Creativity & effectiveness Strategy:

Consistency, simplicity and tapping into fandoms at scale are the keys to creative effectiveness success, according to a new WARC report, Creative Effectiveness Lions – Insights from the 2024 winners.

What it’s about 

The report, which is available exclusively to WARC subscribers, analyses the entries and has insights into the jury’s deliberations to provide a commentary on the themes from the work, unearth what makes a campaign both creative and effective, and offer a behind-the-scenes view of the strategies that lead to winning in this category.

Why the 2024 winners matter

John Bizzell, WARC’s awards lead, explains that the 2024 Creative Effectiveness Lions jury set themselves a mission to “seek causality in every case” – with clear evidence that the campaign had directly caused business impact.

“You can really see that in the winners they chose and that makes this year’s crop a particularly powerful resource for marketers to learn from and be inspired by,” he says.

Three key themes 

• The power of consistency
  Consistency plays a key role in building mental availability and salience. Being consistent might mean investing in distinctive brand assets, or commitment to a long-running campaign. Brands like Heinz, Dove, Mastercard and Spotify maintained commitment to long-standing strategies, but did so in ways that are fresh and exciting. 

• Keying into cultures at scale
  Successful brands are combining approaches that key into cultures and sub-groups with sophisticated mass marketing. PedidosYa, Oreo and Budweiser all built campaigns around sporting fan truths, but then used those insights to go large and win.

• Simplicity is a virtue
  Simple felt like the most used word in the Creative Effectiveness Lions jury room this year, in a very positive way. Simplicity might mean finding an emotional connection, or finding simple solutions to customer pain points, as McDonald’s and Honest Eggs Co showed.

The full report is available to WARC Strategy subscribers