Jimmy KimCEO & Founder, Commerce Roundtable · Marketer of 17+ Years, 4x Founder. Former DTC/Retailer & SaaS Founder. Newsletter. Host of ASOM & Send it! Podcast. DTC Event: Commerce Roundtable

How Sarah Levinger Validates Emotional Messaging Before Scaling Campaigns

12 May 2025 · 1 min

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1:04

In this brief podcast segment, the host (Speaker A) asks how marketers can validate emotional appeals generated with AI. Speaker B explains that the most straightforward method is to run targeted ad experiments, especially for acquisition goals. Rather than launching large‑scale campaigns, they recommend pulling AI‑derived insights into a very small group of ads to test whether the messaging truly resonates. They stress the importance of having data that supports the hypothesis before scaling, and warn against the common marketer habit of flooding the market with ads without validation. Additionally, Speaker B notes a cognitive processing limit: regardless of how many spreadsheets or AI summaries are produced, the human brain can only absorb a finite amount of information before it starts making broad generalizations. The segment ends with a call to subscribe to the podcast.

See, with AI now, it's made it way easier than you probably had to do this in the past through like manual work. And so that's how you go into research. The question is, how do you validate it? Like, what tells you that you're validating these emotional appeals and they're really resonating with your customers?
Easiest way to do this is, is to run ads, or specifically run ads or run— it depends on like what you're trying to do. If it's acquisition, for sure want to test this with an ad. So we'll take the insights that we currently have out there in the ecosystem, then we'll pull them into very small subgroup of ads. I don't typically go for volume unless I know exactly what I want to say. I know this is gonna work for this customer. We have the data to support it. Typically I start with a very small group, mostly cuz what I've noticed is the marketers just like to dump sometimes just to get stuff in there. And they're like, go, go, go as fast as we can. The toughest part about that is we also have a cognitive like stack, like a limit basically on what our brain can process. So it doesn't matter how many spreadsheets you have or how much AI you're running this into, how many summaries you get, your brain can only process so much information before it's gonna start to just make generalizations real quick.
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