System1, the London-based creative effectiveness company, on April 9, 2026, announced a set of material updates to its Test Your Ad platform, introducing AI-assisted report summaries, a beta predictive measurement tool, and a range of interface improvements designed to make ad testing data more accessible across marketing organisations. The changes are the most significant additions to the platform in recent memory and arrive as pressure on the creative measurement sector intensifies, with advertisers and agencies demanding faster, clearer reads on whether an ad is worth running before budgets are committed.

Test Your Ad is the technology that generates all of System1's ad rankings, including the company's seasonal league tables tracking emotional response to campaigns across the UK and other markets. According to the company's announcement, the platform sits on what System1 calls the world's largest database of emotional norms, containing over 100,000 ads. That database - the Competitive Edge database - is now the training ground for a new predictive AI tool currently in beta.

Instant Insights: AI-generated executive summaries

The first and most immediately visible change is the introduction of Instant Insights. According to the announcement, these are AI-assisted executive summary pop-ups that appear within Test Your Ad reports. The feature is designed to reduce the time a marketer spends interpreting output. Rather than reading every chart and metric individually, Instant Insights surfaces the results that matter most and explains their significance. The pop-ups also draw on System1's thought leadership library, including Orlando Wood's publications Lemon and Look out, as well as The Creative Dividend, produced with Effie, and The Long & the Short (Form) of It, a collaboration with TikTok.

The practical logic here is straightforward. 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. The Instant Insights feature attempts to close the gap between what the data shows and what a marketing director, a brand manager, or a finance stakeholder actually does with it. According to System1, the tool launched this month - April 2026.

The predictive AI tool: training on emotional norms

The more technically ambitious addition is the predictive AI creative measurement tool, which System1 is currently beta testing in select markets. According to the announcement, this tool has been trained against the Test Your Ad Competitive Edge database. Its function is to estimate the likely human emotional response and distinctiveness response to an advertisement before it goes through full consumer testing.

This is worth examining carefully. 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 and much of its commercial value, 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. According to the company, it is designed to complement the consumer methodology by providing earlier directional guidance. Real human response remains at the heart of the evaluation.

The distinction matters for marketers trying to understand where this tool fits. What System1 appears to be offering 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 being a measure of how recognisable and memorable a brand's visual and sonic identifiers are when embedded in an ad. Distinctiveness has grown in strategic importance as marketers have re-engaged with research showing that recognisable brand assets accumulate value over years and campaigns.

System1 tracks and ranks ads across seasonal and category contexts, with its most recent UK Easter 2026 rankings demonstrating how the Star Rating and Fluency metrics - which measure the speed and accuracy of brand attribution - can diverge sharply between competitors even within the same product category. Lindt scored 5.9 Stars in that ranking, published on 30 March 2026, with Cadbury reaching 5.6 Stars and Asda finishing last at 3.2 Stars. The gap between those scores illustrates the performance range that the new AI tool is trained to predict.

Report improvements: four new features

Beyond the AI additions, System1 has rolled out four functional enhancements to Test Your Ad that change how reports present and communicate data.

The first is 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. The intent is to give creative teams and strategists a more granular understanding of which scenes drive emotional response and which fall flat. Rather than knowing that emotional intensity peaks at a particular second, users can now see what prompted that peak.

The second is 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 in recent years building frameworks around distinctive assets, and System1's inclusion of this as a discrete reporting module reflects how central that thinking has become in major marketing organisations. Research on marketing effectiveness has consistently shown that brand investment accumulates long-term returns, with brand awareness driving both short-term and long-term sales lifts.

The third is Key Metric Demographics. This module disaggregates core performance metrics by demographic group, allowing teams to understand how creative lands differently across age bands, genders, and other categories. A campaign that performs strongly overall may conceal meaningful variation across audiences. The demographic breakdown makes that variation visible. In the platform interface shown in System1's announcement, the Key Metrics by Demographic view displays Star Rating, Spike Rating, and Fluency Rating across multiple groups simultaneously - men, women, and age bands from 18-34 through 55-plus, all shown within a single view with a NatRep sample size of 150 at the top level.

The fourth improvement is Glide Navigation, which enables smoother browsing through reports and simplifies the process of sharing insights across teams. This is a structural usability change rather than a new metric, but it speaks to a real operational challenge. Marketers frequently report difficulty extracting and sharing measurement data across organisations, with 68% of in-house marketers saying they lack up-to-date visibility into campaign performance. Making reports easier to navigate and share addresses part of that problem at the tool level.

Executive appointment: Mo Taylor joins as CPTO

Alongside the platform updates, System1 confirmed the appointment of Mohan - known as Mo - Taylor to its executive team as chief product and technology officer. According to the announcement, Taylor brings experience as a product leader in technical and advertising-adjacent organisations with a focus on AI-powered solutions. His appointment is positioned as part of System1's investment in the Test Your Ad platform, with the company indicating that his background supports the AI development direction the product is now taking.

The appointment is notable for its timing. 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 at this stage signals that the AI additions announced in April 2026 are not the final word on where the platform is heading.

Andrew Tindall, Chief Growth Officer at System1, set out the company's position in the announcement: "Test Your Ad is already a market-leading product, but we're not standing still. We are investing meaningfully in people, product development and IT so that Test Your Ad remains the most useful and predictive creative measurement tool in the market - combining proven human response, smart and fast AI-powered interpretation and ongoing enhancements to help marketers make better and more confident creative decisions."

Why this matters for the marketing community

The changes at System1 arrive at a moment when the advertising industry is working through a genuine tension in how AI fits into creative evaluation. Research published in late 2025 showed that 47.1% of marketers encounter AI inaccuracies several times weekly, and more than a third have seen AI-generated content published publicly that contained errors. That context makes System1's framing 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 more broadly has seen substantial activity. Nielsen integrated attention-tracking technology from Realeyes in December 2024, building on more than 17 million human observations and 350 billion frames of video content. Google released the ABCDs Detector in September 2024, an open-source tool applying large language models to evaluate video ads against YouTube's creative best practices framework. Each of those moves reflects the same underlying pressure: the advertising industry wants faster, cheaper, more scalable creative evaluation without sacrificing the validity that human response data provides.

System1's approach, as described in the April 2026 announcement, differs from AI-only tools in one important structural way. The predictive AI tool is trained on a dataset built entirely from real human emotional responses - the 100,000-ad Competitive Edge database. The model is not generating predictions from learned associations in general text or image data. It is estimating 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.

Marketing measurement confidence has stalled despite growing data availability, with research from October 2025 finding 54.1% of marketing professionals reported no change in measurement confidence year-over-year, while 14.3% said confidence declined. Against that backdrop, a tool that claims to offer faster, more intuitive reads on creative performance - grounded in real human emotional data and delivered through AI 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 for short- and long-term commercial potential, and Test Your Brand, which tracks the impact of advertising on brand health metrics. According to the company, it tests creative effectiveness across 81 markets globally, with operations in the UK, Europe, North America, Brazil, Singapore, and Australia.

Timeline

  • Before April 2026: System1 builds the Test Your Ad Competitive Edge database to over 100,000 ads across 81 markets globally
  • December 2024: Nielsen integrates Realeyes' attention-tracking technology, built on 17 million human observations across 350 billion frames of video content
  • 30 March 2026: System1 publishes UK Easter 2026 ad rankings, with Lindt scoring 5.9 Stars, M&S 5.7 Stars, Cadbury 5.6 Stars, and Asda 3.2 Stars
  • April 2026: System1 launches Instant Insights - AI-assisted executive summary pop-ups - within Test Your Ad reports
  • April 9, 2026: System1 announces the next phase of Test Your Ad, including Instant Insights, four report improvements (Second-by-Second Reasons for Emotion, Distinctive Brand Assets, Key Metric Demographics, Glide Navigation), and the appointment of Mo Taylor as chief product and technology officer
  • April 9, 2026: System1 confirms it is beta testing a predictive AI creative measurement tool trained on the Competitive Edge database in select markets

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Summary

Who: System1, the creative effectiveness company headquartered in London with operations across 81 markets, made these announcements. Andrew Tindall, Chief Growth Officer, is quoted. Mo Taylor joins as chief product and technology officer. The update was communicated via press release dated April 9, 2026.

What: System1 announced the launch of Instant Insights - AI-assisted executive summary pop-ups for Test Your Ad reports - along with four reporting improvements (Second-by-Second Reasons for Emotion, Distinctive Brand Assets, Key Metric Demographics, Glide Navigation) and confirmed beta testing of a predictive AI creative measurement tool trained on its 100,000-ad Competitive Edge database of emotional norms.

When: The announcement was made on April 9, 2026. Instant Insights launched in April 2026. The predictive AI tool is currently in beta testing in select markets, with no specific broader launch date disclosed.

Where: Test Your Ad is available globally, with System1 operating in the UK, Europe, North America, Brazil, Singapore, and Australia. The platform tests creative effectiveness across 81 markets.

Why: The updates reflect demand from marketing organisations for faster and more actionable creative measurement data, particularly for non-specialist stakeholders. The predictive AI tool addresses the need for earlier directional guidance before full consumer panel testing, while the report improvements aim to make data more interpretable and shareable across organisations. The appointments and product investment indicate System1 intends to continue developing AI capabilities within its established human-response methodology.

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