It won’t come as a surprise to WARC readers that effectiveness and the conversation that surrounds it was a top topic on the platform – but there are interesting currents happening in the conversation.
First, winners. WARC’s second annual Awards for Effectiveness celebrated the most effective campaigns from around the world across consumer and business to business categories, putting into practice the ideas of the Creative effectiveness and B2B Effectiveness Ladders.
The lessons from the B2B Grand Prix, which this year went to the Havas Business London for its work with the Danish logistics firm Maersk, are particularly salient: creativity is not only for consumer brands, and a rich idea allowed the brand to reframe the conversation about its operation, producing extraordinary results.
But the ladders were crucial elsewhere, with analysis of the Super Bowl’s ads also deploying the hierarchy of the six main types of effects that creative marketing can bring.
The conversation is expanding. We covered the developing conversation around attention’s impact on effectiveness, and the emerging idea that brands need to develop their own theory of change, effectively a mission statement for how they understand effectiveness across the organisation.
