The future of creative testing is subconscious.
Most of what drives buying happens beneath conscious awareness, in responses your audience never notices and can’t put into words. We measure that layer directly, and make it fast, affordable, and clear enough to act on.
Already measuring attention? We do too, but that’s only a small part of the story.
Attention tells you they looked. It can’t tell you what stayed.
We capture attention in every study, but we don’t stop there. A piece of creative can hold complete attention and still never encode into long-term memory, and only what encodes can shape what people do next.
Research shows that long-term memory encoding, not attention, is what drives future purchasing behaviour (Silberstein & Nield, Int. J. Advertising, 2008).
We provide both, plus the deeper signals that show what’s really landing, and tell you what moments actually work.
What’s happening in the mind, not just what people say afterward.
Ask people why they responded to something and they’ll give you a reason. Often a good one, surveys and interviews are genuinely useful for understanding the why behind behaviour.
But there’s a layer they can’t reach for you. The moments that truly land happen below conscious awareness, in split-second responses people never notice and can’t report. That’s the what: what the brain is actually doing, moment to moment, as your creative plays.
That’s what we measure. Directly. From the brain, not from a questionnaire, not from a model, not from a guess. Every result comes from real people watching your creative and their real brain responses, never synthetic or modelled data. Decades of peer-reviewed research have shown that what is encoded into long-term memory, rather than merely attended to, is what guides future behaviour.
Affordable
Consumer neuroscience has always carried a premium price, the kind of commitment that made it a once-a-year decision, if that. We’ve brought it down to a fraction of what it used to cost, with further savings across multiples and bulk. It moves from a rare luxury to something you can actually build into how you work.
Fast
Consumer neuroscience traditionally takes weeks. We can turn results around in a week, with second-by-second data for every moment of your creative, ready while the campaign decision is still live.
This is the future of creative research.
Faster, more affordable, and finally usable. Not a report you file away, but a clear read on what your audience actually keeps, and exactly what to do about it.
Already aired? We’ve probably measured it.
We’re always testing what’s currently on air, measuring the real brain response to the commercials Australians see every day. Got an ad you’d love to know the results of? How it performed, which moments landed, and how audiences truly responded? If it’s in our library, we can show you exactly what the brain revealed.
A method with more than 30 years behind it.
Our measurement is built on Steady State Topography (SST), a brain-imaging method first described in the peer-reviewed literature in 1990 and refined across more than thirty years of published research (Silberstein et al., Brain Topography, 1990).
As someone watches your creative, SST reads the brain’s electrical activity many times a second. It’s fast enough to capture what happens in less than a second, and robust enough to stay clean through the blinks, movement, and muscle tension that disrupt other methods, so we can follow the response moment by moment, from the first frame to the last.
What the brain commits to memory is one of the most reliable guides we have to what people go on to do. SST activity at frontal sites has been shown to track the strength of long-term memory encoding, and research using SST has linked stronger memory encoding at the moments of branding and key message to greater advertising effectiveness. Crucially, because SST reads this second by second, it doesn’t just tell you that an ad worked, it shows you exactly where.
That’s why we can do more than report a result. We can tell you the exact moments that will land, and the ones that won’t.
Not whether someone can recall an ad afterward, but what is being written into long-term memory as they watch. This is the measure that matters most, because information that never encodes is unlikely to shape what a person does or buys later.
How personally significant something feels to the viewer. Personal significance is one of the strongest drivers of what gets remembered, and therefore of behaviour.
Not whether an emotion is positive or negative, but how strongly it’s felt. Intensity helps drive memory encoding and gives a moment its lasting charge.
Whether a viewer is leaning toward a moment or pulling away from it. This tracks closely with how people say they feel, and reveals how casting, narrative, and audio-visual choices are landing.
Silberstein et al., Int. J. Psychophysiology, 2000 · Silberstein, Seixas & Nield, Frontiers in Neuroscience, 2020
Predictive Signal is an Australian consumer neuroscience firm, built on decades of combined experience measuring how audiences truly respond to creative, at the neural level, across all forms of media, from social and digital to out-of-home, print, and broadcast.
We bring together specialists who’ve worked at the forefront of the field, with a single commitment: making rigorous brain-response insight fast enough, affordable enough, and clear enough to actually use.
The future is subconscious. Measure it. Act on it.
Consumer neuroscience used to be something you commissioned once a year, waited weeks for, paid a fortune for, and filed away. We’ve made it fast, affordable, and genuinely usable, insight you can build into how you work, on a timeline and a budget that make sense.
Ready when you are
Fill out the form or email contact@predictivesignal.com.au and we’ll be in touch.
Testing audiences worldwide.
Wherever your audience is, we can test there, from Europe to North America to Asia.