The 20 most creative and effective ads of 2020

Throughout 2020, Kantar, the world’s leading data-driven insights and consulting company, tested more than 10,000 adverts for clients around the world.

Kantar reveals the adverts that performed most effectively. What makes the Kantar Creative Effectiveness Awards different from other creativity awards is that consumers are the jury.

Kantar’s Covid-19 Barometer research showed people wanted advertising to continue during the pandemic, as it provided a sense of normalcy at a time of 24-hour Covid news cycles.  Further research showed that, for the most part, consumers were processing content the same way they did before.

Advertisers that held their resolve and invested in their brand during the creative investment downturn were rewarded for their bravery.

To view the most creative and effective ads of 2020, click here 

From the 10,000-plus adverts analysed using Link, Kantar’s validated ad testing solution, five habits from the most effective advertisers were identified.

• Be distinctive: Create the ability to be noticed and remembered in a world where there’s a profusion of ads. Your ad is not just competing in its category, it’s competing for attention against the world. Stand out from the category as a minimum, and ideally from any other advertising.
  
  
• Brand intrinsically: Make sure the attention won by the ad is at the service of the brand. Get your branding cues right. A surprising number of companies forget this basic rule.
  
  
• Be meaningfully different: To grow market share or defend premium pricing you need to fulfil consumers’ functional, emotional and social needs in the category and illustrate how you stand out from the competition.
  
  
• Trigger an emotional response: Making the viewer feel something wins engagement for the ad, bypassing the natural tendency to screen out advertising. It also has positive effects on the brand’s emotional associations.
  
  
• Talk with your consumer: Successful marketers know they can get “too close” to their creative journey and lose perspective, so they listen to viewer feedback during creative development.

Daren Poole, global leader of Kantar’s Creative Domain, says: “At Kantar, we love great creative content, and we love it even more when that creativity is harnessed to deliver against brand and marketing objectives. Our winners are from a range of products and categories, and, as our report shows, use different tactics. They share a commitment to creative excellence and a focus on ensuring their work performs exactly as intended.” 

Kantar’s Link solution is a globally most trusted ad-testing solution, having been used more than 215,000 times. It offers predictive and diagnostic measures to guide ad optimisation to maximise that return on investment. With Link Now available on Kantar Marketplace, ads can be tested with confidence in as few as six hours. 

The link measures that underpin the awards are the “Short-term Sales Likelihood” (STSL) and “Power”. STSL is the probability that an ad will drive a short-term sales response. Power is a measure of an ad’s potential to contribute to a brand’s longer-term equity. Both headline measures are measured against real-life outcomes to get a read of both creative excellence and brand outcomes.

Learn more about Link ad testing on Kantar.com.  

This article was paid for by Kantar.