System1’s Test Your Ad Platform Gives Life360 Actionable Insights for its Super Bowl Spot
The Super Bowl is a major advertising moment for established and challenger brands alike. With creative showcased to millions of viewers, advertisers must be confident that their work will effectively entertain, lodge into memory and ultimately drive commercial outcomes.
Ahead of the 2026 Big Game, Life360, the leading family connection and safety app, committed to its debut Super Bowl ad, which would air nationally on streaming platform Peacock.
The game would offer Life360 an opportunity to extend its “Family Proof Your Family” campaign to a wider audience. The campaign, developed with agency Alto, launched in 2024 and offers a relatable and humorous look at family life, the state of anxiety that comes with parenthood and how Life360 brings a sense of calm in a chaotic world.
“With this chapter of the campaign, we aimed to highlight that, as long as you know your ‘cherished ones’—people, pets and things—are safe, you’ll also be ok. And, Life360 makes that peace of mind possible,” said Mike Zeman, Chief Marketing Officer, Life360.
Life360 developed several creative iterations and sought clarity on which version of its ad to run during the game.
Life360 turned to System1 and its Test Your Ad platform to give the team the highest level of confidence in the next phase of the campaign. Test Your Ad predicts the short- and long-term commercial impact of advertising by measuring the emotional response consumers have to creative and surfacing insights that help further optimize creative’s entertainment value and overall potential.
Specifically, Life360 leveraged Test Your Ad to understand whether the creative would tick the boxes of “breakthrough” (will it cut through the noise and get noticed) and “resonance” (will it land the key brand attributes in the brief). Life360 also wanted to ensure people would view the work as “evocative” but not offensive (exceeding 1-2% of respondents).
The Key Associations reporting in Test Your Ad would showcase breakthrough potential by highlighting the percentage of the audience spontaneously making associations with the ad and linking these to positive, neutral or negative emotion. Meanwhile, the Implicit Brand Attributes reporting would reveal resonance by highlighting the percentage of respondents
“We always want to be data-informed in our advertising decisions, which is why we employ creative testing,” added Zeman. “For us, testing doesn’t serve as a ‘gating mechanism’ for determining whether or not to launch certain creative expressions. Rather, it contextualizes the work and provides additional diagnostics alongside in-market results.”
Life360 put two ads into testing, “Fridge” and “Elevator,” to determine which would be the best fit for the streaming Super Bowl media placement.
The charts and insights in the Test Your Ad reports greatly enhanced the team’s confidence. They made clear that Life360’s creative would spark emotion, a key hurdle as the vast majority of advertising leaves people feeling nothing and is in fact ‘dull,’ leading to wasted media spend. The testing also revealed that the emotional response to the work was more positive than negative, reinforcing the creative’s breakthrough potential.
The ad “Elevator” was selected as Life360’s Super Bowl spot. And because “Fridge” performed well on “breakthrough,” the team decided that it would complement the Big Game spot, preceding its release to generate buzz around the wider campaign.
“We have a ‘play at the poles’ creative strategy, meaning that evoking emotion is a prerequisite. If testing were to flag that audiences view our creative as boring or benign, we wouldn’t run it,” added Zeman. “Because System1’s methodology is deeply rooted in emotional response, it enables us to dig deeper into what’s working, identify areas we can further optimize and put forward the most effective creative, whether advertising during the Big Game, ahead of or beyond it.”
"We always want to be data-informed in our advertising decisions, which is why we employ creative testing. Because System1’s methodology is deeply rooted in emotional response, it enables us to dig deeper into what’s working, identify areas we can further optimize and put forward the most effective creative."
Mike Zeman, Chief Marketing Officer Life360
As World leaders in predicting and improving advertising effectiveness, Test Your Ad provides the most accurate/predictive metrics.