System1 adds AI layer to creative measurement platform as ad testing heats up
System1, the London-based creative effectiveness company, announced updates to Test Your Ad on April 9, 2026, introducing AI-assisted report summaries, a predictive measurement tool in beta, and interface improvements designed to make ad testing data more accessible across marketing teams. The changes arrive as advertisers and agencies demand faster, clearer reads on whether an ad is worth running before budgets are committed.
Test Your Ad generates System1's ad rankings and seasonal league tables tracking emotional response to campaigns. The platform sits on what System1 calls the world's largest database of emotional norms: over 100,000 ads. That database now serves as the training ground for the new predictive AI tool.
Instant Insights: AI-generated summaries
The most immediately visible change is Instant Insights, AI-assisted executive summary pop-ups that appear within Test Your Ad reports. The feature reduces time spent interpreting output by surfacing results that matter most and explaining their significance.
Creative testing generates substantial volumes of data. A single Test Your Ad report may contain multiple metrics covering emotional response, brand recognition speed, and moment-by-moment viewer reactions. Not every person reading a report is a research specialist. Instant Insights attempts to close the gap between what the data shows and what a marketing director, brand manager, or finance stakeholder actually does with it.
The tool launched in April 2026.
The predictive AI tool: training on real human data
System1's core methodology involves showing ads to real consumers and recording their emotional responses second by second. The Star Rating, which underpins the company's rankings, is a quantified measure of the emotional arc generated by an ad - a predictor of long-term brand growth.
The new AI tool does not replace that process. It complements consumer testing by providing earlier directional guidance. Real human response remains at the heart of the evaluation.
What System1 offers is a fast, lower-cost signal earlier in the creative process - a way to filter or redirect work before committing to full panel testing. The tool estimates both emotional response and distinctiveness, the latter measuring how recognisable and memorable a brand's visual and sonic identifiers are when embedded in an ad.
System1 trained the predictive tool against its Competitive Edge database, built entirely from real human emotional responses to advertising. The model is not generating predictions from learned associations in general text or image data. It estimates human emotional reaction to advertising using a reference set of actual human emotional reactions to advertising.
Whether that distinction holds up in practice - and at what accuracy levels - is something the beta testing phase is designed to determine. The tool is currently in beta in select markets, with no specific broader launch date disclosed.
Four new reporting features
Second-by-Second Reasons for Emotion. This feature links specific scenes in an advertisement to consumer verbatims - the actual words viewers use when describing what they felt during each moment. Creative teams can now see what prompted emotional peaks rather than just knowing when they occur.
Distinctive Brand Assets tracking. This function shows which brand elements - visual identifiers, sounds, characters, colours, logos - are being noticed and retained by viewers. The advertising effectiveness community has spent considerable energy building frameworks around distinctive assets in recent years.
Key Metric Demographics. This module disaggregates core performance metrics by demographic group, allowing teams to understand how creative lands differently across age bands and genders. A campaign that performs strongly overall may conceal meaningful variation across audiences.
Glide Navigation. This enables smoother browsing through reports and simplifies sharing insights across teams. Marketers frequently report difficulty extracting and sharing measurement data across organisations.
Executive appointment signals continued AI investment
System1 appointed Mohan Taylor as chief product and technology officer. Taylor brings experience as a product leader in technical and advertising-adjacent organisations with a focus on AI-powered solutions.
The timing is notable. System1 is integrating AI at the product level while simultaneously expanding the scope of what Test Your Ad reports contain. Bringing in a chief product and technology officer with AI experience signals that the AI additions announced in April 2026 are not the final word on where the platform is heading.
Why this matters for creative teams
Research published in late 2025 showed that 47.1% of marketers encounter AI data analysis inaccuracies several times weekly. System1's framing is significant: the company is not positioning AI as a replacement for human response, but as an interpretive layer on top of it.
The advertising measurement sector has seen substantial activity. Nielsen integrated attention-tracking technology from Realeyes in December 2024, building on more than 17 million human observations. Google released the ABCDs Detector in September 2024, an open-source tool applying large language models to evaluate video ads. Each reflects the same underlying pressure: the advertising industry wants faster, cheaper, more scalable creative evaluation without sacrificing the validity that human response data provides.
Marketing measurement confidence has stalled despite growing data availability. Research from October 2025 found 54.1% of marketing professionals reported no change in measurement confidence year-over-year, while 14.3% said confidence declined. A tool that claims to offer faster, more intuitive reads on creative performance - grounded in real human emotional data and delivered through AI for marketing summaries - addresses a real operational gap.
System1 operates Test Your Ad and two related products: Test Your Innovation, designed to evaluate new product or campaign concepts, and Test Your Brand, which tracks the impact of advertising on brand health metrics. The company tests creative effectiveness across 81 markets globally.
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