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Test Your Ad

Test Your Ad: The Creative Effectiveness Platform

The world's most predictive ad test

Test Your Ad is an ad testing platform that measures real consumer emotion to predict short-term sales potential and long-term brand growth, with results available from 24 hours. Unlike survey-based tools, it captures how people feel as they watch an ad, not just what they say afterwards. Test, predict and improve your full creative portfolio, including TV, digital, social, outdoor, audio and print, and benchmark your TV ad’s effectiveness against competitors. Request a demo to explore the platform in action, including Topical Ads and a curated dataset via Competitive Edge, and see how ads are evaluated and benchmarked. You’ll get time-limited access to experience key features firsthand.

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Predict sales and brand growth before you launch

Major media budgets are often committed to creative that hasn’t been validated before launch, resulting in unnecessary risk and wasted spend. Test Your Ad gives you confidence in your creative decisions thanks to validated and predictive emotional analytics that are tied to business outcomes and easy to communicate to leadership and non-marketers. Trusted by leading brands including Aldi, Pfizer, KAYAK and Mazda, Test Your Ad helps marketing teams justify creative direction and media spend at the board level and maximize meaningful commercial outcomes like profit gain and market share gain.

Test Your Ad Competitive Edge
EMOTIONAL AD TESTING

Connect emotional engagement to your creative’s commercial impact

Take the guesswork out of how consumers feel about your ad. Test Your Ad uses emotional ad testing to capture real consumer reactions as they happen, measuring emotional response and capturing verbatims second-by-second. With over 5 million emotional responses collected across 80+ countries, System1 has built the largest global database of emotional metrics to compare and benchmark against. Based on this data, we deliver metrics that predict and improve the short- and long-term impact of your advertising to drive business results.

Test Your Ad
TEST ACROSS MULTIPLE CHANNELS, AT EVERY STAGE

Test TV, Social, Digital, Outdoor, Audio & Print

Test Your Ad enables you to test every media and format, from TV commercial testing to social, digital, outdoor, audio, and print. Quickly and cost-effectively assess and optimize campaign creative at every stage, from early concepts to finished executions, for greater impact on every channel.

COMPETITIVE EDGE PLATFORM

Benchmark your TV ad’s effectiveness against competitors

With a database of over 100,000 ads, including every new US and UK TV ad, Test Your Ad Competitive Edge lets you benchmark and rank your TV ads against competitors in your category. Leverage category-specific emotional norms to see how your performance compares to challengers and leaders alike. Use these insights to invest in your brand’s top-performing ads to achieve the strongest competitive advantage. Plus, get inspired by world-class creative.

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COMPARE AD IMPACT ACROSS MARKETS

Ad testing across markets

Test Your Ad runs across 80+ markets, giving you truly global ad testing at scale. Benchmark performance by channel, category, and country norms in key markets like the US and UK and beyond. Gain rich, emotion-based insight from local audiences to ensure your creative is the right cultural fit and enhance confidence ahead of launch. Unlike smaller-scale ad testing providers, System1 gives you the breadth and depth of data needed to predict creative’s resonance and commercial potential across regions and identify which campaigns may have broad appeal globally.

Test Your Ad
DIGITAL AD TESTING

Test social ads for impact on brand building

Native platform A/B testing tools tell you which ads perform best within a channel, usually based on clicks or views. What these platforms can’t tell you is whether your ad is building brand equity or resonating consistently across TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram.

Test Your Ad Social, researched and validated with TikTok, measures emotional response using the same framework as TV, delivering Star, Spike, and Fluency metrics and platform-native norms for social ads. Understand what’s driving attention with our Attention Trace and Fast Fluency, which measures brand recognition after 2 seconds of exposure, as well as creative’s long-term brand-building potential.

And because System1 uses the same emotional measurement methodology across TV, OOH, and social, you can have confidence that your assets have cross-channel consistency, something native platform tools cannot do.

Test Your Ad
TEST EARLY

Ad pre-testing results in 24 hours

Ad pre-testing with System1 allows you to optimize creative from the very start, whether you are working on early-stage scripts, storyboards, animatics or nearly-finished ads. By understanding how audiences feel about creative before it launches, you can make better creative decisions throughout the production process and avoid costly edits later.

Unlike traditional pre-testing methods that rely on what people think, System1 measures emotional response, what people feel. It’s a proven predictor of real-world behavior, giving marketers a clear view of creative’s potential to deliver commercial impact.

With results delivered in as little as 24 hours, you can move quickly, test multiple creative routes, and refine your work at speed. The result is more effective advertising, developed with confidence from the earliest stages through to final execution.

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POWERFUL REPORTS

Actionable guidance to optimize your ad campaign

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Test Your Ad
Test Your Ad

Trusted by market-leading brands

System1 is trusted by market-leading brands across pharma, FMCG, retail, tourism, and global agencies.

What our clients say

Find the right Test Your Ad product for your needs

Your Need Our Product
Predict your ad effectiveness Test Your Ad Essential
Predict + understand your ad effectiveness Test Your Ad Pro
Predict + understand your ad effectiveness, plus implicit brand attributes and prompted key messages Test Your Ad Pro+
Predict + understand + improve your ad effectiveness Test Your Ad Guidance
Compare your ads’ performance against your category and competitors Test Your Ad Competitive Edge
Uncover how distinctive your brand assets are Test Your Distinctive Assets
Understand how people feel about your distinctive assets Test Your Distinctive Assets+

 

Want to make 5-Star Marketing? Need to understand your customers better? Interested in knowing more about our products or anything we do?

We’d love to hear from you, get in touch!

FAQs

What is Test Your Ad?

Test Your Ad is the creative effectiveness platform that measures consumers’ emotional responses to predict, understand and improve creativity’s impact. The world’s leading brands leverage Test Your Ad to make emotionally engaging work that drives real business results.  

How does Test Your Ad work?

The most effective ads make people feel, they entertain for commercial gain. That’s why Test Your Ad leverages proprietary FaceTrace™ methodology to measure consumers’ emotional responses to advertising and provide a second-by-second view of the emotional journey that creative elicits in consumers.  

Based on this emotional response data, we predict and improve the short- and long-term impact of your advertising with metrics that have been validated to be predictive of business results, including sales and market share gains.  

What is ad testing?

Ad testing is the process of evaluating how an advertisement resonates with audiences before or after launch. Different approaches exist, from focus groups to survey-based methods and behavioral and emotional measurement. Emotion-based ad testing measures how audiences feel when watching an ad to predict an ad’s commercial impact. Ad testing also provides an opportunity to improve creative effectiveness with further enhancements to the work. By testing ads early and often, and finetuning creative based on consumer insights, brands can maximize the commercial impact of creative, reduce waste spend and enhance consistency across channels and markets.  

What is ad pre-testing?

Ad pre-testing is the process of evaluating a TV, outdoor, digital, social, radio, audio, CTV or print advertisement before it launches to predict and improve its commercial potential. Ad pre-testing should measure both short-term sales potential and long-term brand-building potential. It can be used at multiple stages of production, from initial scripts and storyboards through to animatics and finished films. Being able to identify early in the process which creative features resonate with audiences and which do not helps brands avoid costly changes later, reduces production waste, and increases the chances that a campaign will drive sales and long-term profit gain and market share growth. Pre-testing enables more confident decision-making and better-performing ads.

What is ad testing software?

Ad testing software is a tool that helps marketers evaluate how ads perform by measuring audience response and predicting effectiveness. It enables users to test creative at different stages, compare variations, and generate insights to improve performance. Depending on the approach, this can include survey-based feedback that leverages behavioral and emotional measurement. By using ad testing software, brands can make faster, more informed creative decisions and increase the likelihood of campaign success. 

How does TV ad testing work?

TV ad testing, also known as TV commercial testing, evaluates how your television ad will perform by measuring audience response before or after it airs. First, you upload your creative and select a target audience (Nat Rep plus optional custom segment). The ad is then shown to a sample of viewers, during which they self-select how the ad made them feel. The audience responses, both how they feel and why, provide a second-by-second view of creative’s emotional resonance. The types of emotions, the intensity of the emotions and the speed and accuracy of brand recognition deliver validated and predictive metrics on long-term brand-building potential, short-term sales potential and strength of branding. This helps you understand what works, identify areas to improve, and optimize your creative for stronger performance.

Is Test Your Ad right for agencies?

Test Your Ad is widely used by agencies, including creative, branding and design agencies. It helps teams validate creative ideas and build client confidence before launch. Agencies use it to test concepts early and iterate quickly, following approaches used by McCann and Aldi, where emotional insights guide creative development and refinement. By providing clear, predictive metrics on how ads will perform, System1 reduces subjectivity in feedback, strengthens client recommendations, and improves the effectiveness of final creative across channels. Agencies not only use Test Your Ad when working with existing clients on their campaigns, but also to strengthen pitches to prospective clients by delivering validated, predictive and consumer-based metrics around creative concepts that have the greatest potential. 

What can I test with Test Your Ad?

We enable you to test throughout the creative development process, from scripts through to finished films​. Test TV/TVC, social, outdoor, audio and print ads. By testing early and often, you can optimize your ad at every step of the process to maximize commercial impact.  

How quickly can I have results?

Test Your Ad reports are delivered quickly, from 24 hours.  

What format are the reports available in?

Access our Test Your Ad platform and workspace to view your test results in a single page, available in both desktop and mobile-friendly formats. You can also export results to a format of your choice (PPT, PDF, CSV).

What metrics and insights are included in the Test Your Ad report?

Every Test Your Ad report includes our three foundational metrics: 

  • Star Rating – Predicts long-term market share growth, based on the types of emotions felt  
  • Spike Rating – Predicts short-term sales potential, based on the intensity of these emotions and how quickly the brand is identified   
  • Fluency Rating – Indicates strength of branding, based on the percentage of people who correctly attribute the ad to the brand  

We also provide the average Star, Spike and Fluency Ratings for your category.  

Our FaceTrace® showcases the second-by-second emotional response to your creative to help you understand emotional highs and lows. We also highlight the moment where happiness was highest.  

Our Pro reports contain everything above, plus Types of Happiness, Reasons for Emotion and Second-by-Second Reasons for Emotion, Key Associations, Key Metric Demographics, Distinctive Brand Assets and an assessment of the Showmanship and Salesmanship Features in your ad.

Can I get a deeper dive into my Test Your Ad report?

Yes! System1 love creativity – we want every ad to perform as well as it can. That’s why we view our Test Your Ad reports as a springboard for our Guidance which provides tailored recommendations as to how to improve the commercial potential of your ad.

Guidance draws on learnings from the behavioral and marketing sciences, as well as our latest thought leadership on TV, social, outdoor and audio creative effectiveness, to ensure you’re equipped with the best advice to maximize your chances of success.

What about out-of-home advertising – can I test my outdoor creative?

The great outdoors! We love out-of-home so much we built Test Your Ad Outdoor to offer you the opportunity to evaluate not just your outdoor posters and billboards but also your digital outdoor assets. 

In addition to Star, Spike, and Fluency, Test Your Ad Outdoor reports feature Fast Fluency. By measuring brand recognition after just 2 seconds of exposure, reports provide valuable insight into how quickly people connect your creative content with your brand. 

Test Your Ad Outdoor video reports also feature an attention time curve which visually represents the capacity to maintain viewer engagement, pinpointing crucial moments where attention is lost. 

Need additional outdoor effectiveness best practices? Download our joint whitepaper with JCDecaux, Double Take, here. We reveal how emotion and branding drive brand and commercial effects in one of the world’s most powerful media channels. 

Can I test radio, podcast or other audio ads?

Absolutely! Test Your Ad Audio determines the short- and long-term impact of audio advertisements for radio, podcast and other audio platforms.  

You can test audio ads in draft or finished formats among the general population and custom audiences. Get access to your ad’s FaceTrace®, a cumulative second-by-second emotional journey based on listeners’ responses, left and right-brain features, types of happiness, reasons for emotion and more! 

We’ve also built out audio advertising research in partnership with Radiocentre. Download the whitepaper, Listen Up!, here. It’s the first report to define right- and left-brain creative features for audio advertising, built from brand and emotional data collected from over 50,000 radio and non-radio listeners across 10 years.  

Where can I access all my live ads and those of my competitors?

Test Your Ad Competitive Edge is a subscription database containing more than 100,000 ads. Competitive Edge ranks every new ad that airs on linear TV according to consumers’ emotional responses, allowing you to explore a daily updated and market-oriented picture of your category. ​ ​ 

It’s the ultimate ad comparison tool that allows you to: 

  • Benchmark your work for effectiveness – Compare your and your competitors’ ads and see predictions of their potential long-term impact on growth, based on consumers’ emotional responses.  
  • Spot creative trends – Uncover recurring themes and messages across campaigns.  
  • Monitor competitor strategy and stay up to date on new market entrants – See what your competition are up to, from new brand-building campaigns to promotional and seasonal work. Are they maintaining consistency or regularly going in a different direction? Is a new challenger brand investing in TVCs? 
  • Be inspired by best-in-class creativity – With your category at your fingertips and our Topical Ads tab, you have access to campaigns that are relevant to you as well as rankings for the biggest marketing moments, like the Super Bowl, Christmas, Olympics, World Cup and more.  

We’ll work with you to find the scope and plan for Test Your Ad Competitive Edge that suits your business needs. Whether one category or many, you’ll be able to view and compare Test Your Ad results for every ad in your sector – and see the results for new ads from 24 hours after launch. ​ 

Can you provide insights on the category as a whole?

Of course! Our Test Your Ad Competitive Edge platform features more than 100,000 ads, giving us access to richer insights for your category. We pull these insights together in a bespoke creative review called Test Your Ad Audit. 

Test Your Ad Audit gives you vital context to shape your ad strategy. Its business intelligence reports go wider and deeper, with in-depth comparisons and analysis of selected ads in your category and recommendations to inform your next creative brief and comms strategies.​ 

Each Audit details ad performance and reveals the drivers and barriers to effectiveness in the market. We follow up with strategic recommendations, including video consultation with our Creative Guidance Expert.​ ​ 

Test Your Ad Audit distills the wealth of data into focused advice. We’ll work with you to define the scope and ensure your Audit has maximum impact in your business. 

How do I know the distinctive assets in my ad(s) are resonating with my audience?

Test Your Ad Pro reports include a page identifying which brand assets are being remembered, including characters, jingles, logos, and packaging. See what is cutting through and where brand visibility can be strengthened.

We often work with clients to help them better understand which distinctive assets are the most powerful so they can continually leverage them across their campaigns. It’s why we built our Test Your Distinctive Assets solution.  

Discover your most powerful brand assets via our Fame x Fluency matrix and, with Test Your Distinctive Assets+, uncover how people feel about these assets. Our + offering provides the following insights:  

  • Fame x Fluency: How quickly do people attribute an asset to my brand? 
  • Fame x Feeling: For people correctly attributing an asset to my brand, how happy does the asset make them? 
  • Emotional Response: How do my assets and those of my competitors make people feel and why? 

How much does Test Your Ad cost? 

Please contact us to review your testing needs – we’d love to help you Create with Confidence®!   

About System1 Marketing®

What services does System1 Marketing® provide?

System1 Marketing® provides:

  • Advertising and marketing consulting services
  • Advertising effectiveness analysis
  • Brand performance research for business purposes
  • Campaign optimization services

In addition, System1 Marketing® provides electronic transmission of marketing performance data and advertising analytics through System1’s proprietary online platform.

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