LONDON: Campaigns from Diageo, Microsoft and Procter & Gamble are among the 19 from around the world that have been shortlisted for the WARC Awards’ Effective Use of Brand Purpose category.

The panel of 17 judges, led by Claudia Willvonseder, chief marketing officer, IKEA, has selected papers from the US, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, the UK, Ireland, Spain, Israel, UAE, Saudi Arabia, India, Indonesia and Australia.

The complete list can be seen on the Awards site, where WARC subscribers can read the shortlisted entries in full.

BBDO and McCann offices lead the way in terms of nominations, followed by Saatchi & Saatchi and FP7/DXB.

The shortlisted entries include Made of More, a UK and Ireland campaign from brewer Guinness built on the belief that genuine purpose would trigger competitive advantage and which delivered a profit ROI 1.7x the pre-campaign average and 1.8x the category average.

Tech company Microsoft, meanwhile, sought to empower and inspire young women around the world to pursue a career in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math), with its #MakeWhatsNext campaign. The public conversation around this exceeded its KPI for impressions and its reach and inspiration extended across a wide range of people.

In Israel, P&G-owned hair-care brand Pantene invited people seeing a highly visible billboard featuring a cancer sufferer to donate to remove that person from the billboard; donations increased 13% year on year and Pantene sales increased by 13-15% over the previous year.

The aim of the WARC Awards’ Effective Use of Brand Purpose category is to recognise marketing initiatives that have successfully embraced a brand purpose and achieved commercial success as well as a benefit for a wider community.

There is a $10,000 prize fund for the best papers and the winners will be announced in late May.

Sourced from WARC