Creative Effectiveness Awards 2021 – A Kiwi Perspective

This is the second year of the prestigious global Kantar Creative Effectiveness Awards and we are very pleased to bring you some of the key learnings from our evaluation of more than 10,000 ads that consumers have given us their feedback on. Our global awards are different to others in that they not only evaluate the effectiveness of ads but this is done using actual consumer responses gleaned from our Link evaluation suite of tools available on Kantar Marketplace.

So, what are the key learnings we can draw on from these award-winning ads? Well, essentially, there are five key habits and five tactics, they variously use to ensure either successful short-term or long-term outcomes for their brands, or both. Here are a few of those key ingredients, spiced-up with some local examples to add some familiar flavour and colour to our global exemplars.

It is still all about the brand. If your brand isn’t integral to the story or clearly identifiable through brand cues or an established creative style your advertising will fail to deliver to its full potential. Branding remains, by far and away, the most important ingredient in any piece of copy. Let’s take a recent Whittaker’s TVC (‘From Bean to Bar’) as our local example. They are doing many of these things well to ensure their branding is strong. Firstly, they continue to use a distinctive musical score established through previous campaigns. Secondly, they literally do tell the story of Whittaker’s chocolate in their TVC and finally, they have built a new brand cue that has fast become synonymous with the Brand, namely Nigella Lawson. As exemplified by several of our global winners, using a celebrity can be a great tactic to help set the right tone for the brand, bring some cachet to it and, of course, act as a cue for the brand so it is recalled more easily.

The outright winning ad used another tactic to help it to its success, which was to tackle stereo-typing and in so doing help support another habit of successful advertising, namely to ensure that Heineken is seen as meaningfully different. It is, after all, brands that are best able to amplify their meaningful difference that are most likely to show value share growth (up to 4x more likely). A home-grown example of this can be seen in the Speight’s ‘The Dance‘ TVC. Drawing upon New Zealand’s love of understated, laconic humour, the ad engages us in a story that promotes the Brand as something different in showing us the softer side of male culture.

Of course, it isn’t always possible – nor always necessary – to tick every box to ensure your ad is effective. And while creativity was never a tick box exercise, how do you ensure your creative is working its magic to deliver short-term and/or long-term benefits for the brand? What is more, how do you do this in an affordable and timely way, so budgets and schedules remain on track?

Link is our world-renowned creative optimisation and evaluation tool, which is incredibly fast and affordable when it’s run through Kantar Marketplace, our online research platform. We can deliver results in as little as a day and for the same price as a single focus group. Utilising local norms, validated predictive measures, type 1 learnings and nearly 30 years of R&D, our LINK tools on Kantar Marketplace are best in breed, ensuring that your ad is both creative and effective. We’d be very pleased to show you a demo. If you would like to do this, please use the contact details below or if you would like to see the results of the global Kantar Creative Effectiveness Awards and all the learning please click the button below: