Australia soared to the front of the ad stage a few weeks ago when Warc released its top 100 campaigns from the past year, with Saatchi & Saatchi Australia’s Penny the Pirate topping the list.
Overall, Australia was ranked fifth in the world.
And besides just marvelling at the wondrous campaigns, Warc has released the common themes between them all so anyone can pull together a cracking campaign. You can download the full report here.
The four main takeaways are:
Digital-led strategies can be highly affective.
Eleven of the top 20 campaigns were digitally led in some capacity, says the executive summary of the Warc top 100. After analysing the campaign themes, social media emerged as the most used channel for the campaigns – around 80 per cent of the campaigns used social in some way.
Online video was the second most used channel, followed by public relations.
Online video remains a more used channel than TV for the second year running.
Digital is driving low-budget strategies.
The 2016 list has seen a trend towards less-expensive and shorter campaigns.
“This is unusual,” says the report. “The 2015 analysis, consistent with previous studies into high performing campaigns at effectiveness and strategy awards, found that bigger campaigns tend to overperform.”
Coming back to the first point, digitally-led campaigns are proving to be commercially viable, and some of them, says Warc, were on a very low-budget.
“New opportunities are clearly emerging for low budget work to cut through.”
Emotional appeals are becoming more often.
It’s been said time and time again – marketers can’t ignore the emotional pull of advertising. It’s so important, News Corp acquired video ad tech company Unruly and released an offering that uses emotions to target specific ads.
Similarly, emojis are becoming a more widely used marketing tool.
“Emotional marketing has increased in prominence every year since Warc began tracking Warc 100 data, and is now by far the most-used creative approach among the top campaigns,” says the report.
“Despite the fact that emotion is becoming more popular among the total case study set, emotional campaigns continue to overindex on the Warc 100.”
Warc singled out Always’ #LikeAGirl campaign, which came second in the leaderboard of top 100 campaigns, for being a brilliant example of emotional pull.
“The campaign used a digital and PR-led approach, with an online video later repurposed as a Super Bowl ad, all with a highly emotional appeal.”
In case you haven’t seen it, check it out below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjJQBjWYDTs
Australia remains a strategic powerhouse (so people are taking some tips from our fine nation).
This was one of the four takeaways from the overall report, meaning Australia can probably give itself a grand ol’ pat on the back.
The amount of campaigns Australia has within the Warc 100 list (13 per cent) well above our global ad spend (2 per cent).
