This year’s Automotive industry ads run the gamut of emotion, with attention-grabbing ads about innovative technologies, ads that make us smile with high likeability levels, and ads that dazzle us with amazing visuals. As one might expect, the Non-Luxury Automotive category has nearly double the ads and qualifying brands as the Luxury category. Let’s take a look at this year’s winners in both.

Safety plays a major role in the messaging of this year’s Luxury Automotive Brand of the Year, Mercedes-Benz. Taking the title for the second year in a row, the automaker delivered a strong mix of mostly ads driven by information and desire, with a few high breakthrough ads, most notably their Super Bowl spot “Fable”. The Super Bowl ad was among the top 5 of the year.

Brand of the Year honors are awarded to brands earning the highest average Ace Score for their 2015 body of work. See qualifications below.

Brand of the Year: Luxury Automotive

The Luxury Auto category saw thirteen participating brands this year, with ten of them qualifying for Brand of the Year honors. It is a fairly competitive category, with five brands ranking within the 10 highest scoring ad list. Safety was not only a prevalent theme for Mercedes-Benz, but also in the entire category this year, with five of the top ten scoring ads containing a safety message.

The top Mercedes-Benz ads of the year was “Crash Worthy”, with an overall Ace Score of 661 (16% above the category norm). The ad scored particularly well, receiving a 711 score, with with auto intenders planning to purchase or lease a new car in the next six months. Powered primarily by Information (scoring 695, 19% above category norm) and secondarily by Relevance (scoring 676, 17% above the category norm) the ad conveys a powerful message around the brand’s dedication to safety technology.

Comments from two auto intenders:

Top Performing Mercedes-Benz Ads of 2015

Brand of the Year: Non-Luxury Automotive

The Non-Luxury Automotive category saw ads from twenty brands this year, with nineteen of them qualifying for Brand of the Year. Also very competitive, six brands had ads appearing in the list of top 10 by overall Ace Score, with Brand of the Year Mazda’s first ad appearing as number 20 on that list.

Mazda’s creative success this year stems from delivering ads that are not only likeable, but easy to relate to. Their top three ads overall averaged 6 percent above the category norm for both the Likeability and Relevance components. Aside from their top ad, which uses an attention-grabbing magic trick as its theme, their top ads focus on life events and daily routine, as enhanced by our relationship with our car.

“You and Your Car” and “Unpredictable” are both about the cycle of life, one as told by a man going through life and one by new parents driving home with their newborn. Both are powered by Likeability and Relevance and performed better among those with children at home, with overall scores of 639 and 650 among that group. For both of these ads, the Message was named the Single Best Thing about the ad.

Comments from respondents for “You and Your Car”:

Top Performing Mazda Ads of 2015

ad title	brand	category	air date	score(s)
New Trick	MAzda	Non-Luxury Automotive	02.16.2015	612
You and Your Car	Mazda	Non-Luxury Automotive	05.22.2015	596
Sales Event	Mazda	Non-Luxury Automotive	04.12.2015	576
Driving Matters	Mazda	Non-Luxury Automotive	08.01.2015	575
Unpredictable	Mazda	Non-Luxury Automotive	07.13.2015	574

Curious how other Automotive brands stacked up to Mercedes-Benz and Mazda? Contact us to request a meeting.

Check out all of the Top Brands of the Year here.

Brand of the Year Qualifications

Ace Metrix scores every nationally airing television advertisement and the majority of digital video ads across 24 industries, 96 categories and is therefore uniquely qualified to report a brand’s overall effectiveness across the entire video advertising industry’s body of work over a year, as well as year-over-year. To qualify for Ace Metrix Brand of the Year, brands must have debuted five or more unique pieces of creative within a category containing more than 100 pieces of creative and five qualifying brands. Ace Metrix gathered more than 3.5 million responses, including nearly 2 million verbatim comments left optionally for the 6,500+ new television video ads in 2015. Each ad is scored against a unique panel of 500+ consumers, demographically balanced to the US census for age, gender and income. The Ace Score is the holistic measure of ad creative impact and includes data on attributes such as Persuasion, Likeability, Information, Attention, Change, Relevance, Desire and Watchability. Hundreds of qualitative consumer verbatim responses are collected for each ad and inform additional measures such as the Emotional Sentiment Index.