How We Made The Pencil Media Performance Score Better Than Ever

By Brendan Dubsky

What if you could know which of your ads will perform best — before you even put budget behind them?

That’s exactly what the Pencil Media Performance Score delivers.

While this feature isn’t new in Pencil, we’ve been doing a lot of work behind the scenes to make it smarter, faster, and more accurate — helping you make creative decisions with even greater confidence.

Here, we’ve pulled together a run-through of the latest developments to help you get the very best out of your campaigns, powered by the latest AI and predictive machine learning.

First up, the basics: 

The Pencil Media Performance score is a simple, interpretable number between 0 and 100 that gives you a clear prediction of how strong your ad will be.

A score of 85 means your ad is expected to outperform 85% of all the other ads you’ve run. In other words: you get a data-backed read on which creatives are most likely to win clicks.

The current version focuses on CTR (Click-Through Rate). Longer term, we plan to expand the Score to cover metrics such as CPC, CPM and ROAS, giving you a fuller spectrum of performance predictions. There’s no set timeline for these yet, but that’s the direction we’re headed.

‍

How the AI ad prediction works

The Media Performance Score uses machine learning models trained on thousands of ads.

• It scans our database to find ads visually and contextually similar to yours.
• It analyzes their real-world performance data.
• It then delivers a data-backed performance score you can trust.

To activate the Media Performance Score, you first need to connect your ad account or share historical creative data. This is what the AI learns from: your unique style, audience and vertical.

From there, the more data you feed in, the sharper the predictions become.

‍

Accuracy that drives results

So how accurate is it?

In large-scale testing across more than 7,000 ads, the Media Performance Score consistently showed strong predictive power:

• Using decile performance bands, 61% of ads were placed in exactly the right performance band or one step away.
• Predictions aligned with actual results with a correlation score of 70.5 — a strong signal in the world of ad forecasting.

That means you’re not just guessing which ads might work. You’re using AI to stack the odds in your favour.

The chart above compares actual ad performance (Ground Truth CTR Percentile) with the Media Performance Score’s predicted performance.

• Each dot represents an ad.
• The red dashed line is a perfect prediction.
• Green dots show ads where the prediction was either exact or within one performance band of reality.

With a correlation of 70.5, the Pencil Media Performance Score shows strong alignment between AI-predicted CTR and real-world results.

‍

Why predictive advertising matters for marketers

The Pencil Media Performance Score isn’t just a number. It’s a creative testing shortcut that helps marketers:

• Prioritize top-performing ads before launch → focus budget on the highest-potential creatives.
• Reduce wasted spend → fewer dollars burned on underperforming ads.
• Scale winning ideas faster → predict which styles, products, and messages will resonate.

It’s like giving every ad a predictive performance “health check” before launch — helping you spend smarter, move faster, and unlock more ROI.

The future of advertising is predictive. With the Pencil Media Performance Score, you don’t just test ads — you predict their success.