Comparison
Kantar's Link is what "ad testing" meant for decades: validated survey measures, an enormous norms database, and the confidence of the world's biggest advertisers. PreTestAds is what ad testing looks like when the ad was made this morning and the media plan starts Friday.
Link (and its AI-accelerated variant, LinkAI) measures the full marketing stack of a finished ad: branding, persuasion, enjoyment, short-term sales likelihood, long-term equity effects — validated against one of the largest ad-test databases ever assembled. When a global brand needs to defend a campaign decision to a board, Link-style evidence is the currency. Nothing self-serve replaces that depth of diagnostic or that weight of norms.
PreTestAds answers the gating question — will anyone keep watching? — in minutes for a credit. AdCortex™, trained on fMRI brain-response data, returns a percentile against 76 top-performing TikTok ads, Hook Strength, drop-off second, and the full attention curve, plus an AI-ready report you can paste into a chatbot to coach the next cut. It's built for the cadence of feed advertising, where creative refreshes monthly and no single asset justifies a research project.
The honest framing: Link is research; PreTestAds is screening. Research is thorough, expensive, and slow enough that you only do it for creative that's already survived selection. Screening is how creative survives selection — cheap and fast enough to run on all eleven variations, including the AI-generated ones that didn't exist last week. Enterprises increasingly need both layers; smaller teams get most of the decision value from the screen alone.
Choose Kantar when the stakes and budget justify full-stack validation — global campaigns, brand-equity questions, board-level decisions. Choose PreTestAds when you need to rank variations now, spend a small budget intelligently, or give a lean team an attention discipline it can actually afford to run on every single ad. If you're lucky enough to have both problems, screen with one and validate with the other.
Benchmark your ad against TikTok top-performers in minutes — up to 8 free credits.
Test Your Ad FreeFor attention screening at feed speed and self-serve prices, yes. For full-stack validated measures of branding, persuasion, and equity with deep norms, Kantar remains the enterprise standard. They solve different layers of the same problem.
Link is survey-based research on finished creative — deep diagnostics, days of fieldwork, enterprise pricing. PreTestAds is an fMRI-trained model predicting second-by-second attention in minutes, benchmarked against top TikTok performers, priced per credit.
Rarely per-ad. Short-form creative refreshes too fast for per-asset research economics. The workable discipline is model-based screening on every variation, reserving panel research for hero campaigns where a single asset carries sustained budget.