Zappi Curated Norms

Overview

Societal values and consumer trends shift rapidly. In advertising, tones or humor that resonated 3 to 5 years ago can easily feel tone-deaf today. In innovation, AI concept creation and agile testing lead to database homogeneity, making it hard to know if you’re benchmarking to the best new concepts, or a large number of ideas that didn’t hit the mark. Benchmarks that rely on historical or unmanaged data risk anchoring your decisions in an outdated or skewed market.

Zappi’s Curated Norms solve this by reflecting the actual market environment your ad or concept will launch into:

• Representative: Curation by our research team ensures the dataset isn't dominated by a single vertical, making it a robust baseline for any category.
• Robust: Carefully monitored to filter out data clutter, ensuring you are always benchmarking against high-quality, real-world standards.
• Refreshed: Updated every year to capture emerging creative themes, shifting consumer attitudes, and new cultural realities. We review and refresh our norms yearly by replacing up to 33% each year. This gives our Curated Norms statistical stability and cultural relevance. It’s a living benchmark, accurately reflecting the world as it is, not as it was.

Zappi offers Curated Norms for our Advertising and Innovation pillars.

Advertising Curated Norms

Country Norms are foundational for advertising. Brands compete for attention across the entire media landscape, meaning an ad that outperforms its category can still fail to be noticed or remembered in the broader market.

How are the ads chosen?

For each Country Curated Norm, Zappi includes the major categories of advertising on TV. We include better than average ads from the bigger brands within those categories so you can set the bar high. We use recent ads to reflect the ad environment today, and avoid using ads tied to specific cultural moments, like annual sports championships.

Other norms are based on what our customers happened to test. Curated Norms allow us to remove bias from those organic norms, by deliberately creating a norm that is representative of 25 categories, weighted evenly.

Our methodology is designed to create a powerful, authoritative norm by testing ads from the market-leading brands across the most significant advertising categories. 

• Category-led approach - We select ads in the top key categories, chosen because of their share of the advertising landscape, to provide a broadly relevant benchmark.
• Market Leader Selection - We select ads from market-leading brands within each category, identified through market share data. Market share is a stable and widely available metric in all markets, which is essential for building consistent and authoritative norms worldwide.

Why not select ads based on ad spend (GRPs)?

We intentionally designed the curated norms to differ from standard ad spend benchmarks.

A GRP led approach would leave us with a skewed norm dominated by a few industries such as CPG and automotive ads.

Market share is a stable and widely available metric in all markets, which is essential for building consistent and authoritative norms worldwide.

Advertising Curated Norms Availability

Innovation Curated Norms 

Activate It Curated Norms are carefully selected category-relevant sets of either existing or newly tested concepts to ensure the norm truly reflects the diversity of the category it represents. We do this by carefully balancing the types of brands, categories, and innovations included to help you learn the commercial potential of your concept in the category.

What’s in the Activate It Curated Norm?

Selected use of customer-tested and Zappi tested stims from 28 core categories plus up to 6 additional categories depending on the market.

Innovation Curated Norms Availability

Analyzing results using a curated norm

In the charts analysis, you can compare your results to the available curated norm. You can see what norm you are using by looking at the header of the chart.

To switch to the curated norm, select the Norms tab and find the Curated norm option.

Using Profiles with Curated Norms

You can narrow down your analysis by age and gender. Curated norms supports global profiles only.

Want to learn more about Zappi? Let's talk!