Introduction
The Pencil Scoring Framework is a flexible and powerful scoring system that allows you to evaluate, understand and improve your ads with insights that are tailored to your brand. Building on our Media Prediction Score, the Pencil Scoring Framework helps bring more personalisation, clarity and control.
The overall 'headline' score blends Pencil's Proprietary models, third-party tools and your own Custom AI Scores. Beneath the headline number, the Pencil score tells you not just how your ad is performing, but why, and how you can improve it further.
In addition to the pre-existing Pencil Media Performance score and Pencil Brand Relevance score, you can integrate third party providers like CreativeX - see here for details
Finally, you can create Custom Scores, which is where the true power of the Pencil Scoring Framework lies. You can use Pencil's flexible architecture to define custom scores for anything that matters to you including, for example:
Tone of Voice
Diversity and Inclusion
Brand-specific Storytelling
Audience-specific Relevance
Region-specific Scoring
Adherence to Regulatory Compliance
Your imagination really is the limit here, and within this framework, scoring becomes a creative tool, not a simple judgement. You get a full picture of your ad's strengths and weaknesses along with actionable next steps to improve creative quality.
This is Human and AI convergence that works with your creative team, not against it. It's creativity at scale - grounded in data, guided by your brand, evaluated against the things that matter to you, and accelerated by Pencil
How Do I Create Custom Scores?
Start by going to Settings -> Scores:
From here, choose 'New score' in the top right corner of the screen, after which you will be presented with the following screen in which you can configure your Custom Score:
Give your Custom Score a Name that makes it easily identifiable to you and others in your team.
Compose a simple prompt based on 'Does this ad....' (e.g. Does this ad 'resonate with 25-40 year olds working professionals based in London?')
Select the types of media that the Custom Score will be used to measure. Choose one or more from:
Images
Videos
Creatives
Variations
Choose the AI model that will power your score. Currently choose from:
OpenAI GPT-4o
Google Gemini 2.5 Flash
Google Gemini 2.0 Flash
Add any additional knowledge/background that you want the model to draw on when evaluating media - for example this could be product-specific information, or context, location or audience information. You can upload .pdf and .docx files.
Choose whether to enable Brand Library knowledge. This determines whether the model is able to access the Brand Library and use information in drawn from it as part of its evaluation.
On the right hand side you will see that you have the ability to test your Custom Score by selecting and ad from your pre-existing work, and seeing the output generated by the Custom Score.
A Worked Example
We will use our fake brand Tramonto - a hearty stout beer - which has a well-developed Brand Library. We will put together a simple Custom Score to see how well our creatives/ads resonate with 25-40 year olds working in London. I will be using OpenAI GPT-4o and allowing access to the Brand Library:
I will bring in an existing creative/ad to test the score:
After pressing 'Request Score' an overall score is provided - in this case 85. Additionally the following analysis and recommendations are provided based on our criteria and brand knowledge from the Brand Library:
"The creative effectively targets 25-40 year old working professionals in London by showcasing a sophisticated, relaxed setting that resonates with this demographic. The tagline "Punch Out and Pour Up" cleverly connects the idea of finishing work with enjoying a drink, appealing to professionals looking to unwind. The emphasis on traditional brewing and rich taste aligns with the brand's history and quality, which is likely to appeal to this audience. The ad successfully incorporates brand guidelines by focusing on the joy and memories associated with Tramonto, using conversational language that feels friendly and accessible. The visual of a person enjoying the drink adds a personal touch, enhancing the theme of shared experiences. However, the ad could improve by incorporating more explicit elements of community or shared experiences, as the image primarily focuses on an individual. Additionally, the lack of captions might limit accessibility for some viewers. Overall, the creative aligns well with the brand's guidelines and the custom scoring criteria, but there is room for slight improvement in emphasizing community themes."
You can choose to tweak your Custom Score further, or go ahead and press Publish in the top right hand corner.
Once published, your Custom Score will be visible in Settings -> Scores where it can be edited or deleted:
Navigating to the 'Work' section of my workspace, you can filter on Images and Creatives (which our Custom Score was built for) and, in the Predictions column you can choose an Image or Creative and select the Predictions dropdown where you will see all the scores available to you including our newly created Custom Score.
The dropdown shows an average of all scores, a brief Prediction summary and some overall Suggestions.
Selecting an individual score will take you to a more detailed analysis for that particular score and its criteria:
Conclusion
Custom scores truly are that - custom. You can build a scoring framework around anything you like - whether for an individual ad or for a broader campaign across different media.