The other day, one of their beta users wrote to Visibl with an amazing story: This user was excited to say he just landed his biggest client to date and he had used Visibl to do it. Rather than just presenting creative ideas to this client he put his ideas to the test and actually bought media against two different creative video executions. Risky for sure in more ways than one. But in the final pitch he unveiled the campaigns and his prospective client loved both. Then he unveiled the data he gathered from the Visibl dashboard showing that in the real world one campaign clearly outperformed the other. Boom, instant trust. The client was so impressed they forgot to be mad (that he ran work without their permission) - and he landed the account.

The part of the story that is maybe most outrageous is that this guy wasn’t an account guy or a planner or even a media guy. He’s the creative director.

It’s a long running cliché. The client wants to test some work and the creative people are up in arms. I’ve certainly had more than my share of knock down drag out brawls around testing. As a creative you sound like you’re being defensive even when your arguments are valid. “Don’t you have faith in your creative convictions?” they ask. “Of course, I do, and I have no fear of well-designed, real-world testing but what you’re suggesting is to ask people in a room to play guest creative director. If you have so much faith in them why not pay them what you’re paying me?” And round and round it goes because focus groups suck for testing creative and services like MillwardBrown are pricey even in this digital age.

What good creative people know is that how people see and respond to creative work in the real world is very different than how they respond in a focus group or even in some of the very expensive and more thoughtfully designed methodology. It’s just never real.

Good ad people love and respond to good data but good data on creative is hard to find. But maybe that’s getting easier. We launched Visibl so that anybody with any budget could take advantage of hyper-targeted video pre-roll advertising. Agencies, big and small, have lost the ability and the revenue associated with media buying but the next phase of the digital media revolution is democratizing the buying tools in the same way video production has been democratized with those tools.

We want to help build a world where it’s the size of your ideas not the size of your budget that matters. And that includes media.

What we didn’t expect was how many social media agencies, clients, ad agencies and small businesses would use Visibl for real-world, statistically relevant A/B testing. It makes total sense in retrospect. With a $40 buy against a target the platform will deliver over 1000 real world impressions. Doing testing against a similar sample size with MillwardBrown runs a over $7,000. Visibl provides a huge savings and allows for a decent mark up for the agency.

Want to know which offer performs better? Find out the truth for less than 100 bucks. Then do your big TV buy. Want to know which creative is more engaging? Find out which spot was watched longer on average. Then place your big buy. And so on and so on.

Users are constantly optimizing their online and broadcast buys and leveraging statistical data to make better choices. Maybe while we’re busy at work democratizing media we might just make a dent in democratizing quantitative research, too.

www.visibl.io