WARC (World Advertising Research Center) is out with its latest
“Health Of Creativity” report that examined how effective award-winning creative work was over the decade spanning 2015 to 2025.
The upshot: Highly award-winning creative ideas
significantly improve campaign impact.
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The research analyzed more than 6,300 award-winning campaigns to see how often creative excellence translated into marketing effectiveness, based
on the creative and effectiveness award competitions that the group measures annually around the world.
Findings from the report include:
As creativity increases,
so does effectiveness. Over 20% of ideas awarded for creativity were subsequently awarded for effectiveness. And when ideas are highly awarded for creativity, making it into the WARC Creative 100 the
conversion to effectiveness more than doubles, rising from 21% to 45%.
TV is becoming less dominant. Television is still valuable for storytelling and emotional advertising, but fewer top campaigns
rely on it as their primary channel. Instead, marketers are spreading campaigns across a wider mix of media.
The report also found that the highest-performing work is more likely to tap into social or cultural issues, rely on emotional storytelling,
generate publicity, and run for a year or longer versus shorter bursts.
Also, campaigns that invest more heavily in media, run longer and use more channels tend to achieve better business
results than those with smaller, shorter efforts, per the report.
By agency, Ogilvy had the largest number of creatively awarded campaigns overall, BBDO had the most campaigns that converted
creative awards into effectiveness awards.
Retail produced the largest share of campaigns that were both highly creative and highly effective, while the food category had the highest rate of
converting creative awards into effectiveness awards.
The full report is available to WARC subscribers.