This year’s Creative Effectiveness awards have a decidedly international flavor – and that speaks to the emergence of this category, now in its fourth year. While we cover international markets for partners such as Facebook, the majority of our data looks at U.S. content. As such, of the twelve exceptional campaigns that made the shortlist, we have data on just two. Those came to us via the viral web, one through our partnership with TED, Google and their Ads Worth Spreading and the other through its extraordinary success.
The first ad was last year’s winner and is entitled “Dumb Ways to Die” from Metro Trains/Transport in Australia.
We first saw this ad through our partnership with TED and their 2013 AWS crop. The ad was slightly below norm for the Corporate Branding category when it debuted. This is not to say the ad was not exceptional, it just reflects elements within that ad that were either polarizing, not tailored for the audience (U.S.) or tailored for something that appeared to be other than television due to length. The “Dumb Ways To Die” ad delivered a superb Attention score, but unfortunately for the U.S. audience, that was the only component that broke the norm for Corporate Branding ads. This ad performed slightly better in Australia where we tested several of the AWS ads, but was still well below the top ads in terms of Ace Score.
The audience skews male and younger in the United States. In Australia, the ad skewed Female and younger.
From a sharability perspective, the ad had legs with more than 70% indicating some action:
Authenticity was also strong, impressive given that few in America would be expected to know the brand well – this is seen in the brand perception scoring as well. Both are below:
Qualitatively, the ad was deemed “long” at 3:00 which is reasonable for an audience accustomed to :30 ads. The ad also displayed some polarity – with instances of “gruesome,” “disturbing” and “horrible” scattered amongst the praise. The music clearly played a role with 11% of the 300+ respondents noting “catchy” in their verbatim responses. Internationally, the qualitative feedback was quite similar – focusing on the ads length but also the “attention,” “message” and “catchy” tune.
Looking at the custom open-ended questions, we find that the animated approach is on full display with significant references for the “characters,” the “message,” the “cartoon” and the “animation” to accompany the music and humor.
The ad’s stats, both above and online (81 million and counting) speak to the power of the ad.
Our second installment was also “international” in nature but domestic in execution. Dove scored a huge viral hit with their “Sketches” video, garnering over 163 million YouTube views. While the beauty industry generally follows a celebrity driven formula, Dove has taken a different path with its “Real Beauty” campaigns.
Part of what makes this latest Dove ad so exceptional is that it has resonated with both male and female audiences despite focusing on women’s perceptions of themselves. The spot earned an Ace Score of 665, putting it in the top five spots for 2013 when it debuted and tying with Budweiser’s Super Bowl topper, “Brotherhood.” It blew the Skin category norms out of the water, with 4 out of 6 component scores breaking the 700 barrier. Despite only having a little over :10 of Dove branding, respondents still felt they learned something from the spot as evidenced by the fact that the 733 Information score was the second highest of 2013 when it aired.
Our beauty categories- Skin, Hair and Cosmetics, struggle to obtain Ace Scores in the 500 range mostly due to the lack of appeal for the male audience. Amazingly, the 707 Relevance score for “Sketches” was in the top 5% for 2013, indicating that not only did men like the ad, they related to it. A look at the verbatim responses confirms that while men did not necessarily feel like they needed a pick me up in the self-esteem department, they realize that plenty of women need to see the beauty others see in them.
Dove’s goal for this next step in their “Real Beauty” campaign was to “Make women feel better about themselves.” Ogilvy Brazil certainly delivered on that request, and then some. Not only were Attention and Likeability scores through the roof, but the reflective view that the women in the video take when seeing their drawings caused a similar reaction in the video viewers. Many re-evaluated how they feel about themselves, or cited that as a whole, we should all recognize our beauty. Here are just a few of the 239 optional verbatim responses collected for this ad:
YouTube metrics tell us that the top demographics viewing this ad are females 45 – 54 followed by two male demographics 35-54. From the chart below you see that Dove has a standout ad to be placed in front of a broad audience. Great creative communicates a message that can be appreciated by many.
We think this ad is meaningful on several different levels. Like Coca-Cola’s bold ad on obesity – it addresses the subject of inner beauty head on, and in a way that treats consumers with respect. It is also meaningful in that the message is truly broad as noted above. Take a look at this ad compared to the last five ads in cosmetics: while there are the occasional pockets of strength among males with other ads – Dove’s ad shows broad, meaningful acceptance across every age and gender break beating the male average for the other ads by a full 225 points and the narrowing the average gap between males and females by another 30+ points.
Finally, this was an ad that connected emotionally with consumers – male and female alike. In a category that tends to under-index on our emotion scale, ”Sketches” stood out – it had 40% more emotional sentiment than the standard ad (we measure emotion by applying text analytics to 235+ verbatims we collect on every ad). Pretty remarkable.
These are the stats that Creative Effectiveness awards are built on – as demonstrated by the hardware it has corralled in the past year and half.
