How Mattress Firm Hit a 51% Purchase Intent Rate and Turned Around ROAS

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Executive Summary

To strengthen brand equity and drive store visits, Mattress Firm refined its TV creative strategy, shifting from broad awareness tactics to an empathetic, solution-oriented messaging approach. By testing and optimizing the brand’s modular “Sleep Easy” campaign against historical benchmarks using iSpot Creative Assessment, Mattress Firm established new brand performance records—achieving an all-time high 701 Ace Score (overall creative effectiveness metric blending compelling messaging with rewatch likelihood) and a 51% Purchase Intent rate, beating the 48% Purchase Intent rate industry benchmark. Causal Impact Modeling confirmed that this creative evolution successfully accelerated incremental traffic, sales revenue, and marketing ROI.

Solution

To evaluate creative effectiveness and diagnose performance drop-off before committing significant media dollars, Mattress Firm combined iSpot Creative Assessment with neuroscience creative diagnostics, forced-exposure testing, and in-market tracking. As part of the analysis, iSpot reviewed a historical cross-section of 109 Mattress Firm ads from 2017-2025, benchmarking performance across seven key KPIs: Attention, Persuasion, Relevance, Information, Likeability, Polarity and Purchase Intent. This benchmark revealed that previous creative shifts toward pure storytelling starved the ads of “Information” (dropping scores from a historical norm of 689 to 634), which correlated directly to a decrease in Persuasion Score. iSpot copy testing was then deployed to concept-test the new creative against historical brand baselines.

Because traditional clean test/control geographic isolation is rarely viable in national retail deployments, the Mattress Firm analytics team subsequently utilized Causal Impact Modeling. By feeding historic data into time-series algorithms, a mathematical counterfactual estimate was generated representing what performance would have been without the campaign intervention. This successfully isolated the ad strategy’s true incremental contribution to traffic and revenue.

Results

The newly developed “Sleep Easy” campaign took a radical shift in tone, moving from polarizing, shock-value humor to an empathetic, solution-focused framework–mapped to iSpot copy-testing feedback. 

The new ad structure also allowed for more seamless optimization. Product lines and sleep disruptors could be swapped in and out based on seasonal inventory and platform requirements without breaking the core narrative thread. The deployment prioritized premium, long-form video inventory across National Television and YouTube to maximize message clarity and copy encoding.

Ultimately, the updated “Sleep Easy” campaign delivered a complete operational turnaround, establishing new historical performance benchmarks for Mattress Firm across all key iSpot diagnostic metrics:

• Overall Ace Score: Reached an all-time brand record of 701, heavily outpacing prior creative strategy lows of 636.
• Persuasion Score: Skyrocketed to 721 (up from 665), proving that the problem-solution architecture successfully motivated viewer action.
• Information Score: Jumped to 711 (up from a depressed 638), fully restoring the educational substance lost in prior story-only ads.
• Relevance Score: Climbed to 732 (up from 652), confirming that addressing acute sleep disruptors resonated deeply with target demographics without relying on gimmicks.
• Attention Score: Achieved near-record levels at 732, proving that a straightforward message does not need shock-value shortcuts to break through.
• Ad Branding: Reached an exceptional 80% Brand Recognition (vs. a 66% campaign baseline).
• Purchase Intent Rate: Diagnostic forced-exposure testing confirmed a 51% purchase intent rate, significantly beating the 48% industry benchmark.