Advertising best practice, evidence and insights

How creativity drives advertising effectiveness

Article • Research on WARC, July 2020

The crisis in creative effectiveness has been played out during the first several months of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020.

Re-evaluating iconic brand assets in a post-pandemic world

Article • Dr Gemma Calvert, Win Ee Chun and Dr Eamon Fulcher, WARC Exclusive, June 2020

Distinctive brand assets have a powerful role to play in ensuring top-of-mind recall with consumers – but in a world changed by COVID-19, a strategic reassessment of assets is needed.

System1 recommends creative, life-enriching ads during a time of crisis

Article • Geoffrey Precourt, Event Reports, Lions Live, June 2020

Research firm System1 has taken a deep dive into advertising effectiveness during the COVID-19 pandemic in order to understand which types of commercials are effective.

How to connect and communicate in these challenging times

Article • WARC COVID-19 Series, June 2020

Shows how behaviours are changing during and after the COVID-19 pandemic and provides a behavioural road map for how to communicate today and in the foreseeable future.

Keep calm and advertise on: How to successfully navigate your brand through an economic downturn

Article • VAB, WARC COVID-19 Series, June 2020

This research looks at recent TV audience behavior, what sports fans are watching during COVID, OTT trends and COVID-19 ad performance.

How to do video on LinkedIn

Article • Brian Carruthers, Event Reports, IAB research webinar, April 2020

LinkedIn undertook research into the top-performing videos on the platform across EMEA to understand what works best.

Keep calm and advertise on: How to successfully navigate your brand through an economic downturn

Article • Research on WARC, May 2020

Features both current data on ad spending trends due to COVID-19 and historical data highlighting how brands that continue to spend on advertising through recessions come out more strongly when recessions end.

How does consumer insight support the leap to a creative idea: Inside the creative process - Shifting the advertising appeal from functional to emotional

Research Paper • John Parker, Scott Koslow, Lawrence Ang, and Alexander Tevi, Journal of Advertising Research, Digital First, May 2020

Account planners identify and articulate a key strategic resource, consumer insight, from which creative ideation is said to leap.

Old or new? Strategic or tactical? Your COVID-19 advertising questions answered

News • 26 May 2020

Brands are commonly advised to continue to advertise during a recession, but there are different considerations during a health-induced recession caused by disease; System1’s Orlando Wood offers some advice in The WARC Guide.

How should brands advertise during COVID-19?

Article • Orlando Wood, WARC COVID-19 Series, May 2020

Details how to advertise in a recession – and, specifically, a health-induced recession caused by disease.

Laughter is the best medicine: Navigating brand communication in challenging times

Article • Graham Page, WARC Exclusive, May 2020

Looks at how brands can communicate in difficult times and how to strike the right tone in their advertising.

The social-emotional drivers to purchase decisions in COVID-19

News • 06 May 2020

Brands can create more effective advertising by understanding the motivations behind people’s purchase decisions and how they have changed under COVID-19, according to exclusive new research from Decode.

WARC from Home classic webinar: System 1’s Orlando Wood on effective creativity

Opinion • WARC from Home, May 2020

WARC from Home is our series of content for those looking to skill up in the lockdown – including a weekly re-run of a classic webinar from the WARC database.

Beyond the obvious: How to make your brand more relevant during COVID-19

Article • Phil Barden and Dr. Nick Carnagey, WARC COVID-19 Series, April 2020

Explores new research into the changes in consumer motivations during the Covid-19 crisis, as opposed to before.

Why do creative ideas get rejected?

News • 24 April 2020

Advertising creatives often hold different views of what constitutes original, appropriate work than external judges, according to a study published in the Journal of Advertising Research (JAR).

Grocery retailers boost audio ad effectiveness during the COVID-19 lockdown

Article • Alex Brownsell, WARC COVID-19 Series, Future of Audio, April 2020

Analysis of audio advertising referencing COVID-19 by UK supermarket chains including Tesco and Iceland.

The secrets behind long-term McMarketing success

Opinion • Stephen Whiteside, April 2020

Steve Whiteside spoke to Colin Mitchell, SVP/Global Marketing, McDonald’s as part of WARC’s Learn from the best report.

The strategies working in COVID-19 specific communications

Article • Sam Peña-Taylor, WARC COVID-19 Series, Kantar Webinar, April 2020

Research from Kantar assesses how advertising addressing the coronavirus is landing with consumers.

WARC from Home: Brush up on the essentials of marketing during the COVID-19 lockdown

Opinion • WARC from Home, April 2020

Every week WARC from Home will guide you round the latest thinking on a key topic, pointing you in the direction of must-read articles, seminal research papers and essential webinars, to ensure you are top of the class when we all finally return to office life.

COVID-19: The creative fightback

Research Paper • Adam Sheridan, Arnaud Debia, Lesley Tian, Lindsay Franke and Rachel Rodgers, WARC COVID-19 Series, March 2020

Looks at how brands can help people to win the war of COVID-19 both through adapting products and services, and through communications.

Behavioural economics: Habits, experiments and advertising creative

Article • Kate Waters, Richard Chataway and Owain Service, WARC COVID-19 Series, April 2020

Looks at how businesses and brands can become part of consumer habits or shift them from default biases or status quo decisions in their creative and content output.

Multimodal perceptual processing of cues in food ads: Do you smell what you see? Visual-induced olfactory imagery and its effects on taste perception and food consumption

Research Paper • Yamen Koubaa and Amira Eleuch, Journal of Advertising Research, Digital First, March 2020

In food advertisements, consumers often get inputs from only a few senses and rely on crossmodal interactions to represent those advertisement features from which they are not getting sensory stimulation.

How do I use creativity to drive effectiveness?

Article • WARC Evidence, March 2020

Details how marketers should be using creativity to drive effectiveness by looking at studies that prove the link between the two and advising on successful creative strategy.

The brand as a visual construct

News • 05 March 2020

The behaviour of the consumer in the real world rarely corresponds with marketers’ predictions, thanks in part to the way the human brain filters the huge amount of information thrown at it daily.

The grand paradox of branding

Article • Itiel E. Dror and Nir Wegrzyn, WARC Exclusive, March 2020

An exploration into the role of brand in driving purchase decisions from a cognitive-neuroscience perspective.

Creativity & research