This month, the Advertising community celebrated its art at the International Festival of Creativity – the Cannes Lions. We regularly follow and publish consumer data for YouTube’s monthly Leaderboards – which catalogue the most popular paid ads. This list however, was determined by applying the Leaderboard methodology to ads uploaded to YouTube during the Cannes submission period, March 1, 2013–April 30, 2014.

Below are some of the data behind how consumers scored these award winning spots. Ace Metrix scores are based on how everyone would respond to the ad, providing actionable data to marketers contemplating placing their online ads more broadly, digitally or in front of a television audience. To be both among the top viewed ads online and achieve a top quintile Ace Score or high Emotional Sentiment index is the remarkable confluence of great viral appeal and broad demographic appeal.

Ads with lower Ace Scores indicate that while the ad certainly resonates with a market – thus the repeat and accumulated views – the ad lacks broad appeal of multiple demographics.

For more details behind the data, contact your Ace Metrix representative.

The #1 viewed Cannes Lion winner, “The Selfie Shootout” is a demonstration of creative that captured attention and introduced a brand to consumers who were otherwise unfamiliar with the airline. Our sample of 500 consumers, balanced and representative of the US general population found the :30 “Selfie Shootout” ad entertaining but irrelevant and unrelatable resulting in low Ace Scores and persuasion components. While it came close to norm on Likeability (642 vs the current airline norm of 647), the ad fell short considerably on Information and Desire – with the widest gap being Relevance, 499 or 14% below norm.

Of the 333 people who chose to leave a qualitative comment, 8% used the word “interesting” and 6% said it was “fun”. The brand “Turkish Airlines” was also referenced in 7% of responses – the majority of which noted never having heard of the brand before.

The ad scored best among men over 50 – an unusual group in that they are generally the toughest scorers.

#4 on the YouTube Cannes Leaderboard, “Epic Split” is a masterful execution by Forsman & Bodenfors that swept up several awards at this years festival.

Unsurprisingly Relevance and Desire are significantly below norm. (How many of us are in the market for a large cargo truck?) But still, the ad imparts a fair amount of information which also likely fuels the high Change score. Attention broke the 800 barrier, a feat only achieved 6 of our 32K+ ads (and oddly, another of those 6 is also on this very list).

This top quintile ad transcends age and gender breaks, although certainly skews younger.

 The Emotional Sentiment score, generated by applying text analytics to the nearly 300 optional comments left by respondents, was 64 as compared to the overall average of 50 or Volvo’s brand average of 57. Of those verbatims, 4% include the words “wow” and “awesome”, 3% used the words “precision” and “impressive”.

Much ink has already been spilled on the Super Bowl favorite, “Puppy Love”. In addition to their Cannes Lions, Budweiser has earned many awards from us for this – and their other Super Bowl pieces – which often include fists full of emotional heartstring tugs and four-footed actors. This ad also wins across age and gender breaks but earns its best scores from women 36+; good news for a brand that while beloved by men is most likely purchased in volume by women.

Speaking of “love”, of the 361 verbatims given, 12% used the word “loved” and 16% “love.” And while the ad had little to do with beer, 8% mentioned the brand by name.

As noted above, to break 800 on a component score places an ad in an elite space, but this ad did so with both Attention (821) and Likeability (833) – and did so handily.

Beer ads tend to be lower scoring and one could argue this is hardly a beer ad – but does reinforce the brand. A look at the beer intender data reveals that the ad appeals not only to Domestic beer drinkers but to Imported and Craft beers as well – and also scores well above norm with those who don’t consume beer.

As Google points out on the Cannes leaderboard, this Pantene ad is “a great example of a brand leveraging insights about its audience to tell a story.” The ad earned an overall score of 524, just 4% above the Hair category norm – but as expected performed very well with women (Ace Score 614) and even gained a fair score from males 16-20 who awarded the ad a 505, just one point from the Hair category norm.

Women loved the message, a word that was used by 13% of the ladies who chose to leave an optional verbatim comment about the ad. The ad, like many of those showcased at Cannes, is more interested in demonstrating what the brand stands for rather than urging viewers to consider buying a product. That said, only 4% of women mentioned Pantene, meaning the brand may not have come through clearly enough to accept responsibility for a much appreciated message.

Google’s 2013 Zeitgeist broke on national television on Christmas day, just in time to earn Ace Metrix Ad of the Year. The Ad of the Year is awarded to the spot that most outscores its twelve month category average. “Here’s to 2013” beat the Websites category average by 46%.

“Here’s to 2013” is a year in review look at the events of 2013 through the lens of Google Search. The :60 spot is signature Google – inspirational, reflective, yet still shows off their products. With towering scores across all components, what stands out is the Relevance score – a whopping 49% above the Websites category norm. The 706 Relevance scores is fourth overall for the year, across all categories. This score puts Google in the likes of Hershey’s, Dawn, Walmart and Longhorn Steakhouse- mass appeal brands and categories that Google is now firmly among.

Consumers liked that the spot was heartwarming and thought it integrated all of Google’s products well. Several people commented that they would be searching for some of the news stories featured or sharing the ad itself. The ad delivered the goods in terms of brand recognition – a testament to the ubiquity of the search giant’s simple interface. Here is a word cloud generated from the 330 verbatim respondents with 19% of those respondents mentioning Google by name:

This is certainly a collection of ads worth celebrating. We expect to see them among the Lion candidates at next year’s event.