Zappi Amplify: A better, consumer-centric ad development system

Every brand wants to create great ads. In a highly competitive world, great advertising plays a key role in ensuring your brand is more likely to come to mind and be chosen (versus others) at key moments or against key needs now and into the future, ultimately driving equity and sales.

But what if you could make those great ads even greater over time? What if you could discover the key elements that made your ad great, so you can do it again and again? Or improve it even further for your next campaign? Zappi is the only agile market research platform that creates a learning loop that allows you to do just that, making you smarter the more you use it.

By allowing you to research early and often, optimize faster, validate better and leverage systematic learnings, Zappi Amplify creates a game-changing system that helps you create more effective advertising. 

Here’s a breakdown of the four key things our system allows you to do and why they’re so important:

There’s a lot of benefits to starting early. This is especially true in market research — the earlier you check in with consumers, the better.

Unfortunately, a lot of brands still use research at the end of their creative development process and are losing out on a lot of opportunities by not realizing there's a better way.

If you bring in insights too late, there won’t be enough time for consumer feedback to influence the direction of your creative. And what happens if you find out too late that the ad simply doesn’t work for consumers?

"I think there's a perception that research takes too long and is super expensive. And it's not true, especially if we compare the cost of producing an ad that ends up being quite subpar and the media spend on top of that. So the cost of an extra round of research, it’s nothing."

- Bianca Johnston, Integrated Campaigns Lead at Shopify

That’s why the greatest opportunity lies at the start of the process, where you can use consumer insights to influence the direction of your creative before too much money, time and effort are wasted — which steadily drops the further along you are in the process.

There’s no question that bringing insights in early and often is the right decision for advertising, which is why this sits at the top of our flywheel. 

Successful advertising hinges on a deep understanding of consumers. After all, to truly resonate with people, you have to be able to step into their shoes.  In the past, market research has been used to grade work, rather than fuel it. But fortunately, this perception can and is changing. 

“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.”

- Christian Niederauer, Global Head of Insights, Colgate-Palmolive

The Zappi Amplify Ad System is designed to give you the diagnostics you need to help you make the ad better, not just give it a grade.

Almost 50% of our survey is focused on diagnosing why people are reacting the way they are to each ad and getting a granular understanding of the why behind their reactions. This includes: 

• Moment-by-moment emotional reactions so you can spot the spikes and dips and see what moments are landing and which aren’t

• Open responses automatically grouped by theme for quick understanding

• All the individual responses so you can get a closer understanding of consumers’ voices and reactions

• Solutions throughout ad development, not just at the end, to help you iterate and improve

“Zappi Amplify provides a much more robust suite of diagnostics to understand what's working in the ad and why, with metrics that are hard to find in other methodologies.” 

- Ben Jordan, Assoc. Dir; Human Insights Center of Excellence at The Clorox Company

Validating your ideas is a key part of market research. If you aren’t able to confirm whether your audience is responding well to your ideas, how do you know which ones to move forward with?

And a major part of validation relies on how predictive your insights are. That’s what Zappi Amplify delivers, with a sample of 400 consumers.

“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.”

- Christian Niederauer, Global Head of Insights at Colgate-Palmolive

While legacy solutions are able to explain around 50% of the relationship between their sales prediction and market mix modeling, Amplify is able to explain 80%. With this level of predictiveness in Amplify, you are reducing the risk of investing media budget behind ads which don’t give a good ROI — which means that Zappi Amplify will help you to make decisions with confidence.

Perhaps the most impactful part of our flywheel, the Zappi Amplify Ad System allows you to implement systematic learnings — so you can get smarter over time.

With Zappi Amplify, you don’t just optimize and improve one single ad. You learn what works and what doesn’t so you can improve your advertising over time.

A great example of this is the work we’ve done with Stephan Gans, SVP, Chief Insights and Analytics Officer at PepsiCo, who had a vision to turn insights into a competitive advantage by digitizing the function to allow teams to move faster and work iteratively and get smarter over time.

“We've created much tougher benchmarks for ourselves. We don't want our consumers to just tolerate our brand's messaging. We want them to enjoy it. To be motivated by it, and we want those ads to really drive brand value and short term sales.”

- Stephan Gans, SVP, Chief Insights and Analytics Officer at PepsiCo

Working together, PepsiCo and Zappi developed the Zappi Amplify Ad System to give robust consumer feedback at all stages of creative development. As a result of implementing the new system, PepsiCo improved the creative effectiveness of their ads by 30%.

"In short, every time we test an ad, the whole of PepsiCo gets smarter."

- Stephan Gans, SVP, Chief Insights and Analytics Officer at PepsiCo

The benefits of having a system that allows you to gather learnings from your ads almost goes without saying. But if you’d like to learn more about this process and how it’s helped a global brand like PepsiCo, check out our article below. 

By providing the ability to research early and often, optimize faster, validate better and leverage systematic learnings, our Amplify Ad System isn’t just a better pre-test — it’s a truly consumer centric ad development system that gives you a deeper understanding of people and the power to make incredible advertising.

We’re so proud of the Zappi Amplify Ad System and what it allows brands to achieve. If you’d like to talk about how it can help you create better ads, reach out to us below.