Ask ten advertising researchers what makes a creative “work” and you’ll get ten different answers. Ask them again with a fresh CSV of campaign-outcome data in front of them, and you’ll find the answers converge faster than expected. The patterns repeat. The dimensions that predict performance show up in study after study, across categories, across markets, across decades.
We picked thirteen of them. Not because thirteen is a magic number, but because that’s where the marginal predictive value of adding a fourteenth dimension drops to noise. Every dimension has to earn its place by being measurably correlated with downstream campaign outcomes — sales lift, brand-survey delta, click-through rate, attention duration. Anything that doesn’t hold up against ground truth gets cut.
Here’s what each of the thirteen actually measures, and why it’s there.
1. Core Message & Clarity
Will a viewer understand the proposition within the first three seconds? This is the most decoded variable in modern testing — and the most consistently failed by creative the team is too close to. If a viewer needs more than one watch to figure out what’s being sold, the score gets capped here regardless of how brilliant the rest of the execution is.
2. Originality
Distinctiveness against category convention. Penalises me-too execution. Rewards memorable craft. The honest version of this dimension isn’t “is it creative?” — it’s “have we seen this exact frame, copy structure, or musical cue in five competitor ads this year?”
3. Emotional Resonance & Persuasiveness
Does the creative move the viewer — and does that emotion translate into intent? A weak emotional pull combined with a strong call-to-action still underperforms a strong emotional pull with a weaker call-to-action, because intent rides on resonance.
4. Visual Design & Hook
Is the opening frame strong enough to stop the scroll? Composition, focal hierarchy, contrast, and motion are scored at the frame-by-frame level by purpose-built vision models — because the human eye works on milliseconds, and most ads lose the viewer before the brand even appears.
5. Brand Asset Distinctiveness
Are colours, logo, voice and characters unmistakably yours — even with the brand name removed? This is the Byron Sharp question, automated. A creative that requires the logo to identify the brand is one that won’t build attribution memory.
6. Celebrity / Character Elements
When endorsers or mascots appear, do they reinforce or compete with the brand message? This catches the “you remember the celebrity but not the product” trap — a failure mode common enough that we’ve made it its own dimension rather than a footnote on Brand Recognition.
7. Overall Effectiveness
A weighted composite predicting how the ad will perform against its stated objective. Your CMO’s headline number — the single score that summarises the rest, weighted by what the campaign actually needs to achieve.
8. Brand Recognition
How quickly and confidently can a viewer identify the advertiser without seeing the logo? Measures attribution risk in the first three seconds. Different from Brand Asset Distinctiveness: this dimension is about recognition speed in context, not asset distinctiveness in isolation.
9. Cognitive Neuro Balance
Right-brain emotional cues vs. left-brain rational cues. Calibrated to category and objective. Built on behavioural neuromarketing research that’s been quietly accumulating evidence for two decades. Most ads tilt one way too hard. The dimension flags both the imbalance and the direction.
10. Platform Delivery & Visibility
Is the format optimised for the channel? Aspect ratio, sound-off legibility, captioning, pacing — all of it scored against channel-specific rubrics. A 6-second Reel and a 30-second linear cut have entirely different success criteria, and a creative that passes for one will routinely fail for the other.
11. Goal Alignment & Strategic Intent
Is the creative actually built for the funnel stage you booked it for? Awareness creative running on a conversion budget will underperform regardless of craft. Misalignment is one of the top reasons creative underperforms despite strong individual scores elsewhere — and one of the easiest things to catch before the media plan is committed.
12. Predictive CTR & Competitor Score
Estimated click-through performance, plus head-to-head comparison against category benchmarks. Triages 30 variants without buying impressions. The category benchmark is the part that matters — absolute CTR predictions vary; relative ones compound usefully when you’re choosing between variants from the same brief.
13. Compliance & Brand Safety
Regulatory red-flags, platform-policy risk, and brand-safety issues — flagged before launch. Especially valuable in regulated categories (pharma, financial services, alcohol, gambling) where one shipped infraction can cost more than a quarter’s worth of testing budget.
How they fit together
These thirteen are not equally weighted. They’re not even equally measurable on every creative. A 6-second pre-roll for an awareness campaign isn’t going to score highly on Predictive CTR — and shouldn’t. The rubric weights itself by channel and objective.
What matters is that they’re all comparable. A 4.2 in Emotional Resonance on a beverage ad means the same thing as a 4.2 on a fintech ad. That’s the calibration the system is built around — and the bit that’s hardest to engineer, but also the bit that makes the score actually useful.
Pre-flight scoring is only useful when it’s defensible. Defensibility comes from the rubric being explicit, the dimensions being mapped to outcomes, and the scores being comparable across categories. Anything less is opinion with a number stapled to it.
