Zappi Amplify Early Idea

Summary

Every great campaign starts with a creative idea based on a powerful consumer insight. Amplify Early Idea enables you to share your campaign idea(s) with consumers and learn what is resonating, what is missing the mark, helping you check your idea has potential, choose between ideas and know what's important to exploit from within the idea as you develop executions. 
Stimuli: short paragraphs describing the idea. An image can also be included (jump to more detail here)
Framework: consistent with the full Amplify ad system's Reach, Resonance & Response metrics. While it does not have the same later effectiveness summary scoring as Amplify TV or Digital, we introduced the early stage Creative Potential summary score to make analysis easier and more compelling ( jump to section ). Users can also evaluate their creative using key measures that capture reach, resonance and response. Resonance is the particularly important bucket at this stage of development. And verbatims, which are also summarized into themes, are available from a number of open questions so users can understand what people are reacting well to and how they should move forward from idea to execution. 
Evaluation: Monadic
Sample default: 200 category consumers (with the option to set the sample size as anything between 200-800 respondents).
Norms: Yes; market-wide norms are activated when total stimuli tested reaches N=20 and your own customer norm per market activates when you've tested 20 stimuli in each market.

Contents

Getting started

Analysis topics

Key Measures

Creative Potential: a summary measure which looks holistically at the potential of the idea to be translated into a successful finished execution. It summarizes whether the idea has potential to:
  • Reach people by breaking through the clutter and bringing the brand to mind
  • Resonate to hold attention, be relevant, relatable and make people feel good
  • Create a response by making people more likely to consider and feel good about the brand
  • jump to more on the Creative Potential score here
Individual measures help establish whether an ad idea resonates emotionally, provides a strong foundation for campaign executions or presents any risk for the brand:
  • Do people like the idea?  How does it make them feel? Is it relevant to them?
  • Is the idea easy to understand?
  • Does the ad idea communicate key category drivers?
  • Is the key message clear, relevant and believable?
  • Are there any potential cultural issues or risk?
Understand if the idea can help the brand reach consumers and get an early indication of response:
  • Does it have strong connection to the brand?
  • Is the idea unique and different?
  • Does it have potential to drive brand purchase? [Early indication]
  • Does it have potential to build brand appeal? [Early indication]

Testing process

  1. Upload between 1-5 ideas per test
  2. 200 category-consumer respondents are exposed to each idea
  3. Key questionnaire components:
    • Concept Appeal
    • Emoji Response
    • Key Metrics on a 5-point scale
    • Attributes/Category Drivers
    • Key Message Clarity & Believability
    • Likes and Dislikes
    • Brand Meets Needs
    • New Information
    • Cultural Sensitivity
    • Celebrity Awareness, Appeal & Fit
  4. Results are provided in the context of the available norm (e.g. country-level, category-level)

Configuration checklist

  • Ideas: 1-5 images of short paragraphs describing the idea. Pictures can also be included alongside your written idea (jump to more detail here).
  • Ensure you add the following information about your stimuli: 
    • Idea name
    • Brand name
    • Type of idea - choose from:
      • Advertising campaign idea
      • Promotional idea
      • Charity campaign idea
      • Ad idea
      • Big idea
    • 2-15 brand/category attributes that you are looking to test that people might associate with your stimuli
      • 255 character limit, per attribute
    • 1-4 key messages for your stimuli
    • Presence of music and celebrities
    • Tags
      • Tagging your stimuli allows you to categorize your content efficiently, as well as unlocking additional analytic capabilities
        • Standardized tags - taxonomy defined by your organization
        • Custom and smart tags

Early idea stimuli preparation guidelines

An early idea stimuli may include some of the following items:

1. A short, punchy description of the idea. This could be one clear concise benefit statement.
2. A full description covering what the idea is, how it will work, and what need it satisfies.
3. An image associated with the idea. This could be as simple as a brand logo, product image, or an image that helps to convey the premise of the ad idea.
4. Bite-sized information. More engaging than traditional long-form concepts. Focus on what is important and describe in a conversational manner.
5. Relevant claims. The key elements or features of the idea that make the it believable and relevant.
6. Highlight distinctive features. What makes the idea unique and different from others already in the market?
7. A consistent style across stimuli. Consistency helps comprehension and allows for a more accurate A/B comparison of ideas.

Creative potential

What is the Creative Potential score?

The Creative Potential Score is a summary measure which looks holistically at the potential of the idea to be translated into a successful finished execution. It summarises whether the idea has potential to:
  • Reach people by breaking through the clutter and bringing the brand to mind
  • Resonate to hold attention, be relevant,  relatable  and make people feel good
  • Create a response by making people more likely to consider and feel good about the brand.

How is the Creative Potential score calculated and displayed?

The measures cover the 3 key areas of Reach, Resonance and Response in keeping with brand/sales impact scores which we use as the headline predictive metrics at the final execution stage.  
At the earlier stages of development, the Creative Potential score puts greater emphasis on Resonance as that is something that we’d want to be sure the idea delivers on even at this earlier stage of development. There is less emphasis on Reach measures as the translation of the idea into a video will have a much bigger impact on its success in standing out and grabbing attention. 
All measures we use are relevant to the stage of development and are given an equal weight, except for overall emotion as it is particularly important to check how the idea makes people feel at each stage of development. An idea which resonates and makes people feel something (particularly something positive) has greater potential to result in a powerful execution.
The score is calculated at the respondent level, aggregated across the full survey’s sample, and then displayed as a percentile versus all of the other survey level scores that contribute towards the norm’s universe that you have selected in the platform (country, category, brand).
Area of effectiveness framework Measure Weighting
Reach Branding (uniqueness of branding) 12.5%
Reach Claimed attention 12.5%
Resonance Overall emotion 25%
Resonance Relevance 12.5%
Resonance Understanding 12.5%
Response Persuasion 12.5%
Response Brand Appeal 12.5%

How should the Creative Potential score be used?

The Creative Potential score provides a good indicator of a strong vs a weaker idea and can be used to help you:
  1. Take a holistic view on the potential of an idea
  2. Compare the creative potential of ideas to decide which to progress 
  3. Learn. Having a single holistic measure of creative potential enables you to explore the characteristics of the best/worst ideas, helping you learn over time and set future ideas up for success. 
Its primary purpose is to make it easy to understand and compare ideas at a top level before diving deeper.  It should not be used in isolation as there is so much more to understand at the early stages of development. Ultimately, the single most important things we can do at this stage are: 
  1. Know whether the idea is understood as intended (because if not, the evaluation won’t be helpful) 
  2. Diagnose what is working or not so you get hints, tips, ideas on how best to bring the idea/story to life in an ad.

Why is it useful?

It’s useful because it provides a straightforward way to identify the best ideas to take forward as well as identifying areas of strength and opportunity in development before diagnosing why and what next. By doing this, it helps brand/creative teams stay ‘on track’ with creative development. By using a common language and having a common thread through the stages of development, it’s easier to move successfully forward across stages of development, understand results at each stage and learn across everything you do. Starting with a powerful idea or story means that executions that follow are considerably more likely to be successful. 

How does the Creative Potential score relate to the sales/brand impact scores?

The Creative Potential score very much aligns with the Sales & Brand Impact scores, recognising the importance of reaching people, resonating with people and creating a response. It uses many of the same measures, just adapting them and their weight to the stage of development. The stimulus is too early in its development to be able to predict in-market outcomes. Executional details will make such a huge difference to whether the ad ultimately lands or not. However, this score is directional of which ideas have most potential. Ideas which achieve a high score on average will have higher potential to be turned into successful ads with strong Brand and Sales impact scores than those which achieve a low score.

Has the Creative Potential score been validated?

It has not been validated to in-market outcomes as there’s such a big difference between the ideas and the executions that finally bring that idea to life.  But on average, an idea with a better Creative Potential score results in an ad with high sales/brand impact.  It won’t always be the case of course as execution really matters …. But there’s a relationship.

Interpreting data and taking decisions

There are a number of different comparisons and decisions people want to make when pre-testing ads.  Most brands need at least some media support, so ‘using nothing’ is often not an option.  Therefore, common decisions people need to make are:

  1. Is this ad/are any of my ads strong enough for good ROI? 
  2. Is/are the ad(s) good or great?
  3. Which execution(s)/creative route(s) is/are strongest?
  4. Is this new ad stronger than the most recent advertising I’ve invested in? Is this new ad stronger than my competitor’s ad?
  5. Which iteration of the ad is strongest? (recommended for meaningful differences between creative, not small iterations)

Within the platform there are two different analysis routes that enable you to do all of the above and there is a simple toggle available on the right hand side of the page called ‘significance testing’ so you can switch between them. You should toggle to ‘Norm’ for ‘Questions 1 and 2 (comparing to a norm). You should toggle to ‘stimuli’ to sig test between the chosen ads and answer questions 3-5.

How does the ad to ad comparison work?

The ad to ad comparison sig tests between all the stimuli on each measure. 

  • Where a measure for a specific ad is significantly above another ad, the colour will be bolded to draw attention to this strength
  • And then in place of showing the norm under the achieved score, there is a letter which denotes which column (ad) this ad is stronger than (is for example it says B, it means the ad in this column is stronger than the ad in column B). 
  • For sales/brand impact, you will still see the percentile score for each ad but we are using the absolute sales/brand impact score (from which the percentile is calculated) to inform whether one ad is significantly above another on the summary metric

To learn more about taking decisions with Amplify, read here.

Interpreting cultural sensitivity

Why measure it

It's crucial to approach the interpretation of sensitive or potentially offensive content with empathy and cultural awareness. This type of feedback is largely subjective, but by actively engaging with the feedback and striving to stay attuned to cultural nuances, you can refine your advertising to better align with the values and expectations of your audience, thus building trust and equity for your brand.

Jump to read our full best practice advice.

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