Joseph Clift

Opinion
18 June 2017 What skills does the planner of the future need to have? A tough question for today’s agencies, in which the traditional brand planner often needs to share room at the (client’s) table with CRM strategists, social strategists, content strategists and all the rest of the roles that have popped up over the years.
Opinion
14 October 2016 It’s a question we’ve all asked ourselves as we scroll through yet another smug status update or toss our phone across the room because we didn't match a row of colourful candy: is all this digital distraction actually good for us? One thing’s for sure: digital media has been blamed for a lot of society’s ills. And that’s despite its massive - and increasing - global popularity, with one piece of research showing that we touch our phones an average of 2,500 times daily, with 80% of our time spent on just five apps .
Opinion
06 September 2016 Since their launch in 1980, the IPA Effectiveness Awards ( the full archive of which is available for warc.com subscribers ) have become the gold standard for global case study competitions that focus on a campaign's business results, rather than its creative approach. The announcement of the awards winners, every two years in November, is therefore one of the ad industry's most closely-watched events.
Opinion
21 July 2016 It's one of the most-awarded - and most talked-about - campaigns of this year's Cannes Lions. 'The Next Rembrandt', a project for Dutch bank ING from JWT Amsterdam, used a great insight, machine learning and 3D printing to make an all-new painting from the 17th century old master, Rembrandt van Rijn. And the work picked up two Grands Prix at the Palais des Festivals last month .
Opinion
24 June 2016 This year's North American Effie Awards bestowed its top prize to Moms Demand Action, the US pressure group for gun control, for its 'Groceries not guns' campaign.
Opinion
15 June 2016 One of the most effective campaign strategies is to go big, aim to stoke people's emotions and focus on a social issue. At least, that's the strong message from this year's Warc 100 results, which track results from 79 effectiveness and strategy awards around the world and rank the year's best marketing campaigns and companies. Two of the year's top 20 campaigns exemplify this strategy, and centre on one issue in particular: female empowerment.
Opinion
01 April 2016 SXSW Interactive is one of marketing and tech's biggest trade shows, with over 30,000 attendees.(Warc was there this year too, and you can read our reporting from the event here. ) But, of course, not everybody who wants to go, gets to go. Luckily, the Global Academy of Digital Marketing (GADM) and Karmarama, the creative agency, was on hand with a London-based event of its own, SXSW Hangover, that was held in London last week and recapped some of the festival's big themes.
Opinion
17 March 2016 Use a “soft launch” for a new strategy. Aim to get a real, human insight to inform the creative. And deploy cutting-edge tech to get your message out there. Those are the big learnings from the best-performing UK campaigns of the year.
Opinion
19 December 2014 Christmas isn't just the busiest sales period for the UK's retailers, it's also the time when they unveil their biggest, brightest and most expensive-to-make ads. And, according to Toby Harrison and Les Binet of adam&eveDDB, the festive period has become British adland's equivalent of the Super Bowl in the US. "It feels like Christmas advertising is where it's hot now," Binet said. "It's the area where everyone wants to compete." To Harrison, "it's become almost an arms race among advertisers – not necessarily to deliver amazing sales, but to deliver on their own brand ambition to 'win at Christmas'."
Opinion
10 December 2014 Earlier this week, we announced the results of this year's Warc Prize for Innovation at an event in London. We set up the prize to recognise standout examples of innovation in advertising, and the (deserved) Grand Prix winner was 'Clever Buoy', from M&C Saatchi Sydney for Optus, a telecom brand.
Opinion
29 October 2014 Earlier this year, we announced the Warc 100 – our ranking of the smartest marketing campaigns and companies of the year, based on their performance in effectiveness and strategy awards. And taking the number one spot on the creative agencies rankings was an agency far from the traditional ad industry powerhouses of London and New York: Colenso BBDO, based in Auckland, New Zealand .
Opinion
16 October 2014 Neuroscience is becoming an increasingly hot topic among marketers – and has now, officially, reached its "dipping point". That's according to Thom Noble, founder of NeuroStrata, who presented at a Warc event focusing on the technique in London this week. "It's 'dipping' in the sense of dipping their toe in the water," he said. "Clients I talked to about this 10 years ago thought I was crazy, but now they are asking me to tell them more about [neuro] stuff. They want to have a go."
Opinion
05 September 2014 One of the main reasons we set up the Warc 100 – our ranking of the world's 100 smartest campaigns, based on their performance in effectiveness and strategy awards over the previous year – was to reward those planners who know how to put together a great case study. And, recently, we've been reaching out to the people behind some of this year's top cases to learn the secrets of their success.
Opinion
24 July 2014 Ask anybody about what comes to mind when they think about Brazil, and it's likely they'll reel off a long list including great beaches, beautiful people and – with the recent World Cup still in people's minds – football. But, of course, such stereotypes do not tell the full story about this vast, diverse and increasingly influential nation.
Opinion
18 July 2014 Our new Warc 100 rankings, released last week, collect together a truly global array of campaigns. Listed according to their success at effectiveness and strategy awards over the past year, the collection of the world's 100 smartest campaigns highlight a big industry trend: the increasing recognition of the great work being done away from the Anglosphere.
Opinion
16 July 2014 We like to see our Warc 100 rankings – our list of the 100 smartest campaigns of the past year, measured by their performance in effectiveness and strategy awards – as a way for marketing companies to benchmark their performance against their peers. But we also want the individual campaign case studies to provide some inspiration for making better work. And one of the most striking campaign stories on the list this year is 'Legendary Journey', by Wieden + Kennedy Amsterdam for Heineken.
Opinion
14 July 2014 Great strategies can have unpromising beginnings. That's one big message from ' Car Creation ', our number 10-ranked campaign on this year's Warc 100 – our ranking of the 100 smartest campaigns in the world. Developed for NRMA Insurance by Whybin\TBWA in Sydney, the campaign highlighted the fact that the client insured parts that were missed by rival insurers' policies. This was dramatised by building a real-life car out of these missed parts, and by using car parts as the key visual image of the campaign creative.
Opinion
11 July 2014 The Warc 100, our ranking of the world's smartest ad campaigns, recognises those campaigns that have done particularly well at the world's effectiveness and strategy awards over the past year. The inaugural top 100 ( full list here ) is a very varied set in terms of national origin, with non-mainstream markets listed alongside the traditional Anglophone ad powerhouses.
Opinion
10 July 2014 We launched the inaugural Warc 100 today . It's a ranking of the world’s best campaigns based on their performance in effectiveness and strategy competitions over the past year. And our top-ranked campaign – and clear winner – was 'Vodafone Fakka', from JWT Cairo for Vodafone.
Opinion
01 July 2014 The presentations, seminars, forums and workshops at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity seemed to be near-universally well-attended this year. We at Warc also got in on the act, hosting seminars on effectiveness, best-in-show campaign strategies and the future of planning at the Palais. But perhaps delegates and observers' biggest focus was the Lions themselves: who won, and how to go about winning one next year.
Opinion
26 June 2014 The 2014 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity may be finished for another year, but there’s still a lot to be learned from last week's events on (and off) the Croisette. And, of all the Grands Prix to be handed out in 2014, we at Warc kept an especially close eye on the Creative Effectiveness category . Open only to campaigns that won Lions the previous year, the Creative Effectiveness Lions aim to reward campaigns that can demonstrate strong business results over time – as well as a great strategic insight and creative execution.
Opinion
19 June 2014 What's the future of planning? A large question and – as Martin Weigel, head of planning at Wieden + Kennedy in Amsterdam pointed out in a Warc session at the Cannes Lions today – a question that makes a "large assumption". (You can also read all about our other Warc sessions, on the link between creativity and effectiveness, and exploring some of the world's smartest campaigns .)
Opinion
18 June 2014 In yesterday's Warc session at the Palais des Festivals, part of the 2014 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, we learned from a panel of planners about the ever-strengthening link between creativity and effectiveness in the ad industry. Today, we applied this theory to some practical examples – by telling the story of four of the world's smartest campaigns.
Opinion
17 June 2014 How should agencies balance the need to showcase a great creative idea with the need to prove great strategy and business results? A pertinent question for planners, as well as for us at Warc – as publisher of the Creative Effectiveness Lions, Cannes' awards for those campaigns that demonstrate strong effectiveness for clients over time. In an attempt to answer this question, we convened four top planners – CSOs Justin Graham (M&C Saatchi) and Lucy Jameson (Grey), along with CumminsRoss' Adam Ferrier and James Hurman of Previously Unavailable – at a packed panel session in the Palais this morning.
Opinion
17 June 2014 In news that will come as no surprise to anyone who has attended an ad industry event in the last 20 years, one of the most-discussed topics at the 2014 Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity is how agencies and clients should best respond to consumers' changing digital behaviours. A fresh take on the topic came in an event organised by our very own Admap magazine in Cannes yesterday afternoon – which showcased and discussed brand-new digital advertising research from Google, the tech giant, ad agency network Ogilvy & Mather and market research firm TNS.