Introducing Curated Norms: A new standard for measuring ad effectiveness

Some campaigns just don’t land like they used to.

“Whassup?” from Budweiser was once a cultural phenomenon. It let everybody in on an inside joke while underscoring the value of its product, without even showing its product. Today, it would probably raise more questions about how home phones work than interest in the product. 

In the age of the attention economy, associations with distinctive brand assets can change in a matter of days. Jet2holidays here in the UK have become an overnight meme on TikTok, forever changing the way in which their audio cues are perceived by consumers.

Context changes in advertising, humour evolves, and what once felt timely and resonant fades over time. The same is true for the benchmarks we use to measure its effectiveness. 

Norms are a cornerstone of advertising research. They give marketers a comparative way to evaluate creative – offering a sense of how an ad stacks up against a broad set of campaigns. After all, it feels validating when reporting back to marketing teams to say your ad tested in the top X% compared to thousands of ads. 

But bigger doesn’t always mean better. The catch is that those same norms can easily become outdated. Most traditional norms are built by aggregating huge volumes of data over time. The result is scale, yes—but also inertia. The larger the database, the harder it becomes for new trends and consumer expectations to influence the norm. 

That means benchmarks might reflect what’s great, but they don’t always reflect what’s great now. And in a world where consumer expectations are changing faster than ever, that creates real risk. Outdated benchmarks can lead to poor investment decisions, missed growth opportunities—or ads that simply don’t connect with consumers.

Over the last few years, Amplify TV has built one of the largest databases of pre-tested advertising in the world—with over 10,000 ads tested across the globe. This scale reflects the strength of our partnerships and the pace at which leading brands are embracing continuous learning. 

But we know that culture moves faster than large data sets. That’s why we’re introducing Curated Norms as the new default benchmark in Zappi’s Amplify TV solution.

These norms are:

• Representative: Built from a diverse mix of ads across leading brands and categories, so no single campaign or brand dominates

• Relevant: Updated annually to reflect today’s cultural context and creative landscape

• Balanced: Designed to offer a full range of scores so you can meaningfully differentiate between ads

• Stable: Engineered to reduce volatility and remove misleading swings in percentiles

• Transparent: Clear, consistent criteria – no black boxes, no guessing what your ads are being compared against

Zappi Curated Norms are a carefully selected set of high-quality ads, tested within the past 12 months by Zappi, designed to reflect how today’s consumer receives advertising. Curated norms are evaluated on a country level, because your ad isn’t just competing with others in your category, it’s competing with everything else people see on their screens. 

We select ads from 25 of the top advertising categories across each country. Then we choose ads from market leaders – ensuring our norms reflect the best of what’s running and what’s being seen the most in the market today. 

This approach is rooted in how people actually engage with advertising today. Research from Karen Nelson-Field found that roughly 85% of digital ads receive less than 2.5 seconds of active attention. While the active attention paid to TV ads is nearly four times longer (9.7 seconds), the principle of capturing attention with distinctive brand assets and messaging is still paramount. 

And here’s what sets Curated Norms apart: we refresh them annually, removing and replacing up to one-third of the ads. That keeps the benchmark both culturally relevant and statistically stable—not frozen in time. We also exclude ads tied to narrow seasonal moments, those that are over-tested, or those that skew the data in ways that don’t reflect the realities of today’s market.

In short, Curated Norms are built to help brands stay connected—to consumers, to culture, and to what it takes to succeed right now.

Advertising has always been a reflection of its time. And in today’s volatile media landscape, understanding how an ad resonates with consumers is essential. 

Curated norms raise the bar for insight quality and decision confidence. In addition to norms curated from first-party data, they provide a robust benchmark to help teams go to market with a new campaign confident of its ability to drive high ROI. 

“Zappi has allowed us to iterate to get to a place where all of our TV copy is now significantly above the industry average. And when you are trying to build a brand from the ground up, that most people the first time they see your commercial is the first time they’ve seen your brand, you’ve got to nail it! We’ve been able to do that thanks to our internal and creative agency and the partnership with Zappi and the great tools they’ve given us access to.” – SoFi

Zappi’s Amplify advertising system is already proven to drive high return on ad spend (ROAS), and curated norms make it even easier to understand how your creative can move culture and performance. As of today, curated norms are available to all Zappi customers testing US-based advertising using Amplify TV.

Because when your benchmarks reflect today’s world, your advertising is more likely to win in it.

Learn more about curated norms by visiting our Knowledge base or chat with us below to learn more.