NEW YORK: Procter & Gamble, Kellogg's and Kraft were among the major brand owners who picked up golds at the 2013 North America Effie Awards.

But the top Grand Effie went to the video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, for its "The Vet and the n00b" launch campaign. This targeted both younger core and older casual gamers, and benchmarked its success by beating sales targets within the first few days of release.

Overall, 80 brands and 60 agencies won awards across 50 categories, including the specialty Health and Media Awards, and the Global and Shopper Effie competitions.

Warc subscribers can access a selection of winning case studies, including 14 golds, 13 silvers and 18 bronzes.

Among these, Procter & Gamble, the household goods company, won gold in the Yearly Topical category with Proud Sponsors of Moms, a corporate-brand-led campaign based around its sponsorship of the London Olympics.

The Olympics also featured in a campaign for Febreze, the company's odour eliminator brand, which won two silvers in different categories. Febreze aligned with the Azerbaijani Wrestling Team to demonstrate its effectiveness to US mothers.

And P&G picked up a third gold in the Hispanic category for its Tide laundry detergent brand. The Mi Tide campaign took a very targeted approach to communications, promoting different brands within the Tide range according to consumers' levels of acculturation.

Kraft also won a gold in this category with a campaign for its Macaroni & Cheese pre-prepared food brand, which sought to counter perceptions of being 'foreign food' and contrary to the Hispanic tradition of preparing food from scratch.

Kellogg's, the cereal manufacturer, won gold for the Back To School Program it ran with Walmart, centred around the creative message of 'Feed their Imagination', which supported the offer of a free children's book with the purchase of two Kellogg's products.

And Etch A Sketch, the iconic drawing toy, picked up a silver for a near-real-time reaction in the Single Impact Experience category. A chance - and potentially damaging - reference to the toy during the 2012 US presidential election campaign was swiftly spun around by the brand and increased sales by 30%.

Data sourced from Effie North America; additional content by Warc staff