The lead the audience pictured
A concept's lead character may be a single line in a script. Viewers describe who they pictured in the role, and grouped descriptions give the casting brief a sense of the person the audience expects to see.
Use caseTest an ad concept
Ad testing platform
Hear the campaign's audience react to scripts, storyboards and animatics while the work is still rough, and learn which idea they understand, which they credit to your brand and where they say they lost interest.
Scripts and animatics, judged before the shoot
Production is where an ad's cost sits, so the ideas are judged while they are still words and drawings, and a weak one can be dropped for little.
Rough work at an even finish
Each concept goes in at the same stage, all scripts, all storyboards or all animatics, with similar length and polish, so the audience judges the ideas and not whichever one got the better illustrator.
The viewers the campaign is for
Pulse recruits the people the campaign is meant to reach, such as lapsed category buyers in their late twenties and thirties who stream more than they watch broadcast, and screens each one before fieldwork.
Reactions as each animatic plays
Viewers talk through each animatic as they watch it on screen, and video insights capture the emotion on their faces, puzzlement or amusement, which people tend to smooth over when asked about the ad afterward.
The world's most ambitious teams research with Pulse.
GrowwWhich idea goes into production
An idea earns production money by coming through clearly, belonging to your brand and holding attention, and viewers say in their own words which of the three each idea managed.
Did the idea come through
Viewers retell each concept as they understood it, and the team sees whether the intended message survived or was lost in a joke, a visual or a line that pulled attention elsewhere.
Credited to your brand
People say which brand they think each concept is for. An idea remembered and credited to a competitor would be paid for by you and work for them, so misattribution counts heavily against it.
The idea worth producing
With understanding, branding and engagement set side by side, the team chooses one idea to produce, sends a second back for rework and drops the rest, with viewers' own words on where each idea lost them.
How Pulse does it
Match the concepts' finish
Recruit the campaign's viewers
Hear where interest fades
Pick the idea to produce
A sample study: Ad test
Understand how people notice, interpret, remember and respond to an advertisement.
- What's your immediate reaction to the advertisement you just saw?
- What stood out to you first?
- What do you remember most clearly from the advertisement?
The method behind it
Ad concept testing evaluates advertising ideas before they are produced, using scripts, storyboards, animatics or rough cuts shown to the target audience. Its job is to give direction: whether the idea is understood, whether it engages, whether it is linked to the brand and whether the key message comes through, while the concept is still easy to change. Measures include comprehension, likability, relevance, brand linkage and early indications of persuasion, compared across concepts or against past ideas. Qualitative questions reveal what people took from each concept and where it lost them. Because rough formats can be harder to judge, good practice keeps the finish of competing concepts equal and focuses on the idea over production quality. Concept tests are usually followed by testing of the finished ad before media spend, which confirms that the idea survived production.
Related
Ad ideas picked before the shoot is booked
An idea that could run for years
A strong idea should carry many executions. Each viewer is asked what the brand might do next with each idea, so the team sees which concepts could grow into a campaign and which are one-off jokes.
Portrayed community, consulted
A script that works for the wider audience can land badly with the community it depicts. Recruiting viewers from that community lets the team hear how the portrayal reads before a director is hired.