Test Your Ad —OOH OF THE MONTH OCTOBER 2025

Test Your Ad

By OOH TODAY believes all voices, not just the loudest, must be heard On Nov 19, 2025

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OOH OF THE MONTH OCTOBER 2025

In this monthly feature, looking at the effectiveness of Out Of Home ads we usually focus on the trinity of major Test Your Ad metrics. There’s Star Rating, which predicts long-term effectiveness; Spike Rating, which predicts short-term sales boosts; and Fast Fluency, which measures how accurately people pick up the brand from the briefest glimpse of an ad.

But there’s a lot of other diagnostic metrics to unpack from a Test Your Ad report – ones that reveal more nuanced or hidden truths about how an ad is performing. So this month we’re looking at two ads which don’t score as well on our main metrics but where a look at the diagnostics picks up really valuable information on what’s going on. We’re not neglecting the headline Star Rating though – in fact we’re covering the first ever ad to get a maximum 5.9-Star score on Test Your Ad Out Of Home.

First, though, the ads where Star Rating doesn’t tell the full story. Australia’s best-beloved biscuit Tim Tams is now on sale in the UK, and the brand is raising awareness of the fact with a witty poster campaign. “Down Under’s Favourite Chocolatey Biscuit Is Here”, it proclaims, with a logo and a product shot. The twist? The ad is displayed upside down, making people work a little harder to get the “down under” joke.

Not all the audience enjoy working to get the point of an ad, and we see an emotional backlash in the form of a low Star Rating and comments criticizing the format. But when we look at one of the other diagnostic measures in the Test Your Ad report we see a different story. The Key

Associations for the ad are all positive, and exactly in line with what Tim Tams would be hoping for: “Chocolate”, “Biscuits”, “Tim Tams” and “Australia” are the top four.

So even if the first response to the ad isn’t as positive as you’d hope, the Key Associations show that there’s no actual problem understanding it. Tim Tams have made the kind of ad you’d expect to work better on repeated viewings once that initial surprise wears off.

Key Associations and audience comments play a big part in making sense of our second ad, a ChatGPT poster tested in the US. The poster shows two people working to repair their car, looking at the screen of a phone as they lean over the bonnet. The prominent ChatGPT logo implies that they’re using AI to help them. This ad scores well on Fast Fluency – people recognize the ChatGPT brand quickly – but only gets a 1-Star Rating. It would be easy to look at that and think “AI backlash” but Test Your Ad diagnostics can help uncover what’s actually going on.

Most of the response to ChatGPT’s ad is neutral, not negative, with the report’s verbatim comments revealing why. AI isn’t the problem here – dullness is. The minimal copy and neutral colours mean the ad feels visually boring and static. (See System1’s Cost Of Dull report for why dullness is even worse than negativity for advertisers!). Most of the comments which actually mention AI are from the 23% of Happy viewers.

The Key Associations for ChatGPT are even more revealing and offer creative guidance for the brand. On average, AI is a neutral association, not a positive or negative one. That’s not a great finding for a brand whose product is AI, but the Test Your Ad report points to positive associations too. Technology is a plus, as is “information” and “help”. ChatGPT needs to emphasize its helpful results, not its AI process.

No such guidance is necessary for our final ad, a brilliant campaign from Cadburys for their Heroes brand of bite-size variety chocolates. This is the first Out Of Home ad ever to get the maximum 5.9-Star Rating and it lands exceptional scores on short-term Spike Rating and on Fluency too. Is it the perfect poster? It’s the closest we’ve found yet.

So what makes it so good? Like the Tim Tams ad, it turns a brand idea into a visual concept which makes the audience work a little bit to “get” it. Unlike Tim Tams, it makes that work easy and immediately rewarding. The idea behind “All Heroes No Zeroes” is posters which show the

individual chocolates in a Heroes selection tin, but with the familiar logos changed to the names of heroes from British books, folklore and pop culture. So there’s a poster with the chocolates representing characters from Pride And Prejudice, one with the logos switched for the members

of Queen, and one with characters from Robin Hood.

What makes the Cadburys ad so brilliant is that it looks at first sight just like an ad for a product people like, with great use of the brand’s distinctive assets like the Dairy Milk or Fudge logos and the rich purple color. In other words, even if someone never looks long enough to get the second layer of meaning, the ad works just as a Heroes poster. But when they do get that second layer, the ad feels even better, more clever and happier.

This is one of the fundamental lessons you can learn from Test Your Ad. Great outdoor ads need to work quickly, almost immediately in fact. If your idea can do that and deliver something extra on top, then you’ve got a winner. But a lot of ideas can’t do that, and that’s where the topline numbers don’t tell the whole story: you need diagnostics and guidance to explain what’s happening and get to the OOH Factor.

Cadbury

VCCP

OpenAI in house

ChatGPT

Tim Tams

Brand Hackers

Insiders Studio

Zenith Media