CANNES: Marketers should write a clear case study, emphasise product and service utility and demonstrate brand purpose if they wish to win Creative Effectiveness Lions in the future, an expert panel organised by Warc has suggested.

As announced yesterday, Swedish agency Forsman & Bodenfors won the 2015 Creative Effectiveness Lions Grand Prix for its work for Volvo Trucks. At the panel, members of the Creative Effectiveness jury praised the campaign's creative idea, global activation and standout results.

Jarek Ziebinski, CEO of Leo Burnett Asia Pacific, said: "It is a fantastic campaign, rooted in one of the basic strategies in advertising: product demo. It's a product demo done in a new way and it's a demonstration of what global brands can do today. It is sustainable effectiveness, created beautifully."

More than that, the value of the Grand Prix winning campaign's clearly written case study also helped its cause, judges participating in the panel said.

"There's an art to writing case studies," said Suresh Nair, CSO at Grey. "And this Grand Prix winner was the most simply written case study of all. It made reading it a pleasure."

Another panellist, Karl Weaver, CEO of Data2Decisions agreed. "Some of the cases were also too dry. It was strings of numbers. Which was disappointing, as lots of the campaigns were really exciting and brought about social change."

Purpose was another major theme picked up by the panel when discussing this year's Creative Effectiveness Lions entries.

"We had a lot of debate about pro bono cases versus brand cases," Nair said. "It's not just for commercial interest. This was brands doing work that really affected how people are living their lives. It's not just pro bono – it was a happy coincidence. It is something we want to see more of in future years."

Meanwhile, Chris Brown, CEO at DDB New York, suggested that the media trends highlighted by the entries showed the way ahead for creative agencies.

"As a creative business, we need to make things work across paid, owned and earned channels," he said. "That's a challenge about the types of people we employ.

He also emphasised brand utility as a major trend. "We can start to build agencies around product and performance in order to give clients what they want," he said."Things are much more multifaceted than they were recently."

Warc will be publishing its annual analysis of the Cannes Creative Effectiveness Lions next month, examining trends within the shortlisted campaigns and wider entries in areas such as media mix, business objectives and creative approach (read analysis of the 2014 campaigns here).

Meantime, Warc subscribers can view the majority of the 2015 Creative Effectiveness Lions here.

Data sourced from Warc