System1’s Test Your Ad Platform & Consultancy Helps Nest’s Flock Delight Audiences
Nest is the UK’s largest workplace pension scheme by number of members – more than 13 million people, over a third of the UK’s working population, have a pension pot with them. In 2025, the brand embarked on an ambitious campaign aimed at addressing the complexity and intimidation that workers often feel about managing their retirement savings. This would be the brand’s first large scale direct-to-consumer campaign, raising awareness of Nest as a pension provider and speaking directly to members introduced to Nest through their employers.
Because employees can be overwhelmed by the thought of pensions, the team at Nest sought to bring to life the message that members can build their pension with Nest while they focus on their everyday lives. They wanted to deliver something completely unexpected for the category while at the same time ensuring the brand felt relatable. Pippa Strutt, Director of Brand and External Communications, proposed the team fully lean into the Nest name by creating an emotionally engaging and entertaining story using bird characters to represent Nest members.
Nest engaged with expert partners to bring the campaign to life and ensure it would land with the market. Atomic London built out four creative territories around the birds and animation studio Aardman gave the birds their feathers and flair. The advert, set in a Nest tree, introduces a group of birds who are employed in an office, restaurant, supermarket and salon. While they work, their Nest pensions are steadily growing.
“Rather than the financial services category’s usual route of logical ‘reasons to invest’, we wanted to tap into people’s emotions and position ourselves as warm, relatable and ‘for everyone’ to make an impact,” said Strutt. “Atomic created a concept that delivers our key messages in a surprising and unique way, and Aardman’s friendly storytelling evokes nostalgia and playfulness, allowing us to connect emotionally to our diverse member base
Nest also recognised the important role that pre-testing would play ahead of the launch. The team knew these insights would help reassure the business at every stage of the production process that the voice of the customer was in the room and that the campaign would resonate with them.
Nest narrowed the four creative territories down to two by engaging with customers via focus groups. Next, the brand developed an animatic to test with the general population and a custom sample of UK adults aged 30-45 years old.
Nest selected System1, The Creative Effectiveness Platform, to support its pre-testing. System1’s Test Your Ad platform puts creative in front of consumers and measures the type and intensity of emotion response to predict commercial success. In addition to delivering three key effectiveness metrics, System1’s reports also reveal ‘Reasons for Emotion,’ ‘Types of Happiness,’ ‘Key Associations,’ ‘Left- and Right-Brain Associations’ and more.
System1’s Guidance consultancy adds a critical layer of insight, where its in-house experts transform metrics and qualitative diagnostics into personalised, strategic creative recommendations.
The animatic scored above the category average and revealed ways to further optimise the creative in the next phase of production. For example, Nest dug deeper into the best approach for the soundtrack and soundscape to complement the storyline and build towards a peak ending. System1’s Guidance consultancy also provided insights around landing the humour at key points of the story and subtly bringing the brand colours and the Nest egg into the advert.
With System1’s insights incorporated, Nest then tested two films highlighting different birds with their own unique looks, personalities and jobs. This included a parakeet hair stylist with a nervous client, a dove waiter attending to a particularly messy woodpecker customer and a bullfinch encountering scanning issues at the supermarket check-out.
The version initially tested at the animatic stage increased by 0.5 Stars with the target audience and by 1.4 Stars (brand-building potential) with the general population. The ad also improved on Spike Rating (short-term sales potential) and Fluency Rating (percentage of viewers correctly identifying Nest as the brand). System1’s testing also revealed audience verbatims, with viewers describing the birds and the ad as ‘cute,’ ‘funny,’ ‘interesting’ and ‘humorous.’
The creative is among the top 15% of all UK ads and 1.5+ above the category average. On YouTube, the ad overdelivered on reach and exceeded view-through benchmarks and early brand awareness metrics from the first pilot campaign are extremely promising.
“For this campaign to truly take flight, we needed to make sure it would connect with and entertain audiences. Testing with System1 reassured our stakeholders that we were delivering a message that would resonate with our audience, and provided useful and actionable emotional insights that enabled us to deliver a warm, humorous and impactful campaign.”
“We’re thrilled to bring Aardman’s trademark storytelling, warmth and wit to this new campaign for Nest,” added Steve Harding-Hill, Creative Director of Short Form & Commercials at Aardman. “As a studio that’s long entertained the nation, it’s a privilege to help speak to that same audience about something as important as their future.”
"Testing with System1 reassured our stakeholders that we were delivering a message that would resonate with our audience, and provided useful and actionable emotional insights that enabled us to deliver a warm, humorous and impactful campaign."
Pippa Strutt Director of Brand and External Communications, Nest
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