Creative Pre-Test Instant | AI-Powered Ad Testing

Creative testing at the speed of AI

Testing creative concepts no longer needs to be limited by time, scale, or quality concerns. Creative Pre-Test Instant delivers validated, decision-ready insights more than 120x faster than traditional testing, so you can test more ads, in more markets, across more channels, more often. Integrated within Toluna Start, our end-to-end research platform, it reveals not only how your ads perform, but why, with transparent best-practice checks, validations, and explain-why diagnostics.

Creative Pre-Test Instant is fueled by our unique synthetic personas. Built on first-party data from our global panel of 81+ million real consumers, these are not generic AI profiles or segment aggregates. Toluna’s synthetic personas are lifelike respondents with realistic histories, memory, and emotion, designed to mirror human behavior at scale.

Our synthetic personas are available across 12 markets and 10 languages and can be created with specific traits in real-time to reflect your audience. Delivering validated insights that are up to 90% accurate to traditional, human surveys, Creative Pre-Test Instant gives you the confidence to optimize your creative and the evidence you need to back up your decisions.

Start your creative testing at AI speed

Ad testing without trade-offs

Creative Pre-Test Instant removes the limits of traditional ad testing, which is often constrained by cost, time, and market limitations. Combining Toluna’s synthetic personas with our validated benchmarks, it delivers clear, actionable results with a fast turnaround. Creative, marketing, insights, and research teams can test more ideas, validate more campaigns, and optimize creative strategies at the speed of AI, all while maintaining the rigor and reliability needed for confident decision-making.

Move faster with Creative Pre-Test Instant:

Accelerate your ad testing with decision-ready results delivered more than 120x faster than traditional approaches.

Optimize your creative across TV, YouTube, TikTok, and social video with benchmarks validated against our database of thousands of ads.

Understand both how and why your ads perform with transparent diagnostics designed to support confident decision-making.

Make your budget go further, increasing testing frequency and scale without compromising data quality. Creative Pre-Test Instant provides results at one tenth of the cost of traditional testing.

Toluna's ACT Instant AI solution offers 120 times faster ad testing results than traditional methods

Build creative intelligence with Creative Pre-Test Instant

Insights you can trust

Creative Pre-Test Instant is built on Toluna’s validated global benchmark database of thousands of ads. Every result is supported by best-practice checks and clear, ‘why-it-works’ diagnostics, so you know exactly what drives performance and where to optimize.

Validated KPIs and benchmarks

Make creative decisions with confidence and clarity based on 9 validated KPIs with a combined, benchmarked assessment of breakthrough and response delivered in one clear view.

Speed and scalability

Get decision-ready outputs in hours, not days. By harnessing the speed and scalability of AI, Creative Pre-Test Instant makes it possible to expand your testing to more creative, across more markets, at the speed and scale modern marketing demands.

Test, learn, optimize, repeat

Every test strengthens your creative intelligence. Creative Pre-Test Instant helps brands build a continuous learning system, turning every campaign into a foundation for smarter future decisions.

Contact us to accelerate your ad testing

From insights to confident decisions

Every delivered project includes a clear, actionable report to guide faster, smarter creative decisions, including:

A scorecard for each ad tested, combining 9 validated KPIs into one clear view.

Breakthrough and response scores benchmarked against relevant ads by format.

Transparent results that reveal not just how ads performed, but why.

Actionable recommendations tailored to your campaign objectives.

Creative Pre-Test Instant turns ad testing into a competitive advantage that keeps you ahead.

Effortless testing, built for speed

Creative Pre-Test Instant is ad testing made simple, from quick setup to decision-ready insights.

Each project supports one market, with a maximum of 10 ads and 200 completes.

Synthetic personas instantly evaluate ads against validated KPIs.

Results appear as a clear scorecard with explain-why diagnostics and actionable recommendations.

Explore more about Create Pre-Test Instant

Creative effectiveness at AI speed: what synthetic personas teach us about creative testing

Volkswagen and Toluna case study thumbnail showing a woman and man standing beside a Volkswagen car, with Toluna and Volkswagen logos, highlighting creative pre-test ad testing, emotional impact, and synthetic personas.

Toluna x Volkswagen case study: what if you could test creative impact in seconds?

FAQs

Creative Pre-Test Instant is an AI-powered advertising pre-testing solution in Toluna Start that uses Synthetic Personas to evaluate creative quickly and at scale. It helps advertisers assess fundamental measures of creative performance, including attention, branding, persuasion, likeability, emotional resonance, and intent, before ads go live.

Creative Pre-Test Instant supports online video, TV, social video, and TikTok/Reels. High-quality animatics that closely represent the final creative can also be tested, while storyboards and early-stage or rough animatics are not currently supported.

Creative Pre-Test Instant currently allows audience targeting by age and gender, with customizable quotas for both. If your research requires more specific targeting or specialist audiences, Toluna also offers human-based creative testing solutions that can support more tailored research needs.

Creative Pre-Test Instant can deliver results in less than an hour, making the solution well suited to rapid and high-volume creative testing. Total turnaround time depends on the number of ads included.

Creative Pre-Test Instant provides an intuitive scorecard that visually summarizes an ad’s Breakthrough and Response potential. This is supplemented with seven additional KPIs to assist with diagnosis. Creative performance is contextualized against relevant country and format specific benchmarks, with an AI-generated summary and conclusions to help you quickly understand what’s working and identify opportunities to improve.

Creative Pre-Test Instant has been validated by comparing Toluna Synthetic Persona results with human responses to the same ads. Validation is conducted separately by country and ad format and assesses how consistently human and Synthetic Persona results identify strong and weak creative performers. With over 4000 validations conducted, we consistently see a match rate of 81% on average and up to 92% for some countries.

Creative Pre-Test Instant is well suited to screening creative at scale, validating final executions, building learnings across campaigns, and continuously assessing the fundamentals of advertising performance. Traditional human research may be more appropriate for high-profile or strategically important assets, highly specific audiences, cultural or reputational sensitivities, or early-stage creative development.

Creative Pre-Test Instant: Ad testing that keeps you ahead