Campaigns for Tanqueray gin in Spain, e-commerce platform Tmall in China and broker TD Ameritrade in North America are among the 20 that have been shortlisted for the Effective Innovation category of the 2020 WARC Awards.

The panel of 17 judges, chaired by Jane Wakely, Lead Chief Marketing Officer, Mars & Mars Pet Nutrition, has chosen campaigns from around the world; in addition to the above, there are papers from Australia, New Zealand, India, Malaysia, Philippines, UAE, Lebanon, Russia and the UK.

WARC subscribers can read all the shortlisted entries here.

The category recognises innovative thinking that has transformed a business to deliver tangible results. For Tanqueray, agency PS21 used data and technology in an unprecedented way to find the ‘Special Colour’ of Seville – immortalised in song but never actually specified – as a tribute to the city. The results? Tanqueray Flor de Sevilla established itself as the absolute leader of the orange-flavoured gin category.

Alibaba-owned Tmall was already the top e-commerce platform in China but BBDO China used real-time spending behaviours to find niche, tribe-based trends and unleash trend-based consumer demand which turned out to be more effective than discounts.

In North America, TD Ameritrade’s agency Havas New York partnered with IBM Watson to create an AI-powered, rich-media ad that provided guidance and answers to user questions through a chat interface. This not only exceeded expectations on engagement rates, but drove three times stronger conversion rates for new qualified accounts vs. other paid media executions during the quarter.

Among agencies, BBDO China leads the shortlist with a total of three entries. China also heads the list of countries with the most shortlisted entries at four.

The WARC Awards has a $40,000 prize fund split equally across its four categories. Shortlists for the remaining categories will be announced over the next three weeks and the winners will be announced on 27th May.

Sourced from WARC