The next revolution in advertising is here

We know the importance of creating effective ad campaigns that can boost sales and boost brand equity. But with a cost-of-living crisis, greater demands for ROI and consumer expectations for brands at an all-time high, marketers are balancing on a highwire. All at once, they need to stand out, stand up, and build their brand in the long-term while meeting short-term demands for sales. 

However, amidst these challenges, a revolution is happening in advertising that is changing the game: the ability to bring consumers into every step of the creative process to fuel each decision, stay on track and deliver highly effective creative.

Once ads are live in market, it’s easy to understand how consumers engage with them. They can track social media engagement, purchase lift, and CRM data to optimize their distribution and learn which channels land the best results. But the problem is, by the point ads are live in-market, the opportunity to truly unlock effectiveness has already passed. 

According to Nielsen, 47% of sales impact in advertising comes from effective content. And once ads are live – or even nearly close to live – the opportunity to optimize the content to be more effective diminishes. What creators need is consumer insights early and often within their creative development process while the opportunity is large. And they need this data to be connected, just like their engagement and CRM data, so they can learn from the performance of past campaigns to improve new ones.

Which is why I’m excited to announce that, today, Zappi released Amplify 2.0, a consumer-centric ad development system that enables marketers to bring consumer feedback into every stage of the creation process – and build high-ROI campaigns over and over. 

Amplify is an end-to-end ad development system that gives marketers the ability to inspire, optimize and validate their advertising, before it goes to market. Co-developed by some of the world’s leading consumer brands (like PepsiCo, McDonald’s and Reckitt, among others), Amplify has been proven to improve creative effectiveness by over 30%. 

Don’t just take my word for it. Stephan Gans, Chief Insights and Analytics Officer at PepsiCo says “Since partnering with Zappi, we have seen our creative effectiveness improve by almost a third across all our advertising. This equates to PepsiCo gaining hundreds of millions in value from greater creative effectiveness this year!”

But it’s a simple idea, really. By bringing consumer feedback into the creative process early, marketers can quickly validate their best ideas, optimize their messaging and creative to appeal to what consumers want, and inspire new concepts so they can go to market knowing – not hoping – that their creative will be a smash-hit with their core audience.  

Amplify layers the best thinking in advertising research to create the most predictive and accurate advertising development suite available. The system utilizes a unique, three-part methodology across in-context exposure, System 1 emojis, and System 2 forced exposure to build a holistic view of ad performance. The Amplify framework, called the “Three R’s” includes: 

• Reach: Measuring brand recall, creative and brand distinctiveness, and viewer retention to understand an ad’s potential to stand out in the context of today’s crowded media environment. 

• Resonance: Tracking second-by-second emotional response while consumers view the creative, so you can understand when viewers are most engaged or where you can optimize the story to be relevant and make consumers feel good. 

• Response: Observing how your creative impacts brand appeal and purchase uplift to spark a strong consumer response and brand consideration. 

Consumer feedback across this framework is compared against country, category and brand-specific benchmarks to determine creative effectiveness. Amplify has been used to develop and optimize over 6,000 ads, providing a robust comparative benchmark to understand what works, what doesn’t and gain tangible ways to improve creative ideas.

The result is an effectiveness score that is 60% more predictive of sales impact than legacy solutions - along with rich consumer feedback to help marketers optimize creative so it drives long-term value for the brand. 

Christian Niederauer, Global Head of Insights, Colgate-Palmolive says: “We tested Zappi Amplify against our existing approaches and found it was much better at predicting in-market results from market mix modeling. Amplify has made the teams more confident in acting on results. And people who used to push back against pre testing are now asking to use Amplify to iterate and optimize early and often rather than just validating as a final check. They can see how they get findings, steer the direction and see better in market success.”

Amplify provides marketers not only with the ability to confidently bring new advertising to market by validating every step of the creative process – from storyboards through post-production – but the ability to learn and get better over time. It’s not just another testing solution; it’s a marketer’s shortcut to understanding what consumers need, and the ability to follow those needs as they change moment-to-moment. 

Amplify learns from every new data point. Consumer feedback on every new advertisement developed on Amplify feeds into a standard of creative performance that changes with each new campaign. So marketers can quickly understand how new campaigns measure up to past ones, and learn about themes, areas of strength, and opportunities to make future advertising better. This results in creative teams being able to be more agile, more decisive, and more confident with every new project. 

Amplify enables marketers to create ads people love – both today and in the future. Which is why Fernando Kahane, Sr. Marketing Director at PepsiCo Snacks, utilizes the system for all of his campaigns. “Now we see how we can make advertising better. It’s very important to shift the mindset. I tell my agencies it’s not about go/no go anymore. It’s about understanding what’s working, how to make it better, understand what is not working as well and refine. So this idea of moving from research as a way to validate to a way to learn, improve, refine is a big change we are working on as a journey.”

The next revolution in advertising is here, and I cannot be more excited about what the future looks like. 

Learn more about Amplify 2.0 or let's talk about how it can help you create ads people love.