In this episode
Andrew Tindall, Chief Growth Officer, Advertising at System1, walks through The Creative Dividend, System1’s research with the Effie Awards across more than 1,000 campaigns, and what it says about where advertising profit actually comes from. Creativity alone explains about a quarter of business outcomes; creativity combined with media choices explains about 60%, while targeting sits far below both. Greg Kihlström and Andrew cover what “emotional” means when it is measured rather than asserted, the cost of ads that leave people feeling nothing, how to use consumer data as a creative partner instead of a gate at the end of the process, two cases (The Woodsman whiskey and apartments.com) where creative choices produced measurable growth, the leading indicators a CMO can show a CFO before market share moves, and what System1’s testing of real audiences says about AI-made advertising.
Key takeaways
- Creativity is the biggest controllable driver of advertising profitability. Paul Dyson’s research has found this repeatedly; targeting and media choices sit far below it, even though marketers spent the past decade focused on targeting.
- Creativity plus media explains about 60% of business outcomes from advertising campaigns in the Effie and System1 data behind The Creative Dividend. Creativity alone explains about a quarter. With that evidence, advertising should not be treated as a cost or a risk.
- There is a cost of dull. Ads that leave people feeling nothing require more media spend to produce the same effect as ads that make people feel something.
- Emotion is measurable and specific. System1 has measured emotional response to advertising for 25 years using Paul Ekman’s framework. “Emotional” does not mean purpose advertising or cheesy Christmas ads; what matters most is leaving people feeling positive about the brand.
- Clicks and engagement do not predict long-term brand growth. In the Creator Effectiveness Playbook research with TikTok and WPP, there is no campaign-level relationship between clicks, engagement and long-term brand growth.
- Bring the consumer into creative decisions as early as possible, with hypotheses. Testing should answer specific questions (what positivity, which memories, what kind of entertainment), not act as a red light or green light at the end.
- apartments.com moved from 27th to second in its market over ten years with one brand character used consistently. Media spend stopped increasing in year five; revenue and awareness kept rising through year ten.
- Creativity is a leading metric; market share is a lagging one. Awareness, equity, distinctiveness and differentiation move before market share does. The question to ask: is the campaign more distinctive and more emotional than the category average?
- Consumers don’t care how an ad is made. They struggle to detect AI involvement even when prompted and are largely indifferent when they know. About half of all linear TV ads were one-star long before AI existed. Gen Z shows a slightly more negative response when AI is obvious.
- If you can’t outspend competitors on media, the only lever left is being more creative.
Chapters
- 00:54 — Why creative is cheaper than ever but still hard to defend in a budget conversation
- 03:09 — Andrew’s background: medicine, FMCG, and System1’s ad creative testing business
- 04:24 — The Creative Dividend: what 1,000+ Effie campaigns contradict about targeting
- 06:30 — Defining emotion properly, and the cost of dull
- 12:19 — Does data-driven creative lose its edge? Hypotheses, not red-light/green-light testing
- 16:54 — Two cases: The Woodsman whiskey’s five-star debut and apartments.com’s ten-year character
- 23:34 — Making the case to the CFO with leading metrics
- 26:22 — AI as a tool vs. AI as the author: what real audiences notice
- 30:14 — One year from now: System1 Test Your Ad Screen
- 32:14 — How Andrew stays agile
Why creativity is still undervalued even with the data
Marketers spent much of the past decade treating media and targeting choices as the path to profitability. System1 combined Paul Dyson’s work on the drivers of advertising profit with a survey of roughly 400 global marketers about what they believed those drivers were, then layered on Effie Awards outcome data and System1’s own creative testing. The result repeats what Dyson has found before: creativity is the largest driver of profit that advertisers can control, and when System1’s measures of how emotional, distinctive, entertaining and consistent a campaign is are combined with media choices, they explain the large majority of reported campaign outcomes. Andrew’s conclusion is that once you have that data, advertising stops looking like a cost or a risk, because getting creativity right alongside media choices grows brands reliably.
What “emotional” actually means, and the cost of dull
Andrew agrees the word gets thrown around too loosely, and argues that part of advertising’s effectiveness decline over the past one or two decades comes from never defining it. System1 measures emotional response using Paul Ekman’s framework and has done so for 25 years. Two findings matter most. First, there is a cost of dull: ads that leave people feeling nothing show up in the research as needing more media spend to produce the same effect. Second, emotion is not the same thing as purpose advertising or sentimental holiday spots. Making people feel anything shifts short-term behaviour; leaving them feeling positive about the brand is what builds it.
Data as a creative partner, not a gate at the end
Andrew’s answer to the “focus-grouped to death” worry is that the problem is usually the wrong metrics, not testing itself. Work with TikTok and WPP found no campaign-level relationship between clicks or engagement and long-term brand growth, yet those are the numbers marketers have optimised toward. Some of the world’s best creative agencies use creative testing, and the practice that works is bringing the consumer into the process as early as possible with explicit hypotheses: what kind of positivity should this ad create, which memories should it build consistent with the long-term strategy, what kind of entertainment should people recognise. That makes testing useful for the decisions that cost money, from which assets deserve budget and whether an asset belongs in a given channel to whether the soundtrack is right or too much has been crammed in.
Two cases: The Woodsman and apartments.com
System1’s Competitive Edge platform tests every UK and US linear TV ad as it airs, which gives Andrew a database of around 100,000 ads to scan. One recent find was The Woodsman, a challenger whiskey brand in a shrinking category whose first TV ad scored five stars on emotional response, something challenger brands rarely achieve out of the gate. It then grew market share and penetration sharply over the following weeks by being entertaining in a dull category. The second case, from the Effie data, is apartments.com, which hired Jeff Goldblum and kept him as a brand character for ten years without changing the brand’s look and feel. The campaign got more emotional and funnier over time, because consistency lets a brand get away with more humour. The brand moved from 27th to second in its market, and when it stopped increasing media spend in year five, revenue and awareness kept rising in years six through ten.
Making the case to the CFO with leading metrics
Creativity is a leading metric and market share is the lagging outcome. Since creativity alone explains about a quarter of business outcomes and creativity plus media about 60%, Andrew argues creative measurement works as a bellwether: a marketer does not have to wait ten years, or even six months, to know whether a campaign is likely to work. Emotional campaigns build memories that compound into behaviour change, so the brand effects described in The Creative Dividend (awareness, equity, distinctiveness, differentiation) should be moving before market share does. The practical test is whether the campaign is more distinctive and more emotional than the category average.
AI slop, human slop, and what audiences notice
Andrew points out that about half of all UK and US linear TV ads score one star on System1’s testing, so humans have been producing average work for a century without AI’s help. His own research, now about a year old, found consumers struggle to tell when AI has been involved, even when prompted, and are largely indifferent when they do know. Coca-Cola rerunning its AI Christmas ad is his evidence that it worked commercially. The exception is Gen Z, which responds slightly more negatively when AI involvement is obvious. AI works best as a production tool applied to an emotional campaign that has already built memory and equity; he has not seen evidence it is good at generating campaign ideas.
Where this goes next: Test Your Ad Screen
System1 has launched Test Your Ad Screen, its first AI predictive tool, trained on the 100,000-ad dataset to predict star rating, spike rating (short-term behaviour change) and distinctiveness. It matches human testing nine times out of ten and withholds a result when it is not confident, returning bands rather than precise scores. It is currently reliable only for long-form TV advertising, because that is the data it was trained on; Andrew expects the use cases to widen within a year.
FAQ
How much of advertising’s business impact does creativity explain? In System1’s research with the Effie Awards (The Creative Dividend), creativity alone explains about a quarter of business outcomes from advertising campaigns, and creativity combined with media choices explains about 60%.
What is the “cost of dull” in advertising? Ads that leave people feeling nothing require more media spend to produce the same brand effect as ads that provoke an emotional response, so dull creative shows up as a lower return on the media budget.
Do clicks and engagement predict long-term brand growth? No. System1’s Creator Effectiveness Playbook research with TikTok and WPP found no campaign-level relationship between clicks, engagement and long-term brand growth.
How should creative testing be used so it doesn’t dull the work? Bring consumers into the process as early as possible and test against explicit hypotheses about which emotions, memories and types of entertainment the ad should create, rather than using testing as a pass/fail gate at the end.
Which leading metrics show a campaign is working before market share moves? Whether the campaign is more distinctive and more emotional than the category average, plus movement in brand measures such as awareness, equity, distinctiveness and differentiation.
Do audiences respond differently to AI-made ads? System1’s research found consumers struggle to detect AI involvement even when prompted and largely don’t care when they know, though Gen Z responds slightly more negatively when AI use is obvious.
About Andrew Tindall
Andrew Tindall is a leading voice in modern marketing effectiveness, championing a practical, creativity‑driven approach that reconnects media and creative. As Chief Growth Officer, Advertising at System1, he oversees thought leadership and major agency relationships, producing influential research on how emotion and creativity fuel advertising effectiveness across TV, audio, digital, and OOH. Drawing on a decade in FMCG at Diageo and Bacardi, he brings real‑world pragmatism to his analysis and frequently shares insights from System1’s extensive UK and US TV ad database to comment on current advertising. Andrew regularly speaks at industry events such as MadFest and the Festival of Marketing, and he advocates for “effectiveness for all” through his weekly column in The Drum and his fast‑growing presence on LinkedIn.
Andrew Tindall on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-tindall/
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Transcript
[00:00:54] Greg Kihlström: Hi, I’m Greg Kihlström, host of The Agile Brand, and here’s a question for you. Creative has never been cheaper or faster to produce than it is right now, so why is it still so hard to say with any confidence which of it is actually worth the money? Agility isn’t just moving faster. It’s knowing which creative decisions compound, which ones evaporate, and having the evidence to defend the difference when the budget conversation starts. Today, we’re going to talk about creative effectiveness and how to prove its value. Specifically, we’re going to explore what the evidence actually shows about emotional response and long-term brand growth and what the industry still gets wrong about it, how large-scale creative data changes the way work gets developed, not just the way it gets judged after the fact, and how to make the financial case for creative quality in an organization that’s measuring everything else in quarters. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Andrew Tindall, Chief Growth Officer Advertising at System1. Andrew, welcome to the show.
[00:03:07] Andrew Tindall: Thank you for having me, Greg.
[00:03:09] Greg Kihlström: Looking forward to diving in here. Before we do, though, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at System1?
[00:03:16] Andrew Tindall: Of course. So I’m a Chief Growth Officer. I originally studied medicine but then fell into marketing and worked for some very large FMCG, well, CPG businesses for quite a while. And then I joined System1, and I’ve been leading thought leadership and partnerships and growth for our ad creative testing business, which really combines consumer behavior, the System1 buying pathway, how people feel, and advertising effectiveness, working with people like the Effies and the IPA in the US and UK to really understand what ads do in market, but also media owners like TikTok to really understand how we can make best practice for channels that actually grows brands over time. And I also write a lot of our research and publications, including our new recent book with the Effie Awards called The Creative Dividend. It’s a very snappy intro there, Effie. [laughs]
[00:04:24] Greg Kihlström: No, that’s great. And let’s talk a little bit about that, The Creative Dividend, the research with Effie. My understanding is it’s a pretty massive undertaking, analyzing over 1,000 campaigns. So out of everything in that data set, what does the evidence most directly contradict about what a lot of enterprise marketers still believe works?
[00:04:47] Andrew Tindall: Oh, it’s a great question. So over the past decade, marketers in general have been pretty obsessed with the idea of targeting and being able to use media choices to increase profitability. Whereas we actually combined this great research from Paul Dyson looking at the drivers of profitability versus what marketers believe. So we interviewed, I think, 400 global marketers to understand what they believed is a driver of profitability. Paul Dyson’s found time and time again that creativity is the biggest driver of profitability for advertising campaigns that we actually can control, whereas targeting and media choices sit far, far below that. So what we’ve actually found in this research with the Effie Awards data and System1’s consumer creative testing data is that we’ve seen it again that actually when you combine data from System1, so how emotional and how distinctive and how entertaining advertising is and how consistent it is across campaigns, with media choices, you can actually explain the large majority of campaign outcomes as reported in the Effie Awards data. So creativity is still undervalued. And it’s a shame because when you’ve actually got the data, it means that advertising campaigns shouldn’t really be considered a cost or a risk. Because if you get creativity right alongside your media choices, advertising reliably grows brands.
[00:06:30] Greg Kihlström: Well, and I think, and we talk about it a lot on this show as well, there’s such a focus on being data-driven, and it feels counterintuitive that such data-driven marketing would also be emotional and creative, and yet the research points to it doesn’t have to be one or the other, right? And I think the other thing is the word emotional is used so broadly that it kind of loses meaning in some cases. So when your data shows things like this, where do marketers often misread some of those signals?
[00:07:17] Andrew Tindall: Oh, that’s a great question. It’s actually one of my favorite questions. So I agree with you. I think the word emotional gets thrown around too much, and it’s too broad, and I think part of the issue we’ve had in advertising and marketing over the past one or two decades now would be, there’s great evidence that’s showing where we’re getting less effective, and I think one of those reasons is that we’ve not bothered to define these things. What is creativity from a great brand building point of view, and what does emotion mean? So we’re quite specific at System1 with how we actually define and measure emotion. So one, it’s not obtuse. You can measure the emotional response to advertising. We’ve been doing it for 25 years. We use the frameworks developed by Dr. Paul Ekman, which is some very famous research into emotion. And what I would be specific about is that, first of all, there’s a cost of dull. So if you’re not engaging anyone with any type of emotion, if you’re letting them feel nothing, which we measure in our ad testing at System1, there’s a massive cost of that. We’ve seen it in various bits of research we’ve done, including this new one where there’s actually a much higher ROI if you leave people feeling nothing in your advertising, which means that you have to spend more on media. So you have to spend more on campaigns that are interesting to create the same effects. And then the other way that I think it’s important to think about emotion is that often people think it’s about purpose advertising, or those corny, cheesy Christmas ads. That’s not the case. There’s a whole broad spectrum of different types of emotion that people feel. So getting them to feel something like that is great. It changes short-term behavior, getting anyone to feel anything. But what’s better is leaving people feeling positive about your brand. Now, people often can feel that’s a bit of a cliche, that why shouldn’t we be leaving people feeling negative, like a lot of charity advertising does? And why should it just be this glee and happiness? But we’ve seen it in our research time and again, and we’ve seen it in this Effie research now that, sure, negative emotions…
[00:12:19] Greg Kihlström: Let’s talk about this from the creative development aspect as well. Because we talked a little bit about the tension in what might seem intuitive from a data perspective. But the way that things get created is often informed by data, and yet it’s like movies that are focus grouped too much tend to lose their edge. And so I would imagine it becomes the same with marketing and advertising. So where do you draw that line? We have more data than we’ve ever had, and that data is valuable, but how do you think through drawing the line of, if creative is so driven by data, it loses its edge or its emotional impact altogether?
[00:13:17] Andrew Tindall: Yeah. I think it’s another really good question, and I think it’s a big misconception, this, actually. So I’ll give you an example of where this really does happen, which is where marketers have got quite obsessed with short-term objectives and short-term metrics, including clicks and engagement. So we do a lot of work with TikTok and WPP at System1, and we’ve just released new research called the Creator Effectiveness Playbook. And we’ve shown with TikTok data and System1’s data, looking at long-term brand growth and engagement on the platform, there isn’t really a relationship when you look at a campaign level between clicks, engagements, and long-term brand growth. Yet marketers have been fixated on this kind of stuff, and it can lead them in the wrong direction. So it is a real thing where we need to focus on metrics that matter to start off with. Secondly, one of my first jobs when I started at System1 was helping manage and grow our wonderful creative agency network where we work with all these creative agencies. Some of the best creative agencies in the world rely on and use creative testing. It’s about using it in a way that fosters creativity, which I think System1 has been doing, again, ever since we started, where it’s bringing the consumer into the creative decision process. I think as early as possible is best practice because the more consumer data you can have to involve in your insight, involve in those creative choices, when you’re putting a consumer at the heart of the creative decision, that’s best, rather than using it as a red light, green light at the end of the process. And approaching research with hypotheses. I would never recommend testing an ad without having questions you want answered. Research is to answer hypotheses. So what kind of positivity are you looking to make people feel? What memories is this ad needing to build that are consistent with our long-term strategy? What type of entertainment are we wanting to see from the consumers recognizing? All stuff you can answer with our testing. And then what that allows you to do is just make genuinely more decisions that are backed with data, so that you can actually confidently make choices. So obviously the best example, I think, is which ads deserve budget. There’s a lot of money right now just being sprayed on assets, and we don’t have enough creative data to really understand how we can make the most out of that media budget. Or does this asset not belong in the media channel? Should we be putting a focus on others? Or, if you’re lucky enough to then start including testing like this in the creative process early on, is it the right soundtrack, or is that the right scene to cut? Are we trying to cram too much stuff in? So if you’re using it as a partner to your creative process, bringing the consumer into your decision-making with data, data that’s been proven to drive brand and business effects, like we’ve seen in our Effie research, I think that’s what responsible modern effectiveness looks like with marketers.
[00:16:54] Greg Kihlström: And so System1 has quite a few great examples of this. I wonder if you could maybe walk us through a case and highlight how some of those specific creative choices informed by research led to some measurable business impact.
[00:17:12] Andrew Tindall: Yeah, for sure. I’ll give two examples. One not from the Effie research, and then one from the Effie research. And they’re very, very different examples. So I’ll start with the UK. We have this platform called Competitive Edge at System1 where we decided, about five or six years ago, to make the mad decision to test every UK and US TV ad as it goes on linear TV with millions of people. So that allows us, and myself specifically, to do so much research because we’ve got 100,000 ads tested. And crucially, that means it’s what’s out in the real world, not just what people want testing with creative testers. It’s quite representative. I have a scroll most days to see whether there’s some exciting advertising being launched, and I found a new brand being launched in the UK called The Woodsman Whiskey, and whiskey’s struggling right now. It’s a category that’s shrinking in many markets, but this is a challenger brand being started in whiskey. And what was really interesting about it is that despite it being its first TV ad, it got five stars in our emotional testing. Which is very hard for a challenger brand, because often you have to build yourself up and build those memories and compound into getting such a strong emotional response with a campaign. But The Woodsman was straight out of the gates, and managed to get a five-star. And our emotional rating goes up to five star. It then, over the following weeks, managed to grow market share, I think it was by 30%, and managed to dramatically increase its penetration. So we talk about a lot of insights from our testing and in this new research with Effie. Is work emotional, distinctive, consistent? Is it entertaining? But at the end of the day, if you can really deliver an emotional, powerful ad, and they were doing that through being what we would call showmanship, by being entertaining in a category that’s kind of dull, the results always follow. The second example, more from the Effie research, The Creative Dividend, is from the US, this wonderful brand called apartments.com, which I presume you have heard of. So they did a wonderful thing, apartments.com. They hired Jeff Goldblum. Is that their chief creative officer for apartments.com? Brad Bellflower, I think, is his name, right? You’ve probably seen the ads.
[00:20:17] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, I’ve seen it.
[00:20:18] Andrew Tindall: So the idea itself is quite emotional and funny straightaway, and quite entertaining. But then what they managed to do, which a lot of brands don’t do, is that they turned him into a brand character by using him over 10 years, and they submitted this to the Effies. So I looked at all the data on it, and yes, it was emotional, but it got more emotional over time, this campaign, funnier and funnier each time. Because often when you’re consistent, you can actually get away with more humor because people understand your brand enough in a situation, so you can start playing with it quite well. So very emotional, very consistent. They used him over 10 years. Very distinctive. They didn’t really change their brand look and feel over that time. And yeah, very entertaining and funny. And over 10 years they moved from 27th in the marketplace to second in the marketplace. And what was special as well is that it was a 10-year campaign. At year five, they stopped increasing their media spend, but their revenue kept going up in year six, seven, eight, nine, and ten, and so did their awareness. Because when you’ve built that creative consistently and you’ve got an emotional campaign, it doesn’t just work now. Emotional campaigns work into the future so that it keeps on compounding over time, and then you can either get more growth from the same market share as apartments.com did. Or you can start, if you have to, lowering that market spend, and you’ll be able to get away with the same amount of growth because of that creativity. So it’s a great example of the four pillars of creativity that we talk about all the time. It’s not just the one, yes, emotional, but distinctiveness, entertaining, and consistent campaigns, and how media and creativity work together. You can really beat the competition. Well, if you can’t spend more than them in your media, you’ve only got one choice. You’ve got to be more creative.
[00:23:34] Greg Kihlström: There’s a lot of focus on those short-term metrics and the short-term results, and yet, what you’re just saying here is there is benefit in building that long-term, and long-term creative effects can compound over time. Say you’re a CMO. How do you start making that case? You’re in year one of this, if we go back to the apartments.com example. You’re in year one of this thing that over 10 years is going to expand, and strong creative will do that. But how do you make that case? What indicators are you looking for to help prove that to a CFO, CEO, things like that?
[00:24:14] Andrew Tindall: That’s a great point. Well, creativity is a leading metric. Market share’s a lagging metric. It’s the outcome. So I think, and we’ve seen it in this research where creativity alone explains about a quarter of all business outcomes from advertising campaigns. Whereas when you put creativity alongside media choices, you can explain about 60% of business growth. So your media and your creativity, as I was talking about earlier, explains the majority of advertising outcomes. So it’s no longer just hope and pray. Or what a lot of dangerous choices come down from that one question. It’s like, “Oh, we’ll launch it, and in six months’ time we’ll decide if it’s working.” Great creativity might not work in six months. Generally, these emotional campaigns that we’re talking about, they build more and more memories over time that compound into behavior change. So I honestly think that creative measurement can give you a bit of a bellwether around what you can expect from this campaign, so you don’t have to wait 10 years to be sure it’s working. And also you need to be looking at other leading metrics as well, like in the new Creative Dividend, we talk about how brand effects compound into business results. So your awareness, your equity, your distinctiveness, your differentiation. You want to be seeing these move, because they will move before your market share changes. So I think, especially with all the modern creative testing tools that marketers have now, you’ve got a good idea if something’s going to work straightaway. I’d be looking for, is my campaign more distinctive and more emotional than the category average? If you’ve got that, you’ve got a really strong foundation to grow your campaign into something very special.
[00:26:22] Greg Kihlström: Well, and of course I have to bring up AI, because it’s almost a requirement these days. [laughs] So let’s talk a little bit about that. AI is such a broad umbrella, so really let’s talk about two components of this. One is AI as a tool that helps a human get to a better idea faster. And another is a system that produces finished work where no human is really the author. Since your data measures how real audiences respond, are you seeing a performance difference between those two? Or is the audience more indifferent than we might guess?
[00:27:07] Andrew Tindall: Gosh, people worry about this quite a lot, don’t they? I’ve done some research into this, and I do get asked this quite a bit. So I think it’s two interesting points. One would be, I just want to point out, people use the term AI slop quite a bit. And no one ever acknowledges the fact that humans have been making slop for about 100 years in advertising. So as I said, we measure every UK and US linear TV ad with real people. And we can see that about 50% of advertising is what we would call a one-star ad. Which is, from all our research, we don’t expect a one-star ad to create the right kind of useful emotions to grow brands. So humans have been making some pretty average ads for a while. So on the flip side, I’m quite excited about AI because it’s a new tool to make advertising, and put in the hands of great creators it’s an opportunity to make good ads. And then I’ve gone and done specific research in this, and what we could tell is, one, consumers don’t care how an ad is made. It is a tool. Like anything else, you can use animation to make a sloppy ad. You can use a camera to make a sloppy ad. But when we specifically showed in this research we did around this, admittedly, it was a year ago, and things have changed very quickly. There’s this perfect storm happening of consumers don’t know, even when prompted. So when they’re unprompted, they really struggle to tell if AI’s been involved. When they’re prompted, they really struggle to pick if the ad’s actually made by an AI. And two, when they do know, they don’t really care. I think a good example is the Coca-Cola AI Christmas ad. It was a Christmas ad for the past few years. Do we really think Coca-Cola would’ve rerun that for a second year if it didn’t do wonderful things for their sales at Christmas? Of course not. AI is just a tool to make ads. What I will say is that we do see with Gen Z a slightly more negative response when the ad has obviously had AI in the creative process. But that’s getting harder and harder to tell now. So I think it’s an interesting tool creators can use, and it’s used best when it’s put at an emotional, instinctive campaign where they’ve built those memories and that brand equity, and then it can produce other things. I’ve not seen any evidence yet that it’s really good at creating campaign ideas or anything like that.
[00:30:14] Greg Kihlström: No, I completely agree with you. Humans are perfectly capable of creating slop all on their own. [laughs] So maybe it’s made a little easier with AI, but I totally agree there. Well, Andrew, thanks so much for joining today. I’ve got two last questions for you as we wrap up here. The first one, if we were having this interview one year from today, what is one thing that we would definitely be talking about?
[00:30:40] Andrew Tindall: Crikey. Okay. Well, today we’ve just launched System1 Test Your Ad Screen, which is our first ever AI predictive tool, where we’ve trained an AI model to predict our core metrics. So how people feel towards the ad, the star rating, but also our spike rating, which predicts short-term behavior change, and how distinctive and recognizable the ad is for the brand. On that wonderful data set of 100,000 ads that have been on US and UK TV. It matches human testing 9 out of 10 times. And when it’s not confident, it won’t give you a result, so it’s quite a smart model. It’s not very specific. It won’t give you a 1.1 or a 4.5 star, but it shares bands to work out whether you’ve got a good ad or you need a bit more data or another one before you then move on to precise human testing. That’s what we’ve called it, Screen. I suspect in a year’s time, that will be even better and even smarter, and be used for more use cases, because at the moment we’re only really confident for it to predict long-form TV advertising, because that’s the data it’s trained on. So I think in a year’s time we’ll be talking about that and how do we actually make sure that we’re able to really predict human emotion and stuff like that with AI, as we’re just starting to find out now.
[00:32:14] Greg Kihlström: Love it. And last question for you, what do you do to stay agile in your role, and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
[00:32:22] Andrew Tindall: I read as much as I can and listen to as much as I can every day. Whether that’s forcing an audiobook whilst you’re running or stealing half an hour to scroll LinkedIn and read actual research. We’ve talked quite a bit about AI. AI’s got very good at doing our jobs. If we don’t try and still learn and think and get involved in marketing conversations, well, I think you’ll completely lose your edge. So I force myself to do that all the time.
[00:32:59] Greg Kihlström: Love it. Well, again, I’d like to thank Andrew Tindall, Chief Growth Officer, Advertising at System1 for joining the show. You can learn more about Andrew and System1 by following the links in the show notes.
