Since assuming the role of Chief Product Officer at Ace Metrix back in April, I’ve only grown more energized by the company’s unique combination of powerful technology, rich quantitative and qualitative data, and the entrepreneurial spirit of continuous improvement.

Now that I’ve acclimated to the Ace Metrix environment, I’d like to briefly reflect back on what drew me here and, more importantly, to introduce the market to an exciting new product offering – Ace Metrix BRANDCOMPASS™.

After many years in the mix modeling, testing and ad assessment businesses, I was drawn to Ace Metrix by our shared passion for providing insights that empower advertisers to create increasingly impactful advertising. From the sidelines, I watched Ace Metrix introduce disruptive technology-enabled services, such as the Ace Metrix LIVE syndicated ad assessment platform, into an ad tracking/testing industry that in the eyes of many advertisers had grown stale, bloated and, in many ways, out of sync with the needs of a rapidly changing media environment. In April, I left the sidelines and joined the team, anxious to contribute to its longstanding culture of continuous improvement and innovation, the next output of which is launching today.

As the market responded and our ad assessment business grew, so to has our knowledge base on the creative drivers of ad performance. One of the cultural distinctions of the Ace Metrix team is that we don’t constrain our ever-expanding knowledge base only to the confines of our own heads. We shudder at the thought of letting our potentially game changing information only slowly trickle out to clients in the cumbersome form of PowerPoint decks. In addition to the insights provided by our world-class client consulting team, we place our entire treasure at clients’ fingertips in the form of a web-based portal that provides stunningly easy and expedient access to a massive volume of ad videos and rich quantitative and qualitative data (i.e. consumer verbatims) on over 40,000 ads to date. Let there be no doubt, this is a truly revolutionary and much needed approach to video ad assessment and copy testing.

Introducing Ace Metrix BRANDCOMPASS

With this spirit of innovation in mind, I’m excited to introduce Ace Metrix BRANDCOMPASS, a powerful “next step” in our commitment to continually improve marketers’ ability to develop more impactful advertising. BRANDCOMPASS was born out of our recognition that advertising plays a distinct and vitally important role in the marketing mix. Unlike promotional elements of the marketing mix that are focused against the objective of driving immediate/short-terms sales lifts, activities that too often can have a destructive effect on brand health, advertising is uniquely able to build stronger more durable brands that are positioned to thrive over the long haul. Equity building is a solemn responsibility of advertising, and our clients need to understand how to design creative strategies that will get that job done in market. Since this is clearly a very important issue to our clients, and an issue that is often under-served and over-priced by the traditional equity tracking industry, helping to address it became a high priority for Ace Metrix.

In a traditional brand equity tracking market that our clients often described as bloated, expensive and not actionable (sound familiar?), there was clear need for another dose of Ace Metrix-style disruptive innovation. We’ve answered the call with a cost-effective service that provides a clear line of sight between advertising creative and multiple key dimensions of brand health– maximizing actionability via an elegant and respondent-friendly methodology that is highly sensitive to the impacts of monthly in-market and/or advertising events.

What Makes BRANDCOMPASS Unique? Learn more here or contact us for a demonstration.

I can honestly say its still a rather mind blowing experience for me to wake up in the morning and see what we have to work with – to feed off the technology-enabled energy that comes from imagining the unconstrained possibilities for extracting new and possibly game changing insights and then being able to immediately begin exploring those possibilities. If I may speak for the entire company, we are not only proud of what we have accomplished to date, the energy we have infused into the industry, and the many extraordinary client partnerships we have built, but also of our demonstrable commitment to never stand still; to continue the Ace Metrix tradition of introducing bold new ideas into an innovation-starved marketplace.

There are great times ahead as we directly take on the challenges of today’s highly cluttered media environment where consumers are increasingly both inclined and enabled to avoid ads. We are now in the process of introducing our clients to ground breaking perspectives on the “ad personality characteristics” of “destination advertising”, illuminating the creative levers for developing high breakthrough ads that consumers want to see, ads they may even seek out and could potentially spread, and, importantly, ads that change/enhance their perceptions about the brand.

I look forward to meeting you on what promises to be a very fun and thought- provoking journey into the next generation of advertising-driven brand building!