Five habits to learn from the World’s most creative and effective ads

Throughout 2020, Kantar, the world’s leading data-driven insights and consulting company, tested more than 10,000 adverts for clients around the world. Today, Kantar reveals the adverts that performed most effectively. What makes the Kantar Creative Effectiveness Awards different from other creativity awards is that consumers are the jury. 

Kantar’s COVID-19 Barometer research showed people wanted advertising to continue during the pandemic, as it provided a sense of normality at a time of 24-hour COVID news cycles.  Further research showed that, for the most part, consumers were processing content in the same way as they did before. Those advertisers that held their resolve and invested in their brand during the creative investment downturn saw their bravery rewarded.

The most creative and effective ads of 2020 were: 

Across the year, and the 10,000+ adverts analysed using Link, Kantar’s validated ad testing solution, five habits from the most effective advertisers were identified.

Be distinctive: Create the ability to be noticed and remembered in a world where there’s a profusion of ads. Your ad is not just competing in its category. It is competing for attention against the world. Stand out from the category as a minimum, and ideally from any other advertising.
Brand intrinsically: Make sure that the attention won by the ad is at the service of the brand. Get your branding cues right. A surprising number of companies forget this basic rule.

Be meaningfully different: To grow market share or defend premium pricing you need to fulfil consumers’ functional, emotional and social needs in the category AND illustrate your uniqueness compared to the competition.
Trigger an emotional response: Making the viewer feel something wins engagement for the ad, bypassing the natural tendency to screen out advertising. It also has positive effects on the brand’s emotional associations. 
Talk with your consumer: Successful marketers know they can get ‘too close’ to their creative journey and lose perspective, so they listen to viewer feedback during creative development.

Commenting on this year’s winners and the five habits of creative effectiveness, Daren Poole, Global leader of Kantar’s Creative Domain offered “At Kantar, we love great creative content, and we love it even more when that creativity is harnessed to deliver against brand and marketing objectives. Our winners today are from a diverse range of products and categories, and, as our report shows, use many different tactics in their creativity. The commonality they share is a commitment to creative excellence and a focus on ensuring their work performs exactly as intended.” 

Kantar’s Link solution is the world’s most trusted ad testing solution, having been used over 215,000 times. It offers predictive and diagnostic measures to guide ad optimisation to maximise that ROI. With Link Now available on Kantar Marketplace ads can be tested with confidence in as few as 6 hours. The Link measures that underpin our awards are the ‘Short-term Sales Likelihood’ and ‘Power’. STSL is the probability that an ad will drive a short-term sales response. Power is a measure of an ad’s potential to contribute to a brand's longer-term equity. Both headline measures are validated against real life outcomes to ensure we are getting a read of both creative excellence and brand outcomes.

Learn more about Link ad testing on Kantar.com