In 1899, a bet prompted Eadweard Muybridge to sequentially photograph horses so that people could see whether or not all four feet ever simultaneously left the ground. As art critic Robert Hughes has put it, Muybridge's brilliant stratagem "introduced time into space." Muybridge used his new insight to empower people to observe the invisible: A horse does indeed gallop with all four legs off the ground.

As with Muybridge's work, the Ameritest® system helps you see things others don't. Our non-verbal techniques create a visual vocabulary that gets into the mind of the consumer. We provide insights into the feeling or emotional components of your advertising so important for long-term brand equity.

Ameritest doesn't reward any particular formula for advertising, beyond that of success. This provides creatives with the freedom to produce truly innovative ads. Our research helps by providing:

• A valid set of report card measures—Stopping Power, Brand Linkage and Motivation—filter ideas, without subjective bias.
• A diagnostic advertising model that includes non-verbal techniques: Ameritest's Picture Sorts®, Flow of Attention® and Flow of Emotion®.
• A road map for grouping and interpreting the information collected—one that separates the "report card" measures needed for "go/no go" decision-making, and the diagnostics that provide opportunities for optimization.

If your goal is to sustain a competitive advantage by making smarter decisions about your advertising, then you need to constantly improve your mental model of how advertising works.

Essentially, the Ameritest model says that for any commercial to be effective, it must accomplish three things:

• It must get noticed and attract an audience—attention.
• The audience must know who is sending the advertising message—brand linkage.
• Once the commercial has the audience's attention, it must sell them something—motivation.

Other measures are important only insofar as they help to explain attention, brand linkage, and motivation. For example, entertainment is not important in and of itself, but because it is an important predictor of attention.

Now look again, the left side of our model is about the advertising execution and the right side is about the strategic message being communicated. This is often seen as the creative "yin and yang" of advertising.

On the execution side, attention can be explained by:

• Entertainment—Does the execution entertain or reward viewers with an enjoyable experience in return for the 30 or 60 seconds they're asked to spend with your client's message?
• Flow of Attention—Is the execution a well-edited piece of film that captures and maintains the viewer's attention over time, and does it focus their thoughts and feelings on the commercial's essential content at a reasonable pace?

On the strategic side, motivation is also dichotomous construct, explained by:

• Communication—How relevant, believable and brand-differentiating is the strategic promise you are communicating to your customers?
• Flow of Emotion—How much emotion have you induced though the power of film to make you brand's promise seem "larger than life" and even more compelling?

The Ameritest model generates insights to help you take good ideas and make them better. It incorporates emotional, feeling components and does not just reward rational advertising. When combined with Ameritest's experience, it will help you to learn faster and stay smarter than your competition about what works in your category.