Using purpose to power behavioural change, involving customers to drive brand engagement and weaving creativity into the customer experience, are the three main themes, finds WARC, following its analysis of the world’s most creative campaigns.
WARC has released the ‘Creative 100 – Lessons from the world’s best campaigns’, a report analysis of the campaigns ranked in the WARC Creative 100, to uncover trends from the latest creative strategies as well as bringing together insights and opinion from the creators of award-winning ideas.
The three key trends from the WARC Creative 100 are:
- Purpose-led strategies evolve
The use of purpose as a driver for marketing strategies continues to be a regular feature of the top creative campaigns, and was central to the number one campaign, Palau Pledge, which created an immigration policy for the island of Palau to protect the nation from environmental damage.
Whilst purpose has become commonplace, several brands in this year’s Creative 100 evolved their purposeful messaging, from driving awareness to encouraging consumers towards behavioural change.
In campaigns with this approach, the brand purpose was actually actioned by customers themselves, driving engagement through participation and subsequent diffusion of conversation.
- Casting customers
Directly involving customers in campaigns, whether to drive behavioural change or to drive brand engagement is a key theme from the Creative 100. This year’s most creative brand, Burger King, had its customers dress up as clowns in a campaign that trolled its competitor’s mascot, Ronald the Clown. Skittles cast one superfan as the star of its Superbowl campaign (ranked #4) and Marmite (#7) asked their customers to take a DNA test.
Participation elements can turn ads into acts, and in a low-attention economy, this approach has become an important way of gaining attention.
- Creativity across the experience
Rather than seeing a campaign as an entity existing on a single channel, this year some of the most awarded brands created experiences where the creative idea was woven into every element of the purchase journey, building customer executions across multiple channels to work at those moments.
Bodyform’s ‘#Bloodnormal’ (ranked #2) a social idea at its heart, used influencers, designers and stylists to create visual pieces to champion a cause and rightly played in the channels where consumers could share and support. Tide’s ‘It’s a Tide Ad’ (ranked #5) used traditional media in an innovative way, hijacking the brand awareness generated by other ads, and turning it into awareness for Tide whilst creating a choreographed brand experience. A similar approach was used by Budweiser in their Tagwords campaign (#32), which harnessed print and outdoor to drive the audience to online search.
These brands created experiences for consumers, who then actively wanted to engage.
A summary of WARC’s Lessons from the world’s best creative campaigns report can be downloaded here.
