Dentsu Unleashes Marketing Excellence Through Artificial Intelligence and Neuroscience

Dentsu's new, innovative capabilities within the Measurement Engine fuse AI and Neuroscience to unlock the full potential of marketers’ creative assets. By connecting performance insights to customer data and business outcomes, clients can further maximise return on media investment.

Backed by over 100 billion data points, including brain EEG measure, eye-tracking measurements, fast-response tests and extensive human-based memory studies, collected through testing the brain responses of 120,000 people, dentsu is decoding neurological responses to visual stimuli to create a fully automated creative analytics solution at scale. This step change allows teams to transform their creative strategies with precision and confidence, predicting attention, emotion, and memorability using a brands' own historical performance data – before anything is even launched.

Using any asset type, platform, language and market, these insights can be integrated into campaign workflows, including email campaigns, webpages, e-commerce platforms, advertisements, packaging design, and in-store experiences.

By extracting actionable insights from a multitude of images, videos, and text at an accelerated speed, marketers can save hours of manual analysis, experiment with confidence by rapidly pre-testing creative versions to predict behavioural outcomes before deployment and directly link creative impact to business outcomes.

Clients can also unlock local relevance at a global scale, seamlessly analysing, optimising, and delivering creative assets across 83 markets, keeping their brand identity and messaging consistent and relevant at every consumer touchpoint.

“Our AI-infused, neuroscience-backed approach to creative measurement is a game-changer for brand creativity,” says Joe Newcombe SVP, global creative technology and product, dentsu. “By understanding how creative feels, performs, and connects – we can go beyond just making content to giving brands a real-time creative compass, scoring for attention, emotion, and effectiveness before creative goes live. That means smarter investments, faster time to market, and work that moves people. It’s where data meets creative instinct – and that’s incredibly exciting,”

Using five key KPIs – attention, emotional resonance, prominence assessment, cognitive load evaluation, and memory potential – dentsu is putting predictive, creative analytics at the heart of integrated marketing measurement and optimization. This approach has already delivered strong results for clients, including a 120% increase in click-through rate, a 43% decrease in cost per application from optimized social assets, and an 8% increase in video completion rate from optimized OLV creative assets.

“The most important breakthrough has been our ability to combine neuroscience-led models with real-time production data in a way that’s both scalable and brand-specific,” explains Mandy Bath, head of technical AI, dentsu UK&I. “Creative measurement used to rely on lagging indicators – brand lift studies, post-campaign surveys, or subjective feedback – and specific to asset type or platform. But through our Measurement Engine, we’ve integrated cognitive science with machine learning to evaluate creative effectiveness pre-flight and across all creative formats. That means we can now predict attention, emotion, and memorability using a brands' own historical performance data – before anything is launched to ensure a deeper and more impactful connection with audiences."

“When you layer that with live production signals – such as asset usage, reuse rates, localisation variants – and audience engagement data from media and CRM channels, you create a living, learning system. This combination of brand-tuned AI models and real-time data connectivity has allowed us to go from a concept to a core capability – helping marketers make faster, more confident decisions about what to make, where to use it, and how to improve it,” Mandy adds.

These capabilities fit perfectly at two key campaign stages: pre-flight and in-flight. Pre-flight, it plays a critical role in evaluating concepts and assets before they go live – scoring for attention, emotional impact, and brand alignment. This helps creative teams and marketers make faster, more informed decisions, reduce production waste, and increase the likelihood of success from the outset.

In-flight, it continuously monitors how content is performing across channels and markets, providing actionable insights to optimise or adapt creative in near real time.

“By sitting across both stages, the Engine becomes a feedback loop,” says Joe, “closing the gap between strategy, production, and performance. It helps brands shift from static creative testing to always-on, predictive measurement that fuels smarter planning and faster iteration.”

Imagine a global pet nutrition brand launching a new functional food range across 20 markets. Through dentsu’s Measurement Engine, it can pre-test all modular assets – copy, visuals, layouts – against attention and emotional resonance benchmarks using their own historical campaign data. “Before any media spend, they already know which adaptations will perform best in which markets,” suggests Joe. “That means fewer creative rounds, faster production, and a more confident launch.”

Another example: Consider a snacking brand running an influencer-driven social campaign across multiple formats. The Engine scores each asset not only for brand fit, but also for performance by platform and demographic. If creative aimed at gen z under-indexes for attention on TikTok, the team is alerted mid-flight and can optimize instantly – swapping out visuals or adjusting copy tone for better impact.

“In both cases, we don’t just track what happened— we predict what will work and provide a clear feedback loop into the content supply chain. That means better ROI, less creative fatigue, and more consistent brand excellence,” says Joe.

“For dentsu clients, this means moving from subjective, post-hoc evaluation to real-time, predictive insight built into the creative process. We’re no longer guessing what might work – we’re scoring concepts and assets before they even go live, using AI models trained on your own historical brand data.”

These cutting-edge capabilities unlock three big shifts:

1. Fewer rounds, faster production – Creative is guided from the start by intelligence, cutting time-to-market.

2. Higher-performing assets – Every piece of content is scored for emotional resonance, attention, and brand fit – making more of what works.

3. Creative as a growth lever – Performance data flows back into strategy, giving clients a clearer picture of what’s driving results—and what to scale.

“In short, dentsu agencies aren’t just delivering campaigns,” concludes Joe, “they’re delivering a measurable content system that gets better every time it runs.”