Seedlabs

Infection Score: Two-Sided Emotional Transmission Testing for Brand Creative

A service that checks if the emotion felt by an ad creator is the same emotion felt by the audience.

A pre-testing service for ads and brand films that scores creative on how faithfully the emotion the creative team actually felt is transmitted to a test audience — measuring both sides of the emotional 'infection' equation, not just audience reaction.

Arts and HumanitiesEthics, Aesthetics, and Art
Aesthetic Perception and AnalysisAdvertising creative pre-testing and brand storytelling

Concept

A pre-testing module for advertising and brand creative built on the 1898 emotionalist theory of art [0]: a work succeeds when a feeling the maker has actually lived through is handed on through external signs and "infects" the audience. Every major ad-testing product measures only the receiving side — how audiences react. Infection Score measures both sides, and the gap between them.

Workflow

  1. Sincerity intake (maker side). A structured interview with the creative team: what specific feeling the work is meant to transmit, where it comes from in lived experience, how personally it was felt. Scored for specificity and sincerity.
  2. Audience panel (receiver side). A targeted panel views the creative; felt emotion is captured through self-report paired with behavioral measures, because corpus work shows people's beliefs about their own aesthetic responses diverge from their actual behavior [6].
  3. Transmission fidelity. Congruence between the maker's stated feeling and the audience's felt feeling, reported as one Infection Score (0–100) with three sub-scores mirroring the treatise's conditions of infectiousness — individuality of the feeling, clarity of expression, sincerity of the maker [0] — plus a diagnosis of where transmission breaks down.

Delivered as a licensed module for existing testing platforms or a standalone pre-launch study for brand teams.

Why now

The new paper [0] supplies the two-sided criterion — transmission of lived-through feeling from maker to receiver, with sincerity as the decisive condition — that no current ad-testing product operationalizes; audience-side testing alone cannot distinguish a sincere story badly executed from a hollow one that scores well on surface response. Empirical aesthetics has established that the perceptual and emotional processes of aesthetic experience can be captured with current methods [3][4], making the receiver-side measurement deliverable today, and eye-movement evidence that self-reported aesthetic influence diverges from actual viewing [6] justifies pairing self-report with behavioral measures. The flood of AI-assisted, "effectful" creative makes the maker-side check newly valuable: the treatise's attack on art for art's sake [0] predicts that polished form without felt emotion transmits nothing — exactly the failure mode of content produced at scale without anyone feeling it.

Written by GLM · 8 Oct 2026

AI assessment

Backed by 4 papers59

A conceptually intriguing application of aesthetic theory that lacks a rigorous, objective method for measuring 'maker sincerity,' making it more of a qualitative consulting framework than a scalable software product.

Evidence strength
2/5
The core premise relies on a 19th-century philosophical treatise rather than empirical data, and the supporting papers on empirical aesthetics provide general feasibility for receiver-side measurement but do not validate the 'transmission' theory.
Market pull
3/5
High-end brand teams and agencies value 'authenticity,' but the willingness to pay for a 'sincerity score' is speculative compared to traditional conversion or sentiment metrics.
Novelty & moat
4/5
The two-sided 'infection' approach is a distinct departure from standard one-sided audience testing and does not overlap significantly with existing catalog ideas.
Feasibility
2/5
While the audience side is feasible, there is no objective way to 'score' the sincerity of a creative team's lived experience beyond subjective interview analysis.
Wedge clarity
3/5
The focus on pre-testing for brand films is a clear entry point, though the delivery as a 'module' for existing platforms is a more realistic go-to-market strategy.
Simplicity / focus
4/5
The product is focused on a single metric (the Infection Score) and a specific workflow, avoiding the trap of becoming a broad creative platform.

Scored by Gemma 4 · 8 Oct 2026. Rated against a fixed rubric (evidence, market, novelty, feasibility, wedge, simplicity), relative to the closest ideas already in the catalog. A prior estimate to compare ideas before real-world signal arrives.

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Who benefits

  • System1 Groupcompany

    Tests emotional response to advertising at scale with its star ratings; the maker-side sincerity and transmission-congruence measurement is its obvious blind spot, and licensing the module would differentiate its product.

  • Kantarcompany

    One of the largest ad pre-testing businesses; adding a maker-side sincerity module lets it answer the question clients now ask about AI-assisted creative — did anyone on the team actually feel this?

  • Zappicompany

    A productized ad-testing platform; a transmission-fidelity score slots directly into its automated pre-launch workflows for brand teams.

  • Charity: waterorganization

    Its fundraising campaigns depend on transmitting the founders' felt urgency to donors; a transmission score would show which stories actually infect audiences before launch.

  • Patagoniacompany

    Brand value rests on sincerely felt environmental conviction; the score guards against storytelling drifting into effectful but hollow content as the brand scales.

Research it builds on

  1. What Is Art? (1898)
    Leo Tolstoy · 2026 · 233 citations
    All ideas from this paper →
  2. The nature of perception and emotion in aesthetic appreciation: A response to Makin’s challenge to empirical aesthetics.
    Martin Skov, Marcos Nadal · 2019 · 40 citations
    All ideas from this paper →
  3. Does descriptive text change how people look at art? A novel analysis of eye-movements using data-driven Units of Interest
    Alan Davies, Manuele Reani, Markel Vigo et al. · 2017 · 7 citations
    All ideas from this paper →
  4. The nature of perception and emotion in aesthetic appreciation: A response to Makin’s challenge to Empirical Aesthetics
    Martin Skov, Marcos Nadal · 2019 · 5 citations
    All ideas from this paper →
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