The WARC Effectiveness Awards offer a new benchmark for effective marketing

One of WARC’s roles is to show the industry what great effective marketing looks like. Today’s launch of the WARC Effectiveness Awards will be a key way to do that, says WARC MD Paul Coxhill. (This is an excerpt from a longer Opinion piece. Click "View more" to read the full article.)

These new awards will provide a marketing benchmark like no other. Using the Creative Effectiveness Ladder, co-created with LIONS, to guide the judging process will enable a global effectiveness standard to emerge, helping the industry to see where their work is and how it might improve – both internally and against the entire industry.

A unique tool, the Creative Effectiveness Ladder is a universal framework of the six main approaches to use strategy and creativity to drive specific marketing outcomes: Influential Idea, Behaviour Breakthrough, Sales Spike, Brand Builder, Commercial Triumph and Enduring Icon. It offers a much-needed new and consistent shared language for the marketing industry enabling a global benchmark for effectiveness.

It was developed on behalf of WARC and Cannes Lions by James Hurman, founding partner at New Zealand-based innovation consultancy Previously Unavailable, and Peter Field, a marketing consultant, based on their analysis of thousands of case studies from WARC’s CaseFinder. The aim is to help brands shift their focus from short-termism to sustained success.