Indie agency Paper Moose’s recently-launched AI tool, ‘Moose Review’, utilises advanced AI-powered personas, “synths”, designed to mimic human responses to advertising.
Each synth is a complex digital construct built from psychographic and demographic data, programming them with detailed personality traits, emotional drivers, values, and backgrounds that reflect a real target audience.
Paper Moose creative director Jeremy Willmott told LBB that, when fed an advertisement, Moose Review analyses the content to understand the key elements, and then presents the analysis to selected synths.
Each synth independently reviews the ad against five key pillars of effective advertising: feelings, universe, branding, simplicity, and attention. They generate scores and, crucially, provide detailed qualitative feedback in their own unique voice, explaining what resonated, what didn’t, and why.
The tool aggregates the individual synth responses into a comprehensive report, providing an overall effectiveness score and actionable insights.
“These [synths] are all individual people,” Jeremy explains.
There’s even a synthetic version of Jeremy, with the same name and a similar voice, based on inputs he provided.
“I’ve basically filled out a psychographic personality questionnaire, and then that’s informed my synth person. Think like ‘Severance’. There’s a version of me sat in synth court reviewing ads all the time.
Many of the synths are “random” people Paper Moose created from psychographic data, intended to represent different demographics and target audiences. These synths then respond to ads based on their programmed personality. Sometimes, Jeremy says, they can be “quite brutal”.
“We’re using them to really interrogate [work] and we can chat to different synths about what we can improve on, like real conversations with customers.
“We’ve also recently built a panel view,” Jeremy adds. “Like a traditional [focus] group environment, where there would be 10-15 people answering questions … we can ask all of the synths at the same time, and we can have a live conversation between everybody.”
The idea for Moose Review has been brewing for a long time, going through myriad iterations over two years.
“We spent a fair bit of time interrogating marketing science’s key principles, [asking] what you need in an ad set for it to be effective in market. There’s a bunch of research that other people have done, and we basically aligned on five pillars.”
Those pillars — feelings, universe, branding, simplicity, and attention — are the criteria used by the tool to assign work a score from 1 to 10.
“If you get a good emotion score, that’s a good indicator it’s going to be effective,” Jeremy says.
“Does it belong in the universe of the brand? If it feels wildly off, people don’t know that it’s who you are. Are all the distinct brand assets there? … Simplicity — is it an easy message? Are you trying to layer two or three messaging messages into the ad that make it difficult for people to process? Or does it keep my attention?
“Those key measures make up our Moose Review score.”
Jeremy says the key benefit of the tool is its ability to remove subjectivity when testing lines, scripts, and concepts.
“We’re using it to test key visuals — it’s really good at that — but we can also test finished ads as well.”
Currently only used in collaboration with the agency’s clients, Paper Moose hopes to use the tool to evaluate entire bodies of work, and future work.
“Getting the human panels involved obviously [comes with] cost and time… we’re able to do this iteratively and really quickly.
“We can make changes on the fly [and] save on the loop of human testing, which is still relevant… but this is a really good first litmus test for clients wanting to test work before it’s in market.
An “in depth process” goes into the building of each synth’s persona, which Jeremy sees as the key to their accuracy.
“It takes the bias we have as creative directors, creatives, and humans out of the equation and allows you to make decisions based on real outputs. We’re able to take a point of view, and build on our idea, and make better decisions as a client.
“In a room with clients, there might be one louder voice or one more senior voice [leading] the creative discussion. [Moose Review] allows people to see through that subjectivity and have a conversation around what the target audience is going to be talking about. [This is] what we should all be doing anyway.”