MrQ Bets Big on its Boldest Campaign with System1 Ad Testing and Guidance
MrQ is the ultimate spot for online casino games, offering customers a range of entertainment, from slots to bingo to live casino. In 2025, the brand engaged with MISSION to help it stand out in a sea of sameness in online casino marketing and double down on its ‘radically honest’ challenger spirit.
This would be the company’s first fully integrated campaign spanning Above The Line channels, digital and owned media. With brand awareness paramount, MrQ needed to land an emotional response while also being distinctive.
“For our biggest, boldest campaign yet, we needed to be sure that it would make players feel something real about MrQ,” said Adam Ryan, CMO, MrQ. “We’re the ‘casino you love to hate’ but what emotions does the creative actually elicit amongst our target audience? Pre-testing from the early stages would help us uncover the answers and further finetune the concept ahead of such an important launch.”
MrQ engaged with System1, The Creative Effectiveness Platform, to first pre-test at the animatic stage with the general public and a custom audience of casino goers. The concept put “Q” the centre of the story, showcasing players with over-the-top reactions to winning and losing games, like a winner celebrating on a Q-shaped yacht and a loser angrily throwing paint onto a Q-shaped art exhibit.
System1’s Test Your Ad platform measures consumers’ emotional responses to advertising to predict its short-term sales potential and long-term brand-building potential. And because System1 tests nearly every linear ad airing in the UK, it also has continually up-to-date rankings and norms for the casino category in its Test Your Ad Competitive Edge database, giving MrQ even deeper insights from which to learn.
The new love-hate creative platform landed strongly with a 3.5 Star Rating, predicting ‘Good’ long-term brand-building potential. It also achieved a ‘Good’ Spike Rating of 1.14, which predicts short-term sales potential. Meanwhile, the Fluency Rating (measuring strength of branding) offered room for improvement. Overall, it was a strong result for an animatic, giving MrQ and MISSION confidence that it was deserving of progressing to finished film.
To optimise the creative’s commercial impact, MrQ opted for Guidance, hands-on support from System1’s experts. Guidance reiterated the strength of the love-hate positioning. Verbatims from the casino players and System1’s FaceTrace, a second-by-second look at the audience’s emotional journey, provided evidence that the narrative resonated with the highs and lows of winning and losing. System1’s team then recommended focusing in more on the amusing and playful characters and their expressions to support emotional resonance, and building saliency through more prominent brand cues.
Following this process, MrQ and MISSION ctioned the recommendations and leveraged AI to produce a rough cut for another round of testing and Guidance. This resulted in a meaningful step up to 4.1 Stars, predicting ‘Strong’ brand-building potential, ‘Exceptional’ short-term sales potential and an increase in Fluency. Guidance provided a few final adjustments, including a slightly more dynamic voiceover and fewer fast-cut scenes.
In addition to testing early, the team at MrQ followed System1’s advice to test often. The final version of the ad was tested to get the latest look at System1’s predictive and validated creative effectiveness metrics.
Amongst the target audience, the ad achieved the maximum score on System1’s Star Rating scale: 5.9. It maintained its ‘Exceptional’ short-term sales potential (Spike Rating) and also further improved Fluency to ‘Good.’
“As a challenger brand, we’re not trying to be the biggest. We’re here to be the most distinctive, most entertaining, and most loved brand in the category,” added Ryan. “Our partners at MISSION, Rebel Spirit Media and System1 were instrumental in helping us deliver creative that consumers love and a media plan that ensures we continue to reach and engage them.”
"Our campaign scored 5.9 Stars on System1’s Test Your Ad platform, placing it amongst the very best ads in the world for long-term brand impact and short-term sales potential. That doesn’t happen by accident - it’s the result of sharp strategy, brave creative and a relentless team that refuses to play it safe!"
Adam Ryan CMO, MrQ
As World leaders in predicting and improving advertising effectiveness, Test Your Ad provides the most accurate/predictive metrics.