Storyboard screening

Overview

Once you have a campaign idea, but before you commit to filming or fully producing it, a storyboard, a sequence of illustrated frames showing how the ad or content will unfold, lets you test the narrative and message with real people while changes are still cheap to make.

Why test a storyboard instead of the finished ad

A finished ad is expensive to shoot and hard to change once it's done. A storyboard is deliberately rough, hand-drawn or simply illustrated frames, so participants aren't reacting to production quality. You're checking whether the story makes sense, whether the message lands, and whether it creates the right emotional response, while changes are still easy to make.

How to run this in Decode

Upload your storyboard frames or a simple animatic (a rough video version of the storyboard) using a Media block, see Set up a media block. Since a storyboard tells a story across several frames, enable Facial Coding so you can see how emotional response builds or shifts as the story unfolds, rather than just capturing a single reaction at the end.

Add follow-up questions asking participants what they understood the story or message to be, in their own words. This tells you whether the message you intended is the one actually coming through, or whether something is getting lost along the way.

What to do next

See Read media block results to interpret your results. Once the storyboard direction is validated, see TVC effectiveness setup or Animatics testing setup to test a more finished version.