CANNES: Campaigns that go on to win strategy and effectiveness awards tend to aim for memorability above all else, according to a panel session hosted by Warc at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity.

The session celebrated campaigns ranked highly in the Warc 100, the annual ranking of the world's top campaigns based on their performance across 87 effectiveness and strategy awards. It discussed research on the Warc 100 that showed that the top-ranked campaigns tend to feature more media channels than the norm, use storytelling and link online and offline media effectively.

Anaheeta Goenka, executive director at Lowe Lintas + Partners, discussed Kan Khajura Tesan, which was ranked the number one campaign this year. This work, for the agency's Hindustan Unilever client, created a new entertainment channel via users' feature phones.

As the target audience, media-dark people in rural India, had to dial a number on their phones to access the channel, getting people to remember this number was the sole focus of the campaign's advertising. Lowe achieved this through a cartoon mascot, a catchy jingle and colourful creative.

"The challenge to us was to use popular culture to make the number unique and sticky," she added. "So we created a character – the 'Kan Khajura', an insect – with the number spelled out on its body. And the character went everywhere."

Goenka added: "Being culturally relevant really helped us. In our over-crowded content space, too many people aim to create an impact. But what's really effective is being memorable."

Also ranked high in the Warc 100 this year was Ship My Pants, created by FCB Chicago for Kmart, a US retailer.

While the target audience and media used were very different, the agency's head of planning John Kenny explained that memorability was also the key aim for the campaign.

Research on what Kmart shoppers liked to share on Facebook showed a love for bawdy humour – very different to fans of rivals such as Target and Wal-Mart. So FCB created a "gloriously stupid" strategy based on potty humour, Kenny told the audience.

"It was not about changing attitudes," he added. "It's to get them to go to Kmart. The challenge with store to home is that everyone had forgotten about it. So a huge part of the campaign was about making it memorable."

The full Warc 100 results for this year are available to all, as is a sample of our Warc 100 analysis discussed in Cannes.

Data sourced from Warc