Kantar ranks Australia's top 10 ads for creative effectiveness

EBay’s ‘The fast and the furious’ digital advertising for its Plus loyalty program has topped a new list of Australia’s most effective ads in 2020.

The latest Kantar Australia list is part of the branding and consumer insights consultancy’s Global Creative Effectiveness Awards and was based on Australian consumer responses. Top of the list of the eBay Plus campaign, created in partnership with CHE Proximity. The ad was also ranked 18^th in the recent Kantar Global Creative Effectiveness Awards list.

In second place locally was AAMI’s ‘AAMI Assist for those assisting’ static advertising, produced in partnership with Ogilvy Australia, while third place was taken by Nescafe’s ‘The perfect blend of bold and smooth’ TVC, produced with Saatchi & Saatchi.

Rounding out the top five were Ice break’s ‘The real Queenslander’ static advertising, created in partnership with Honey Communications, and Nivea Sun’s ‘Nivea sun 2020’ TVC, created in partnership with Publicis One Touch.

Commenting on the results, Kantar Australia director of creative, Kris Katalbas-Hagamann, said eBay’s winning ad resonated with consumers because of its combination of behind-the-scenes footage and humour.

“Ads adopting emotional routes have a better chance of breaking through the brain’s filters, and using an emotional cue like humour is actually one of the best ways to prevent people from skipping an ad in a digital environment,” she claimed. “EBay played to this emotion very well.”

More broadly, Katalbas-Hagamann said the ads in the top 10 consistently demonstrated key traits that made them creatively effective, such as distinctiveness, entertaining content, clear propositions and impactful employment of brand.

“For Australians in particular, ads using authenticity and a local lens were imperative at a time when provenance and localism were of fundamental importance as we navigated the pandemic on the back of the bushfire crisis,” she said.

Kantar head of media, digital and creative, Mark Henning, added the group’s CrossMedia studies showed quality creative as the single largest drive of advertising profitability that a marketer can influence.

“Creative quality and consistency of use across channel accounts for 50 per cent of campaign effectiveness,” he continued. “The link between the top 10 Aussie ads is that they each have strong creative, which is built consistently across touchpoints to make the most of the media synergies – and understanding how to make that creative effective in the environment is absolutely critical.”

The brands sitting in 6^th to 10^th position were: Coca-Cola’s ‘Coke and food, better together’ TVC (Ogilvy Australia); Powerade’s ‘Powerade, sweat it out’ TVC (McCann Australia); Domino’s ‘New Yorker 30-inch’ TVC (Elevencom); Nando’s ‘Legendary peri-peri’ static advertising (BWM Dentsu); and Zespir’s ‘Excited bros’ TVC (Dentsu Tokyo). The results were tallied using Kantar’s ad testing solution, Link.

Other highly commended advertisements that fell out of the top 10 were 7-Eleven’s ‘My 7-Elevn loyalty launch redeem 2020’ digital advertisement (CHE Proximity); Pepsi Max’s ‘Pepsi Max taste challenge’ TVC (TBWA Australia); and AAMI’s ‘AAMI does home claims’ 15-second Facebook ad (Ogilvy Australia).

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