Creative development is not a straight line. We built a company around that fact.
By Justin Maples
We called it the Creative Snake before we called it anything else. Not a brand name. Just what we drew on a piece of paper when we were trying to explain to each other why the same customer kept telling us different things at different times.
The brief goes out. The videos come back. Some pass, some don’t, some almost do. A cut gets chosen, or doesn’t, or gets chosen and then changed. Something goes live. Something underperforms. The brief gets rewritten. It loops. It doubles back. It never moves in one direction for long.
Everyone in creative knows this. What surprised us was how few tools were built around it.
The Insight Behind Vibe Analytics
We started Vibe Analytics because we believe emotional data helps make better creative decisions. We got that part right from the start. What took us longer to understand was where in the process people actually needed insight, and what they needed before insight could help them.
Our customers kept saying the same thing: the disconnect starts earlier than you think.
- Compliance: A brand manager doesn’t have a measurement problem at the moment she’s watching 15 influencer videos come in against a 48-hour deadline. She has a compliance problem. Are these videos on-brief? Do they violate FTC requirements? Could someone please use the right tagline? Right now, this problem demands slow, haphazard manual watch-throughs.
- Decision: Further in the process, the problem area shifts: now she has 17 approved videos and a media buy to place and a room full of people with opinions, some of them executive opinions. The question has moved to which one actually works and passes muster with the boss. That’s a different moment. A different tool.
- Deep Analysis: Even later in the process, the question becomes why: not which cut won, but what made it land. What happened second-by-second. Where the audience leaned in. What to carry into the next campaign.
Three Products for Three Moments
These are three different moments on the snake. We built a product for each one.
1. Brief Analyzer
Brief Analyzer handles compliance before anything goes live. Upload the brief, upload the videos, get a timestamped report against every requirement. Competitor mentions, FTC disclosures, messaging accuracy. Flagged before approval, not after.
2. Vibe Study
Vibe Study handles the deeper creative question. Second-by-second emotional response, a Vibe Resonance Score, timestamped guidance on what to keep and what to fix. It works at concept, in production, and post-launch.
3. Vibe Selector
Vibe Selector handles the decision in-between. When you have multiple options and need to know which one actually performs, it ranks them by emotional resonance. The debate ends.
The Foundation: Vibe EQ
Vibe EQ is the foundation of it all. We rebuilt our entire measurement technology from the ground up and built a proprietary data model because we needed it for the next level of analysis we wanted to do. It was a major engineering effort and one of the things our team is most proud of.
The Snake in Action
A real engagement might move through the snake like this:
A brand runs an influencer campaign. Brief Analyzer checks all 20 deliverables against the brief before anything goes live. Two get flagged for FTC issues, three for off-brand messaging, and the rest pass. Seventeen approved videos go into Vibe Selector to determine which ones deserve paid amplification. The top three go live with media dollars behind them.
After the campaign runs, Vibe Study goes deep on the top performer to understand what made it work, so the next brief gets better. That’s one path through the snake. Most don’t look exactly like that. The entry point depends on where you are in your process and what question you’re trying to answer today.
Builders First
We built Vibe EQ as a proprietary technology for ourselves, but along the way realized others might want access to it. R&D teams, innovation labs, and teams who need robust, general purpose real-time emotional measurement without building out the infrastructure themselves.
That pattern keeps happening. We build something because we need it and someone else recognizes themselves in it. We are builders first. If you’re sitting on a problem you haven’t found a product for, that’s the kind of conversation we want to have.
The site maps all of it. Every product, every entry point, every question it answers. If something in here sounds like your process, that’s where we start. It turned out that solving the measurement problem was the easy part.