Need for Speed: How Marketers Use Pre-Testing to Accelerate Outcomes

Whether they're launching a new video ad or brand tagline, marketing teams need insights into how their messages and content will impact consumers—before they spend ad dollars to bring those creative ideas to life.

Mars Petcare brand Nom Nom has used Swayable to benchmark new creative vs. old creative to inform real-time media placement.

At Quirk's Media NYC, James Slezak, CEO and Founder at Swayable; Rachel Porges, Chief Innovation & Brand Development Officer (CMO) at Nom Nom (a Mars Petcare brand); and Spencer Adkins, Principal Product Marketing Manager at Intuit Mailchimp discussed how their teams use rapid, creative pre-testing against real humans to move faster and with more confidence.

"Evidence from real consumers is more critical than ever," said Slezak. “By doing early testing, major brands and innovative brands are driving substantial improvement in their downstream decision making."

Here's a closer look at how Nom Nom (a Mars Petcare brand) and Mailchimp are embedding pre-testing into their marketing operations—and the outcomes they are seeing from insights-driven decision making.

Pre-testing turns internal debates into data-backed decisions

Rapid consumer insights enabled Mailchimp to choose the ideal website headline.

Creative testing enables brands to quickly identify which message will resonate most with target audiences, replacing leadership hunches and guesswork with real consumer evidence.

At Mailchimp, Spencer's team pre-tested several tagline options for the website homepage, including one built around the brand's SMS marketing capabilities: "Email & SMS marketing minus the learning curve.”

The headline drove an immediate business impact for the email and SMS marketing platform.

Among internal stakeholders, that tagline wasn't the front-runner. But test insights showed it drove the strongest consideration and purchase intent among the ideal customer profiles Mailchimp cares most about. That winning message has since driven a 22% increase in bookings and a 40% increase in order value since going live on the brand website.

"The internal results in selling the story were gigantic, because we had leaders that didn't like that message—they didn't think it represented the vision of the brand or what would resonate the most," said Adkins.

Speed of insights helps brands quickly pivot media plans

Nom Nom used pre-testing to compare the performance of old vs new ads, accelerating media placement strategy.

The turnaround time for generating consumer insights, accelerated by AI, has decreased from weeks to days—meaning insights can now inform real-time decisions about media allocation, rather than only long-range planning.

At Nom Nom, Rachel's team tested a new video ad (shown below) against an older, already high-performing video ad running in market. Results came back showing the new ad improved key perception metrics, including favorability among target demographics—giving her team the evidence needed move forward with the new creative.

"I took fear and concern out of my media strategy in three days,” said Porges. “That's worth the investment in some consumer insights.”

For a brand with limited budget, that speed meant Nom Nom could greenlight a media plan and start optimizing it within days of finishing the test, rather than waiting weeks for results that may have arrived too late to act on.

Testing scope expands as trust builds

From left: Swayable's James Slezak, Nom Nom's Rachel Porges, and Mailchimp's Spencer Adkins discuss the power of pre-testing at Quirk's NYC. 

Neither Nom Nom nor Mailchimp rolled out pre-testing as an enterprise-wide mandate. Both started with small use cases—one ad, one tagline test—to prove the approach worked before expanding their testing programs.

Adkins at Mailchimp said that over the past year, his team has progressively tested more across broader campaigns and website redesigns. The brand’s process for pre-testing has also become a core component of his team’s formal internal processes and slide decks.

Porges at Nom Nom added that early success with ad testing is giving the petcare brand confidence to bring the same approach into innovation and concept testing across other brands she works on.

For brands that are looking to expand their pre-testing programs, there’s a sustainable path they can follow: starting small with unique use cases; iterating on those use cases by testing and benchmarking updated messages and creative; and expanding their pre-testing programs to test different types of content once they have proven initial value.

For more insights from Mailchimp and Nom Nom, watch our full Quirk's NYC presentation:

Interested in kickstarting your pre-testing program? Book a demo to learn how Swayable enables global brands to generate rapid insights into consumer perception.