Marketer's Toolkit 2023: A new pattern for global advertising investment?

The coming 12 months will potentially usher in a new pattern for global advertising investment as digital investment growth slows, media planning is re-assessed and pressures for industry reform continue to grow, according to the latest instalment of WARC’s Marketer’s Toolkit 2023.

Why it matters

Against a backdrop of economic crises, geopolitical complexity, spiralling inflation, supply chain disruption, and structural technology shifts, marketers are re-evaluating their approach. Ad spend is growing but at a slower pace. 

WARC’s latest forecast anticipates a $90bn reduction in global ad market growth for 2022 and 2023, meaning digital media owners are likely to fight harder for ad revenue growth – and, increasingly, will compete with one another for ad dollars. 

Meta’s first-ever year-on-year quarterly revenue decline – announced last July – may one day be seen as the moment the digital advertising industry tipped into a new, less expansive phase. 

Key trends 

The Future of Media report, part of WARC’s annual Marketer’s Toolkit, highlights key trends in three vital areas: advertising investment, media planning, and industry reform.

• Digital investment reaches the top of the ‘S’ curve

Nearly a third of WARC’s Marketer’s Toolkit respondents expect 2023 marketing budgets to be lower than 2022. WARC has downgraded its global advertising investment forecast to $880.9bn, removing $90bn of growth potential for 2022 and 2023. 

Retail media is increasingly favoured by advertisers, and is now the fourth-largest medium by ad spend, with global investment totalling $110.7bn in 2022 and forecast to reach $121.9bn in 2023.

Marketers are rebalancing their ad budgets, decreasing investment in offline channels and increasing spend in online video, social media and gaming. TikTok ranked top for increased investment in 2023 by 76% of marketers, according to WARC’s Toolkit survey.

• Fragmentation calls for more fluid media planning 

More than a third (34%) of survey respondents identified media and audience fragmentation as one of their biggest causes for concern when drawing up plans for 2023. The situation calls for advertisers to adopt a more fluid approach to media planning and branding, and one that emphasises the importance of communities over basic demographics in segmentation.

While over half (52%) of survey participants expect to increase investment with social media influencers and creators as a whole, two-thirds (65%) are planning to work with content creators to connect with communities “aligned with specific interests authentically tied to the brand”.

• Fixing the media ecosystem

More than half (54%) of US respondents to the Marketer’s Toolkit survey said that media planning recommendations in 2023 will include more diverse publishers, reflecting the importance of minority audiences in that market.

However, with only a third (34%) of advertisers planning to include more low-carbon alternatives in their media plans in 2023, it is clear more work must be done to persuade marketers of their role in combating climate change.

WARC says

“While the breakneck speed of growth in ad investment witnessed in 2021 could never have been maintained, media owners like Meta, alongside brands and agencies, are also challenged by other fundamental issues – from cleansing the ecosystem of misinformation, using ad dollars to promote greater diversity and inclusion, attracting and retaining the right talent, to saving the planet from catastrophic climate change” – Alex Brownsell, Head of Content, WARC Media.

The Future of Media is the third in a series of four reports that make up The Marketer’s Toolkit 2023. Based on exclusive data from WARC Media, findings from a global survey of 1,700+ marketers, and interviews with with senior marketing leaders, the report is a guide to help brands focus, survive and thrive in 2023 and beyond. A complimentary sample of this report is available here. WARC clients can read the full report.

Kimberly-Clark looks to innovation and the long term

Kimberly-Clark, which owns hygiene brands including Kotex, Kleenex and Scott, is increasing its advertising spend back to 2020 levels as it backs new product innovation to make inroads in highly competitive consumer packaged goods categories. 

Why it matters

In difficult economic times, many brands cut back on advertising and adopt a more aggressive discounting strategy. But Kimberly-Clark is bullish, investing in its brands now for long-term growth pay-offs down the line. 

Leveling up ad spend

On a Q4 earnings call, chairman and CEO Mike Hsu explained that the business was “taking advertising back up a little bit more” after some pandemic-period reductions. “We’re excited about the programs that we have and we want to invest behind them,” he said. “And at this point, we’re pretty good at evaluating the returns of our investment and making sure that they pay out.” 

Turning away from discounting

After several months of a highly promotional pricing environment, Hsu is less inclined to continue down that particular path, preferring to invest in advertising and brand building, which he believes are better for the long-term health of the company’s brands. 

“I’m not a fan of driving the business through promotion,” he stated. “We can do it effectively, because we know our ROIs on trade promotion as well as we know our advertising ROIs.” And while the returns on both are satisfactory, “I like the advertising ones better,” he added. “That’s my go-to, and I think it’s better for the long-term health of the brand.”

Looking for long-term category growth 

Kimberly-Clark’s retail customers aren’t keen on passing price increases to consumers – an unpalatable but often necessary decision in inflationary times – and are more focused on long-term category growth and how the company’s brands plan to deliver it. 

“Part of what they’re looking for from us is to make sure that we’re bringing commercial programming to grow the category for the long term,” Hsu said. 

“They’re excited about our innovation and they’re excited about the commercial ideas that we’re bringing this year. They want us to bring it, and so that’s probably the bigger reason why we’ve ticked up the investment in our advertising.”

Sourced from Seeking Alpha

[Image: Kimberly-Clark]

Diageo backs its effectiveness plan, increases spend

Diageo, the alcoholic beverage company, is seeing the benefits of proving marketing effectiveness, with increased transparency on quality, and performance of its marketing campaigns convincing executives to further boost marketing budgets. 

“We built a lot of sophistication in the data, analytics and tools we now have to assess marketing effectiveness,” said CEO Ivan Menezes on its recent Q2 2023 earnings call. 

“As we look to the second half [of the financial year], we see very good opportunities to step up the investment behind our brands. This is built up by market, by brand and very much with the degree of confidence on returns,” he said. 

Why it matters

By building a data and analytics operation to better understand its marketing effectiveness, Diageo has been able to make more informed investment decisions with clarity around what is working and what isn’t. This experience offers a case study to other brands on the same path. 

By the numbers

• Net sales up 9% with growth across all regions.
• Volume grew 2% even as brands implemented strategic price increases.
• On a constant basis, Diageo is 36% bigger than pre-Covid.
• Strong growth in Scotch, up 19%; tequila, up 28%; and Guinness, up 17%.

Thinking long term 

Marketing at Diageo is not just to make the second-half sales numbers, it is about the next three years, Menezes said.

“Everything in our business – upweights and marketing – are not for short-term return alone. You do get some short-term impact, but the bulk of the impact really comes down the road and in line with our goal to be a very reliable top-tier compounder,” he explained.

“This flywheel of Diageo [is to] upweight investment, drive efficiency and get quality top-line growth…We want to ensure we’re setting ourselves up well for the quality of growth through the medium term, but it’s going [with] very specific brand opportunities where we have a high degree of confidence in the return that we will get for this investment,” he added.

“The quality of our marketing continues to step up significantly, and I feel really good about that.”

Sourced from Seeking Alpha

[Image: Diageo]

People are spending less time online but more time on social

Online behaviours are changing again, with people around the world cutting their average daily internet use post-pandemic, even as they up the amount of time they spend on social media so it now exceeds the time spent watching broadcast and cable TV. 

That’s according to Digital 2023, the latest annual report on social media and digital trends worldwide from socially-led creative agency We Are Social and social and media intelligence firm Meltwater.

Key stats 

• Average daily internet use has declined almost 5% over the past year and now stands at 6 hours 37 minutes.
• Average time spent on social platforms has increased to more than 2.5 hours per day — 40 minutes more than the time spent watching broadcast and cable TV.
• 16- to 34-year-olds are now more likely to visit a social network when looking for information about brands than they are to use a search engine (48% vs. 45%). 
• Half of the world’s social media users say that they actively visit social platforms to learn more about brands and see their content. 
• The rise of TikTok search has grabbed headlines but the latest data suggest that Instagram is social media users’ preferred destination when researching things. 
• TikTok tops the global list of social media platforms when it comes to time spent per user on Android devices, followed by YouTube and Facebook.

Why it matters 

The study suggests that people are looking for more purposeful internet use, with a focus on quality over quantity. That seems debatable given the rise of algorithmically-powered platforms like TikTok; but it’s certainly the case that they’re spending more time on social, the platforms they use are changing, and how they use them in relation to brands is also shifting. 

Marketers have to better understand the role of different social platforms in the customer journey and deliver relevant content that can capture attention and engagement, both there and in other digital channels. 

Sourced from We Are Social

IPL 2023 could be a pivotal moment for digital sport

More than 500 million people are expected to stream the 2023 India Premier League (IPL) on digital devices, overtaking traditional TV viewing.

Background 

Media rights for the Indian Premier League are shared between Disney Star (TV) and Viacom18 (digital). The shift towards digital is a direct consequence of the decision by Viacom18’s JioCinema subsidiary to offer free streaming of the annual cricket competition, so accelerating a trend towards digital sports viewing that was already under way.

Why it matters

The media rights for the IPL have increased every time they come up for sale and both Star Sports and JioCinema now face a challenge to recruit viewers and advertisers in sufficient numbers to realise a return on their huge investments. How the battle between them plays out has implications for everything from audience reach to ad rates.

One observer suggests that digital could add an extra 200 million viewers to the existing base of between 500 and 600 million, while an advertiser thinks the cost per contact will go down as acquisition of customers happens at a faster scale.

Takeaways 

• The number of Pay TV households has declined from 129 million in 2020 to 108 million in 2022.
• Free streaming is likely to significantly increase viewership in smaller towns and rural areas.
• TV viewing may gain from being a more reliable experience; JioCinema had complaints about the quality and experience of its coverage of the FIFA World Cup last year.

Final thought

“Advertisers may have to do a rethink in the middle of IPL 2023 based on the viewership numbers and be ready to bet their monies on winning platforms” says medianews4u. 

Sourced from e4m, medianews4u
^{[Image: BCCI]}

Data clean rooms show promise but brands struggle with measurement

Data clean rooms appear to be one answer to the decline of third-party cookies – a means of matching user-level data with a platform’s audience without compromising privacy – but a new IAB report finds that while some advertisers are using clean rooms for targeting, very few use them for measurement. 

Why it matters

With expansive data privacy regulations on both sides of the Atlantic, data clean rooms (DCRs) that purportedly allow audience-matching your first-party data to that of a publisher or platform without compromising privacy (or at least not contravening privacy rules) are often invoked as solutions. However, the IAB report depicts the big gap between theory and practice.

For an overview of WARC's insight on the topic, read What we know about post-cookie audience tracking.

Take-up with missed potential

The IAB’s State of Data 2023 report, based on a survey of 200 data decision-makers across brands, agencies, and publishers, finds that two-thirds of brands “leveraging privacy-preserving technology” used data clean rooms, a quite obscure way of putting it.

Just under half of the sample reported using clean rooms for data anonymisation and compliance.

Where users appear to lag most is in the area of measurement and attribution: under a third use data clean rooms for this purpose.

Issues

Search Engine Journal has a good explainer that uncovers some of the limitations:

• First, you need lots of first-party data.
• Different platforms – Google, Meta, Amazon – tend to have their own DCRs, which creates complexity for advertisers working across platforms.

Alternative solutions

This complexity is part of the reason that brands are still learning to use this technology to replace the deeply flawed but broadly used cookie. Certain platforms have thrown their weight behind other identification techniques such as the Trade Desks open-source Unified ID 2.0, which Amazon and Disney have talked about supporting.

Sourced from IAB, WARC, Search Engine Journal

OOH ads that include location messaging encourage search

Six in 10 people in the UK are encouraged to search when an out-of-home advertising campaign features a location callout, new research finds.

The Point of Search study, by Clear Channel UK, Global, JCDecaux and Posterscope, is based on an online survey examining why people search, as well as a search diary completed by 1,100 people. 

The most common reason for a mobile search out of home was to fulfill a location need, such as finding a nearby store address (39%), followed by fulfilling a product or information need (33%) and a response to something seen or read (21%). 

Why it matters

Search behaviour is a clear indicator of consumer needs, and creative messages can be linked to these needs. The study suggests that optimisation of specific creative elements such as large logos, short succinct copy and large product shots can have a significant impact on search behaviour. 

Additionally, DOOH can use dynamic and contextually relevant messages, such as location, weather and time to encourage people to search. 

And with share of search emerging as a predictor of market share, there are good reasons to take all available opportunities to maintain or increase it. 

Key findings 

• Mobile searches conducted out of home are 38% more likely to lead to a purchase compared with mobile searches conducted at home.

• People who spend more time out of home search 58% more on their smartphones than those who spend less time out of home.

• People who spend more time out of home search across more varied products and services.

• Mobile searches out of home take place more often in the company of other people than at-home searches, providing more opportunity for word of mouth.

Sourced from Posterscope

Organisations are talking a good game on sustainability

Organisations’ stated enthusiasm for sustainability is not being matched by significant progress, according to a report which finds a gap between perception and reality across three pillars of sustainability transformation – environmental, economic and societal. 

Why it matters

The Fujitsu Uvance report*, Closing The Sustainability Gap, identifies ‘Change Makers’, a small group of organisations which it says are leading the way on both sustainability imperatives and technology transformation. 

Not only do Change Makers find “sustainability transformation” using digital innovation easier to complete, they’re also more likely to exceed profit targets and to have brand reputations that perform above expectations.

Key stats

• 61% of organisations say they’re advanced on their sustainability journeys, but in reality less than one in 10 has completed major sustainability imperatives such as developing sustainable supply chains (9%), achieving net zero status (2%) or preparing for environmental emergencies (7%). 
• 77% of organisations say being sustainable is the right thing to do and is ultimately good for business, but 18% regard sustainability as a passing fad.
• 27% of organisations are not clear whose responsibility it is to drive sustainability, while 25% are still being challenged on sustainability investments if they don’t offer a clear return on investment. 
• The top sustainability goals are simply complying with regulations and developing sustainable supply chains and ecosystems (both 18%); that’s followed by health/wellbeing initiatives for employees (12%) and empowering staff and customers to respond to social issues (11%).

The role of tech 

“A lot of sustainability challenges are problems of inefficiency. So technologies can come in and really help us take optimisation to a whole different level” – Ioannis Ioannou, Associate Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship at London Business School. 

*Findings in the report are based on a survey of 1,000 business and public sector leaders across a range of sectors from 15 countries (Australia, Canada, China, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, Korea, New Zealand, Philippines, Singapore, Spain, Thailand, the UK and the US).

[Image: Closing The Sustainability Gap]

Media in-housing pays off for P&G

For Procter & Gamble, bringing media planning in buying in-house for its crucial fabric care category has allowed the company to drive reach while saving more than $65m in advertising spending in the US market, according to the company’s executives. 

Why it matters

While the in-housing of marketing functions previously outsourced to agency partners has been attempted by many brands, the change can be difficult and many brands have been unable to successfully implement it. P&G, which is one of the world’s biggest advertisers, marks a success story. 

P&G saves money ...

The Fabric Care team in the US brought their media planning and buying in-house and developed proprietary algorithms to better place ads during TV programming, which is a crucial channel for driving reach. 

“That in and of itself has allowed $65m of savings in one year, while increasing frequency,” said Andre Schulten, Chief Financial Officer at Procter and Gamble, on its most recent Q2 2023 earnings call. 

… but the move is not without challenges

One major challenge for brands seeking more marketing functions in-house is the need to restructure their existing partnerships and processes, for example:

• Reshaping the marketing team culture to take over elements previously handled by agency partners. 
• Hiring enough in-house expertise to match what is being lost from agency partners, especially in priority areas such as media planning and data.
• The risk of losing momentum in the market during the transition, or the project failing altogether, requiring an expensive and time-consuming move back to collaborating with agency partners. 

“There are many categories in the US that are still building their own approach to drive these synergies and there's the whole world outside of the US, which is still building on the capabilities that we are developing. We see this as an area of continued investment, in terms of our own capabilities, with a great ability to drive productivity for years to come,” Schulten said.

Sourced from Seeking Alpha

Inflation takes its toll on UK ad market recovery

The UK ad market is set to reach £36bn this year, up from a projected £34.7bn in 2022, according to the latest quarterly data in the Advertising Association / WARC Expenditure Report. 

Overall growth of 3.8% in 2023 is less than half of what is now expected for 2022 (+8.8%) and equates to a 3.0% real-terms decline once inflation is accounted for. Forecasts for the coming year show reduced growth expectations for almost all sectors of advertising in line with pressures felt by all parts of the economy. 

Q3 2022 highlights 

• UK advertising spend rose by 4.3% to a total of £8.5bn between July and September 2022, the ninth consecutive quarter of growth and demonstrative of an ongoing, resilient recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.
• Search rose 7.7% – equating to almost 40% of total adspend during the quarter.
• Out of Home (+13.2%) continued a strong recovery, while cinema, in particular, bounced back (+148.1%) from a COVID-hit 2021. 
• Social media, included within online display, grew in line with the average (+4.4%), as did broadcast video on-demand (+4.3%).
• Main traditional media all declined: TV -6.6%, national newsbrands -11.2%, regional newsbrands -10.4%, radio -7.5% and magazine brands -6.3%.

Q4 projections 

A retained recovery is projected for the ‘golden quarter’ (Q4 2022). Spend during this time was estimated to have grown by 4.0%, to a total of £9.5bn, as the winter period hosted the two biggest events for adspend: Christmas and the FIFA Men’s World Cup. This growth was still half a point behind previous forecasts but should nonetheless be considered as a good performance given economic challenges.

WARC says 

“A looming recession will put pressure on ad trade this year,” advises James McDonald, Director of Data, Intelligence & Forecasting, WARC. “The silver lining here is that our current modelling suggests that the slump will be short lived, with advertising investment set to lift by 5% over the first nine months of 2024.”

Subscribers can read the report in full here. Non-subscribers can download the executive summary here. 

Sourced from WARC, Advertising Association

Multi-cultural K-pop stars expand brands’ appeal

Increasingly, multi-cultural K-pop stars are expanding bands’ brand ambassadorship potential, according to a new report.

Why it matters

K-pop is a big deal around the world, part of a soft power play that has brought the genre to audience far beyond East Asia. The phenomenon is such that it is now becoming a tactic that brands want a part of, as Chinese stars help brands speak to Chinese audiences.

What’s going on

Luxury sector publication Jing Daily takes a deep dive into the cross-cultural potential of these new stars.

• Luxury brand Louis Vuitton has announced a brand ambassadorship with the Chinese K-pop star Jackson Wang (who sings in English), who has grand ambitions for global fame, as the FT wrote recently.
• Many other Chinese or Chinese-American K-pop stars have signed-on with luxury brands focussed on selling to China.
• It speaks to a growing interest in expanding China’s presence in global pop culture.

A tried and tested tactic, now for brands

“K-pop groups will go to a foreign country, and there will be one member of your group that will know how to speak the language and will know how to reach those fans more directly,” explains CedarBough Saeji, assistant professor of Korean and East Asian Studies at Pusan National University in South Korea, to Jing Daily.

Sourced from Jing Daily, FT

WeWork edges into experiential

As consumers and office workers continue to adapt to the post-pandemic environment, IRL connections are finding new traction, and co-working network WeWork is exploring ways to take advantage by edging into the experiential space. 

What’s happening 

Digiday reports that WeWork has been working with Recess, a platform that describes itself as an ad network for experiential, to help connect brands with people using its co-working spaces. To date, some 40 brands have used Recess to work with WeWork on partnerships of varying length.

As well as offering up spaces for events and sponsored products (it has exclusive tea, coffee and delivery partners), WeWork has also partnered with digital media company Captivate to bring digital OOH ads to around 200 of its locations.

Why it matters

Apart from opening up new revenue streams, WeWork is tapping into a trend as people everywhere look to (re)connect with each other and with retailers and brands beyond virtual environments.

But Rebecca Graf, WeWork’s head of ancillary revenue for the US and Canada, stresses the need for “the authenticity of the experience” to align with its users. “That’s why we’re choosing very specific categories to be broader category partners,” she said. 

Sourced from Digiday

Sustainability perceptions carry a financial value 

Major brands have hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of value contingent on how sustainable they are perceived to be, according to a new study* by Brand Finance and the International Advertising Association (IAA) – and that’s the case whether they are seen as sustainability champions or not.

Why it matters

Perceptions of sustainability matter more for some brands and sectors than others. Tesla, for example, is particularly financially reliant on sustainability perceptions: 26.9% of its brand value is associated with a reputation for sustainability. Similarly, sustainability perceptions play an important role in the luxury auto sector with an average sustainability driver score of 22.9% – well ahead of the next sector, soft drinks on 13.7%.

And amid concerns about greenwashing, Brand Finance and IAA find that 62% of consumers believe claims about sustainability made by brands. That said, 79% also indicated they had reduced their use of a brand if they’d discovered it was acting in an unsustainable way. 

Who’s got most at stake

This analysis reveals tech companies and luxury carmakers to have the highest sustainability perceptions values, with sustainability being judged across the three ESG pillars: 

• Amazon $19.9bn (sustainability perception score 4.40)
• Tesla $17.8bn (5.43)
• Apple $14.7 bn (4.50)
• Google $14.6bn (4.74)
• Microsoft $9.0bn (4.28)
• WeChat $8.4bn (6.27)
• Porsche $8.1bn (4.44)
• TikTok $80.bn (4.55)
• State Grid Corporation China $7.4bn (5.64)
• Mercedes-Benz $6.5bn (4.74)

But those values largely reflect the size of the companies; strip out revenues and the picture starts to change: Tesla is still there, but so too are the brands one might expect to see – IKEA and Patagonia for example – while certain brands score highly in their home market (eg.The Body Shop in the UK (sustainability perception score 6.83), Natura in Brazil (6.25), Yves Rocher in France (5.87)). 

Key quote

“Failing to communicate clearly about ESG topics puts value at risk. Consumers are relatively trusting of sustainability claims, and clearly value brand’s commitment to sustainability, so under-communicating or ‘green-hushing’ is a missed opportunity. On the other hand, communication must be authentic and supported by action, because over-claiming or ‘greenwashing’ exposes the business to hundreds of millions of dollars of reputational damage” – Robert Haigh, Strategy & Sustainability Director, Brand Finance.

*The Sustainability Perceptions Index takes the values established in Brand Finance's annual Global Brand Equity Monitor and derives a Sustainability Perceptions Value based on the sustainability part of a brand drivers’ analysis and on how sustainable consumers perceive a brand to be versus the sector median. 

Soured from Brand Finance and IAA

Google faces ad-related antitrust lawsuit

Alphabet, the parent company of online search giant Google, is the subject of a new antitrust lawsuit filed by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and eight states that alleges the firm “corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry.”

The context

• Google’s ad revenue stood at $209bn in 2021, positioning it as the biggest advertising company worldwide.
• The firm has drawn scrutiny due to its operation as a buyer, seller and advertising exchange which, combined with its vast scale, is often said to give it a uniquely dominant position.
• Alphabet has pushed back against this view, highlighting the market share held by Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram, which generated ad revenues of $115bn in 2021.
• The DOJ and various states also sued Google in 2020, based around allegations that it deployed anti-competitive tactics to try and monopolise the markets for online search and search ads. That lawsuit is still in progress.

What the latest filing says

• The latest DOJ filing alleges that Google has taken actions which have compromised the ad tech space as the company aimed to become “‘the be-all, and end-all’ location for all ad serving.”
  
• "Competition in the ad tech space is broken, for reasons that were neither accidental nor inevitable," the filing continued.
• Google, it further alleges, “has corrupted legitimate competition in the ad tech industry by engaging in a systematic campaign to seize control of the wide swath of high-tech tools used by publishers, advertisers, and brokers, to facilitate digital advertising."
• The states joining the Department of Justice in the filing are: California; Colorado; Connecticut; New Jersey; New York; Rhode Island; Tennessee; and Virginia.

Under the microscope

• One aspect of Google’s strategy coming under the microscope is the results of certain acquisitions, like the $3.1bn purchase of ad-serving firm DoubleClick in 2007.
• Similarly, the purchase of ad optimisation platform Admeld in 2011 was argued to demonstrate a “familiar tactic: acquire, then extinguish, any competitive threat.”
• If the antitrust lawsuit is successful, it may result in Google being required to sell off parts of its ad business.

Google’s response

• A Google spokesperson told Axios that the DOJ’s latest lawsuit “attempts to pick winners and losers in the highly competitive advertising technology sector.”
• Moreover, the spokesperson suggested, the lawsuit could have negative effects for players across the online advertising space.
• “DOJ is doubling down on a flawed argument that would slow innovation, raise advertising fees, and make it harder for thousands of small businesses and publishers to grow," it was argued.

Sourced from Axios, CNBC

WARC Awards for Effectiveness North America: winners announced

Campaigns for Quickbooks, Champion, BMO, Coinbase and McDonald’s have won Grand Prix in the inaugural WARC Awards for Effectiveness, North America Edition. 

The Awards, in association with LIONS, recognize the most inspiring and effective work delivering marketing success. Two judging panels, one led by Pam Forbus, SVP, Chief Marketing Officer of Pernod Ricard USA, the other by Cheryl Guerin, EVP, Global Brand Strategy & Innovation of Mastercard, gave out a total of 22 awards across five categories. The US won 16 awards, Canada five and Mexico one.

The winners

Brand Purpose

• Gold: Underpressure · Michelob Ultra · GUT, Mexico City
• Gold: Feeding Imagination · Goldfish Crackers · Zulu Alpha Kilo, Toronto
• Bronze: Tough Turban · Pfaff Harley-Davidson · Zulu Alpha Kilo, Toronto 

Business-to-Business

• Grand Prix: Adios Cuadernito · QuickBooks · Alma DDB, Miami
• Gold: A Song For Every CMO · Spotify · FCB New York

The Grand Prix was awarded to Alma DDB Miami for their work for accounting software brand QuickBooks. To reach the 14% of small businesses in America owned by Hispanic entrepreneurs, the brand brought to life insight-driven, culturally relatable creative resulting in first-time prospects accounting for 89% of traffic.

Cultural Impact

• Grand Prix: Reverse Mode: Reversing Injustice & Rediscovering An Icon · Champion · Energy BBDO, Chicago
• Grand Prix for Good: Shamecards · Change The Ref · Mullenlowe U.S., Boston
• Silver: Cut Out The Bullshit · Change The Ref · Mullenlowe U.S., Boston
• Bronze: Save It See It · Michelob Ultra · GUT, Miami
• Bronze: Extra's Pandemic Comeback · Extra · Energy BBDO, Chicago

 Energy BBDO Chicago picked up the Grand Prix for sportswear brand Champion, by turning to TikTok to reverse sales declines, propel the brand into Gen Z culture and rectify the injustice experienced by Black creators of not being recognized for their contributions.

 The Grand Prix for Good was awarded to MullenLowe Boston for their work for US nonprofit Change the Ref, for which they created the first postcard collection designed to be sent to Congress to demand gun law reform. With no paid media, the effort drove 2.3bn earned impressions worth $21m in ad spending, and increased gun control advocacy among those aged 55 and over.

Customer Experience

• Grand Prix: Gear Up · BMO · FCB, Montreal
• Silver: Veteruns 100K · Call Of Duty · GUT, Los Angeles

FCB Montreal is the winner of the Grand Prix for its carefully targeted multimedia campaign for BMO, the financial services organization and an active sponsor of CF Montreal. The result of the campaign saw 11,000 pieces of soccer equipment delivered to more than 2,500 children in need.

Instant Impact

• Grand Prix: Coinbase Super Bowl Ad · Coinbase · Wavemaker, New York
• Gold: Invisible Hate · NAACP Atlanta · 22Squared, Atlanta
• Gold: Better With Pepsi · Pepsi · PepsiCo · Alma DDB, Miami
• Bronze: The Wendy's Phone · Wendy's · McCann, Toronto
• Bronze: Pabst Is The Place · Pabst Blue Ribbon · DNA Seattle, Seattle

Picking up the Grand Prix, Wavemaker New York won for its Super Bowl ad for Coinbase, the cryptocurrency exchange platform. It introduced the brand to the masses using a QR code, with the execution achieving over 20m instant landing page hits.

Sustained Growth

• Grand Prix: Famous Orders · McDonald's · Wieden+Kennedy, New York
• Grand Prix for Good: Long Term · Canadian Down Syndrome Society (CDSS) · FCB, Toronto
• Gold: Skip The Rinse · Finish · Havas, New York
• Silver: Moving From Nuclear Laxatives To Holistic Health · Miralax · Energy BBDO, Chicago
• Bronze: Get Your TV Together · DirecTV · TBWA\Chiat\Day, Los Angeles

Wieden+Kennedy New York won the Grand Prix for fast-food brand McDonald’s. To reverse the decline among young and multicultural audiences in the US, the campaign created the Famous Orders platform and made a series of iconic partnerships resulting in US$280m in incremental sales and 1.2m more 18-24-year-olds served per month. 

A Grand Prix for Good has been awarded to FCB Toronto for their work for the Canadian Down Syndrome Society (CDSS). The campaign empowered an entire community through a creative platform that allowed them to, literally, speak for themselves, resulting in a boost of 429% in donations.

More information on the new WARC Awards for Effectiveness, North America Edition, part of a suite of WARC Awards, is available here.