For Brand Managers
Your job runs on defensibility: every creative decision may need to survive an insights review, a finance question, or a boardroom. The enterprise platforms were built for that — and priced so you can only afford to test what's nearly finished. The gap is everything upstream, and that's where cheap screening earns its place in your process.
When a study costs real budget, you test two nearly-final ads — which means every earlier decision (which concepts advanced, which hooks got produced) was made on judgment alone. If a weak opening survives to the study, you pay research prices to learn what a $2.45 screen would have caught at the storyboard-adjacent stage. Screening every cut against a public 76-ad benchmark moves the first data point from the end of the pipeline to the start.
The reason model screening can sit in a brand process at all is transparency. The methodology is published: AdCortex™ is trained on fMRI brain-response research, predicts viewer attention and engagement from the creative alone, and explicitly does not claim persuasion, comprehension, or sales effects. The benchmark is public — every ad, curve, and transcript — so an insights partner can audit exactly what your percentile means. That's a cleaner conversation than a black-box "AI score."
Nothing here replaces panel diagnostics when the question is human: brand linkage, message comprehension, emotional response, purchase intent. System1, Kantar Link, and Zappi-tier platforms answer those with norms and fieldwork. The stack that respects both budgets: model-screen every variant for attention, then commission the study on creative that already holds — so the expensive instrument measures message, not scroll-past.
Video up to 60 seconds or any static — filmed, designed, or AI-generated, the model scores the creative, not the process. Reports return in minutes with Hook Strength, the full attention curve with the exact drop-off second, and the peak frame. For long-form brand films, score the cutdowns and openings — the first minute is where feed attention is decided anyway.
Self-serve, $49/month for 20 analyses (about $2.45 per test), packs from $45, no procurement cycle, and up to 8 free credits to pilot the workflow before anyone signs anything. Compare that to what a single round of fieldwork costs, or to the $500+ per variant a live A/B test burns before reaching significance — screening is the cheapest line item in the entire creative process.
Score a current campaign asset and read the report your team would get — up to 8 free credits, no credit card.
Test Your Ad Freeor read a live sample report first — no signup
As a screening layer, yes — if the methodology is inspectable. PreTestAds publishes what the model was trained on, what the score predicts (attention and engagement, not persuasion or sales), and the full 76-ad benchmark it scores against. Position it as the gate before the panel, not a replacement for one, and the conversation with insights gets much easier.
In front of them. Panel studies are priced and paced for finalists, so feeding them five rough cuts wastes budget on creative that fails the attention gate anyway. Screen everything at about $2.45 per test, kill the weak openings, and field only the survivors — the panel data comes back cleaner because every ad tested was actually watchable.
Brand linkage, comprehension, persuasion, and long-term equity effects — the things panel diagnostics exist for. The score answers one prior question: will a feed viewer still be watching when your branding and message arrive? It's deliberately narrow, which is why it's fast and cheap.