration in the UK market.
To support awareness goals, System1’s Fluency metric assessed the strength and consistency of Breeze’s branding throughout the animatic. By identifying moments where brand assets could be introduced earlier, reinforced more clearly, or repeated more effectively, the analysis provided actionable guidance to maximise brand recognition.
Test Your Ad also delivers a second-by-second view of audience response through FaceTrace®, enabling Breeze to understand which moments resonated most strongly with viewers and where opportunities for optimisation existed. Given the campaign’s ambition to make offline dating feel more approachable, the ideal emotional journey would see positive emotions build as the protagonist takes the leap, culminating in feelings of confidence, comfort and optimism. This provided a clear framework for evaluating whether the creative was successfully bringing the campaign’s message to life.
“Online dating is one of the most emotionally charged categories in advertising. Building resonance as a new brand is tough. We knew our insight was right — real growth and connection happens when you step out of your comfort zone. System1 helped us land this insight,” said Sarah Fronckevic, Chief Marketing Officer at Breeze. “System1 testing took us from an animatic to the finished film that connected with people. We are excited to see the campaign driving strong results and outperforming the category.”
The initial round of animatic testing delivered encouraging results, achieving a 3.3 Star Rating, indicating good potential to drive consideration and long-term brand growth. The FaceTrace® results also reflected the campaign’s intended narrative, with happiness increasing after the protagonist takes the leap into her date and continuing to build as positive, confident emotions emerged towards the end of the film.
The pre-test also highlighted opportunities to strengthen branding. Both Spike Rating and Fluency scored below target, driven by late brand cues and limited visibility of Breeze’s distinctive assets. The findings suggested that introducing stronger and earlier branding would help improve brand awareness, recall and search interest following exposure to the campaign.
Using these insights, Breeze refined the creative before final production, strengthening brand cues while preserving the campaign’s positive emotional journey. The finished film delivered improvements across all key metrics. The Star Rating increased from 3.3 to 3.5 Stars, reinforcing the campaign’s ability to drive long-term growth, while maintaining a strong emotional response throughout.
The largest gains were seen in the campaign’s short-term effectiveness metrics. Spike Rating increased by +0.54 points, moving from a low to a strong level of activation potential, while Fluency rose by +51 percentage points, shifting from low to good brand recognition and recall.
These improvements translated into real-world results, with Breeze experiencing a 55% increase in search volume during the three months following the campaign launch. The outcome demonstrates how creative optimisation informed by System1’s metrics helped strengthen both brand-building and activation performance, giving Breeze greater confidence that “Love is Worth the Leap” would deliver impact in both the short and long term.
"System1 testing took us from an animatic to the finished film that connected with people. We are excited to see the campaign driving strong results and outperforming the category."
Sarah Fronckevic, Chief Marketing Officer Breeze
As World leaders in predicting and improving advertising effectiveness, Test Your Ad provides the most accurate/predictive metrics.