Zappi Amplify is 60% more predictive than other ad research approaches

If you could build your ideal advertising development program from the ground up, what would it look like? 

Three years ago we asked that question to a diverse group of insights professionals, marketers and agency professionals.

They told us their ideal system would be one that: 

• Let them access consumer insights at every step of the creative process.

• Helped them guide and amplify creative development, including inspiring, iterating and optimizing creative.

• Allowed them to learn from their data and improve their advertising over time. 

• Related to real-world outcomes, delivering a superior prediction of effectiveness. 

Starting with that end in mind, the Zappi team worked tirelessly to create something that met their needs, and the Zappi Amplify ad system is what we built. 

When you go into a development process with the end in mind, you can start fresh and explore all possibilities. There is no historical data to protect! 

To find the best approach, we experimented with forced exposure, in-context exposure, and multiple approaches to capture system 1 response. We tested different questions and wording to find what delivered stable, discriminating results. And we played around with different scales for the measures. In total we did over 15,000 surveys to generate enough data to find what works best.

We found that combining multiple research approaches gives the best of all worlds (learn more about the importance of combining research approaches from Dan White’s research). 

Those multiple approaches include: 

• In-context exposure: Reflecting how people consume media today. Measures ad engagement and breakthrough with behavioral ad skipping, brand recall and pre-post purchase uplift (similar to IPSOS ASI).

• System 1 emoji’s: The world’s fastest growing language! Measures overall emotion and second-by-second emotional response (similar to System 1 Test Your Ad).

• Forced exposure: Measuring appeal, relevance, distinctiveness, persuasion, understanding, distinctive brand assets and social risk (similar to Kantar Link).

Zappi Amplify also incorporates principles from Bryon Sharp’s research-based book, How Brands Grow. 

In his book, Sharp describes the importance of targeting a broad audience. Targeting only your existing buyers so they continue to buy isn’t enough. Growth comes from encouraging those infrequent buyers to choose your brand and/or choose it more often. That’s why it's important to understand how your ad is received by everyone who could buy your brand — not just your brand loyalists.

That’s what Zappi Amplify delivers, with a sample of 400 consumers.

With the best thinking in advertising research baked into it, the Amplify method is proven to relate strongly to sales outcomes across countries and categories.

Zappi Amplify predicts not only the short term sales impact of the advertising with roughly 50% greater accuracy than our legacy pre-testing approach, it also predicts the ad’s longer term brand-building potential.

Stephan Gans, Chief Consumer Insights and Analytics Officer PepsiCo

While legacy solutions are able to explain around 50% of the relationship between their sales prediction and market mix modelling, 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. 

Importantly, Amplify’s results relate to sales. Where the Amplify Creative Effectiveness score predicts a strong ad, it results in strong sales ROI in 84% of cases — and never results in poor sales effects.

Where the Amplify Creative Effectiveness score identifies a poor ad, it results in a poor sales effects in 79% of occasions — and never results in strong sales effects.

All this means that you can act in confidence with data from Zappi Amplify.

We tested Zappi Amplify against our existing approaches and found it was much better at predicting in-market results from market mix modelling. Amplify has made the teams more confident in acting on results

Christian Niederauer, Global Head of Insights at Colgate-Palmolive

Finally, Zappi Amplify is an end-to-end research solution that allows you to research across the creative development process from storyboard, boardomatic, animatic, to final assets across TV and digital. This allows you to get insights early and often throughout your creative development process — including at the critical early stages where you have a bigger opportunity to affect the outcome and the direction of the creative. 

And with all your data connected in one platform, you can systematically and quickly connect with your consumers as you iterate to optimize your campaigns and learn.

Within the Zappi platform, there is no “single use” data — it is always growing more and more valuable over time and it’s always available for you to access. You can see how your advertising is improving year on year. And you can look at the characteristics driving success of your ads versus what’s holding them back.

The platform not only stores and organizes data in a way that enables learning, it also provides automated analytics to identify patterns and relationships quickly and easily to create an ongoing cycle of improvement.

The result: Agile development that saves time and resources while helping you create more effective campaigns and better advertising.

We’re proud of Zappi Amplify, a solution we co-created with our customers to solve their exact needs in an advertising research solution. 

If you’re interested in learning more about how Zappi Amplify can help you improve your creative effectiveness, reach out to chat.