Advertising research for the campaign you only get to launch once.

Yes, and that’s the point at which the work is worth the most. Production costs a fraction of amplification, and the media is usually committed long before anyone knows whether the creative earns it. We test routes at whatever stage they exist, from a written line to a storyboard to a finished cut, and we read them for meaning as well as for score. Turnaround depends on how many routes, how many markets and how deep the reading needs to go, and we give you the timeline alongside the quote. If your production date is fixed, it shapes the plan from the start rather than turning up as a problem halfway through.

Every quote is built for the project, because the variables move a great deal. It depends on how many routes or assets go into the test, who has to see them and how hard that audience is to recruit, whether that means general consumers, a category audience or B2B decision makers, how many markets, how many participants, how deep the reading goes, how urgent it is, and what you need in your hands at the end. Testing three routes in one market and reading a full campaign across three are different projects with very different numbers. Most of our projects sit in the six-figure range. We scope after a proper conversation about the decision you’re making, and you get a fixed price and a timeline before any work begins.

The agency and the research answer different questions, and both are needed. An agency optimises the piece it made, which is the right instinct, but it’s hard to be objective about your own work. We read why that piece means what it means to the people watching it, in their market and in their words, and we do it without a stake in which route wins. We also build on the testing you already have rather than starting from zero: if there are scores, we use them as a starting point and go after the part they can’t explain, which is usually why the number came out that way and what it will cost you on the fifth viewing.

Usually because the work carried an assumption that travelled badly. Not the language, which is the easy part, but what the piece takes for granted about the person watching it: what is polite, what counts as help, what a brand is allowed to say about your money or your body or your family. A route that reads as supportive in one market can read as supervision in the next, with nothing changed but the audience. In practice you rarely need to abandon the campaign: the fix is to find which element carries the assumption and rebuild that element, a much smaller job when you find it before the media runs.

By taking out everything else that was happening in the same weeks. Categories grow on their own, competitors go quiet, promotions run, seasons turn, and all of it lands on the same tracker line as your campaign. Some of that is visible in the data, and some of it isn’t: a rival cutting spend for six weeks shows up in listening long before it shows up in a model. So we separate the lift into what the market was doing anyway and what your work moved, and then split that second part between what the media plan bought and what the creative earned. A number you can’t reproduce is a good year, and a number you can reproduce is a plan.

By not asking one question and calling it the answer. A single score forces attention, comprehension, respect and wear-out into the same number, and the routes that win on one of those often lose on the others. So we test against the questions your campaign actually has to answer, and each one gets the lens that can answer it. How many people took it in is a quantitative question, what it made them feel about themselves only surfaces in conversation, and whether it survives the fifth exposure shows up in how people talk about it online, unprompted. Read together, the three lenses give you a recommendation with its reasoning attached, which is what lets a creative director argue with it properly instead of being handed a verdict.

Both, and the connection between them is what the firm is built on. We call it insight-led strategic intelligence because research earns its cost when it makes the strategy sound. In this category that means you get the evidence and what to do with it: which route to produce and what to change in it first, which line is costing you, where the message has to start because the belief underneath it isn’t there yet, which channels deserve more of the budget than the plan gave them. The point of all of it is that your company loses less time and money going in the wrong direction.

Abdo López and Norah Walsh lead every project in person, from the framing session to the final reading, and everyone working alongside them is senior, with more than a decade in the field. Around that core we build the team for the project. The right moderator for a creative session in Mexico isn’t the right one for Germany, and the specialist who reads social conversation isn’t the one who runs the survey, so we select the experts, the partners and the technology that fit the question, the technique, the country and the industry. There’s no handover to a junior once the contract is signed, and that’s the main reason we stay small.