Amplified vs System1

Human attentionvs human emotion

Two complementary approaches. One fundamental difference.

Both Amplified and System1 help marketers improve advertising effectiveness. The difference is what each company is designed to measure.

System1 helps brands understand how advertising makes people feel. Amplified helps brands understand whether advertising was actually seen, processed and capable of creating commercial impact.

The comparison

Two leaders. Two different questions.

System1
Ad effectiveness

For more than 25 years, System1 has become one of the world’s best-known advertising effectiveness companies, helping marketers predict long-term brand growth through emotional response testing, distinctive brand assets and creative effectiveness. Its methodology is built around a simple principle:

Core principle
Great advertising creates emotion.
Amplified
human-led measurement

Amplified starts one step earlier. Our science focuses on measuring the quality of human attention because attention determines whether an advertisement has the opportunity to create memory, emotion and ultimately business outcomes.

Core principle
Great advertising first has to be noticed.

Rather than replacing emotional measurement, Amplified provides the behavioural foundation upon which emotional effectiveness is built.

The order that matters

Emotion is important.

But before an advertisement can make someone feel something…

…it first needs to earn their attention.

The distinction

Attention comes before emotion

Consumers cannot emotionally respond to advertising they never truly process. That’s why Amplified measures the quality of attention. Rather than treating every impression equally, we identify how much of your audience is genuinely engaged at every second of your creative.

01
Active attention

The moments where people are consciously processing the advertising.

02
Passive attention

The time viewers spend looking near, but not directly at your ad.

03
Non-attention

Moments where the advertising simply isn’t working.

04
Attentive reach & decay

How far genuine attention travels and how quickly it falls away.

Before asking whether advertising created an emotional response, it’s critical to understand whether people actually experienced it.

This distinction allows marketers to understand
  • Whether people stayed with the ad
  • When attention declined
  • When branding was first processed
  • Which creative elements retained viewers
  • Where attention was lost
The foundation

Built on real human behaviour

Amplified combines best-in-class research methodologies with market-leading attention measurement to help platform owners and media partners answer their most important commercial questions. Whether it's validating the attentive power of advertising inventory, measuring in-market brand impact, understanding audience behaviour, or uncovering opportunities through deep audience segmentation, our technology and machine learning models deliver robust, actionable attention insights tailored to each business challenge.

01

Across genuine media environments

02

Across multiple devices

03

Across TV, digital, social, cinema and OOH

04

Under real-world distraction

Across every environment

TV

Social

Online video

Cinema

Out of home

Learn more about Research ->
Micro-second resolution

Behaviour at micro-second resolution

Attention changes continuously. Milliseconds determine whether branding is seen, whether key messages land and whether audiences continue watching. Amplified captures behavioural changes at an exceptionally granular level, producing second-by-second attention curves that reveal:

0 25 50 75 100 Active attention (%) 0 3 6 9 12 15 Seconds
01
Audience engagement
02
Attention decay
03
Hook performance
04
Hold performance
05
Branding visibility
06
Platform-specific differences
The power of Amplified's AttentionAI

From measurement to prediction

AttentionAI extends this capability even further. Using sophisticated machine learning models trained on billions of real human attention observations, AttentionAI predicts how creative will perform before campaigns launch.

Every creative asset is analysed across
Visual composition
Motion
Text
Branding
Faces
Objects
Platform dynamics
Historical behavioural patterns
AttentionAI
Billions of observations
The result is platform-specific predictions for
Creative Attention Score
Active Attention
Hook & Hold
Attention Decay
Attentive Reach
Creative benchmarking
The whole lifecycle

Beyond creative testing

System1 has established itself as one of the industry’s leading creative effectiveness platforms. Amplified was built to support decisions across the entire marketing lifecycle. Our dataset and research capabilities enable organisations to:

Predict creative performance
Plan media using attention
Optimise media investment
Test creative via an attention lens
Feed attention into Marketing Mix Models
Power planning systems through APIs
Feature comparison

Amplified vs System1

Capability
Amplified
System1
Real human eye-tracking
Behavioural measurement

Survey & behavioural response

Active vs passive attention
Emotion measurement

Expanding capabilities

Core capability
Creative testing
Creative prediction before launch
AttentionAI
Media planning

Limited

Campaign measurement

Limited

Marketing Mix Model integration

Limited

API integrations

Available for enterprise workflows

Cross-channel attention measurement

Primarily creative evaluation

Peer-reviewed attention science

Behavioural science & advertising effectiveness

Amplified and System1 address different stages of the effectiveness journey. Many organisations use emotional measurement alongside behavioural attention data to gain a more complete understanding of advertising performance.

Why leading marketers choose Amplified

Effectiveness depends on more than great creative

It depends on whether that creative receives sufficient attention to influence memory, perception and behaviour.

Amplified helps organisations understand
  • What people actually looked at
  • How long they remained engaged
  • Where creative succeeded or failed
  • Which media environments maximise attention
  • How attention contributes to business outcomes
A better input for better decisions

Don’t just understand how advertising makes people feel.

Understand whether they were truly paying attention in the first place.

Emotion explains how advertising resonated.

Attention explains whether it had the opportunity to resonate in the first place.

Together, these are powerful. Independently, they answer different questions. For organisations seeking to optimise creative, media investment and marketing effectiveness from a single behavioural foundation, Amplified delivers comprehensive attention intelligence grounded in real human observation, advanced machine learning and proven scientific research.