How can you identify ads that will have an impact?

A comprehensive analysis by the IPA of 1400 of the most successful advertising campaigns over the last three decades found that ads with purely emotional content performed about twice as well (in terms of driving profit gains) as those with only rational content.

Not so long ago some of the most widely used ad testing systems focused on rational measures of an ad’s potential impact – and argued very vocally that ad recall was the key metric over any measurement of emotional persuasion.

We weren’t one of those voices advocating ad recall as the measure of all measures. In fact, we argued the opposite. Through our work with Dr Robert Heath (author of The Hidden Power of Advertising and a pioneer in this area) over 10 years ago we helped develop an easy to use but very powerful measurement of the emotive and creative power of an ad.

Our approach has been tried and tested in the UK, US, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Poland and beyond. It can be used to test ads in any media and works with both finished film and early edits. You can use it to test a single ad or carry out what we call a ‘landscape study’ and look at a raft of ads from recent years from multiple brands to identify ways to stand-out in a category. It delivers results in a matter of days and helps you create ads that will have a lasting impact.