Guide Dogs Takes Audiences on an Emotional Journey with System1 Ad Testing and Guidance
In 2023, Guide Dogs, one of the UK’s leading sight loss charities, debuted a new campaign depicting the life-changing support that the charity provides for people with sight loss.
The brand ad centres on two young brothers, Max and Jake, who have a close bond and enjoy playing practical jokes on one another, such as adding hot sauce to the other’s drinking glass. Their playful sibling rivalry hangs in the balance when Max develops sight loss. The audience sees the many ways that Guide Dogs offers support – habilitation skills in the kitchen, long cane training and then later a guide dog. Fast forward to the present day, Max and Jake are adults and still have fun-loving tricks up their sleeves.
Alongside the brand advert, Guide Dogs also created a sister response version for legacy fundraising. This version features the same brothers, now in their 60s, still enjoying each other’s company and a joke.
In both adverts, Guide Dogs cast real service users with sight loss into the roles of Max at different ages. Their case studies, available on the campaign website, showcase inspiring stories and the life-changing difference that tailor-made services can make for people with sight loss.
“As a charity that relies on fundraising, donations and volunteers, it’s vital that we get the most value from our marketing spend and create adverts that connect with the public,” said Pip Brady, Director of Brand, Marketing and Digital, Guide Dogs. “This brand TV advert would raise awareness for our range of services and run across numerous bursts, so we wanted to make sure it was the best it could possibly be.”
With a goal to connect deeply and drive essential fundraising, the team needed to ensure the ad was performing at its peak. Could its emotional and commercial impact be enhanced? The charity turned to System1’s creative testing tool and consultancy service to dive deeper into consumer sentiment and ways to optimise the creative.
Guide Dogs leveraged System1’s Test Your Ad platform, which can be used at every stage of the creative process to predict and improve the commercial impact of advertising. Test Your Ad is the world’s most predictive ad test because it captures consumers’ emotional responses to creative to gauge sales effects and long-term growth potential.
Guide Dogs also opted to include Guidance, a bespoke consultation with System1’s experts. Guidance involves a thorough review of the Test Your Ad report’s predictive metrics and detailed diagnostics. It also includes an overview of potential optimisations for the creative, rooted in the emotional responses from consumers and effectiveness principles from the work of System1’s Orlando Wood, including story, humour, music, characters, fluent devices and more.
System1’s experts noted that the ad featured strong character interaction and a dynamic emotional journey, but minor improvements had the power to make an even bigger impact on audiences. These included:
With the insights from System1’s Test Your Ad report and the Guidance session, the Guide Dogs team was able to implement changes. The team then retested the creative to understand the impact of these edits.
The original 40-second edit of the brand ad scored 2.7 Stars on System1’s Star Rating scale. A solid start, as this was a full Star above the average score for the UK Charities and Non-profits category, and the ad achieved high levels of positivity, specifically people feeling ‘Uplifted’ and ‘Pleased for others.’ Meanwhile, the Spike Rating (short-term potential) for the initial version was ‘Modest,’ leaving room for improvement.
The next iteration of the creative saw a 1.9-Star increase to 4.6 Stars, improving the long-term brand-building potential from ‘Modest’ to ‘Strong.’
For charities, it’s also key to drive short-term effects like donations and volunteering applications, measured by System1’s Spike Rating. This particular metric increased by 0.12, making it yet another instance where ‘Modest’ potential dramatically improved to ‘Strong.’
The adverts are at the heart of Guide Dogs’ fully integrated marketing campaign, with a PR launch, website takeover and social edits in addition to airings on ITV, Channel 4 and more.
“We were confident in our creative based on our experience, knowledge and the thorough process we followed to get to the heart of the matter,” added Brady. “System1’s Test Your Ad reports, category norms from their extensive ad database and the Guidance team’s recommendations then provided evidence of that confidence, which was incredibly valuable for us.”
"We were confident in our creative but System1’s Test Your Ad reports, category norms from their extensive ad database and the Guidance team’s recommendations then provided evidence of that confidence."
Pip Brady Director of Brand, Marketing and Digital, Guide Dogs
As World leaders in predicting and improving advertising effectiveness, Test Your Ad provides the most accurate/predictive metrics.