David Ogilvy is known for saying, “We sell—or else.”
Great creative ideas in advertising can’t just sit there and look pretty. They must drive results—ultimately, sales. That’s the philosophy that undergirds the Effie Awards, which honors the most effective agencies, marketers and brands.
Thursday night at the 47th annual Effie Awards Gala in New York,
The most effective marketers have an “ability to find great insight and leverage it in a very interesting way,” according to Neal Davies, president and CEO of Effie Worldwide, adding that they also understand “what success looks like and the amount of collaboration and teamwork it takes to get there.”
Certainly, ad metrics are evolving in an era of social media and fractured platforms, but financial results remain the ultimate gauge of effectiveness. “Clearly there are new metrics available to us (likes, followers, shares), but the key to success is to see how they drive and contribute to long-term success metrics such as ROI market share and sales,” said Davies in an email. “In other words, likes aren’t the end game.”
Meanwhile, “The World’s Toughest Job” campaign from Mullen Lowe and American Greetings was best in show, named the North American Grand Effie winner.
The agency’s challenge was to persuade people to craft a Mother’s Day card with American Greetings’ Cardstore—at a time when only half of people buy Mother’s Day cards. The work caused people to reconsider Mom as the amazing professional she is and realize importance of acknowledging her with a card. The video received more than 21 million views, and the earned media effort for #worldstoughestjob increased American Greetings’ Cardstore orders by 20%, and user base by 40%, and met sales goals for the entire year.
“The American Greetings work cleared significant business and behavioral hurdles by reframing the depth of a Mother's devotion in a highly original way that moved the needle — and moved us,” said Todd Waterbury, chief creative officer at
“It was an intelligent idea,” said Clive Sirkin, CMO at Kimberly-Clark and a Grand Effie judge. “It drew you in and made you participate with it,” he said. “It was just powerful, and it’s in a very tough category where they’re swimming against the trends and they didn’t take the easy way out. We all found that to be the kind of idea we want to hold up.” It was an idea you would want to “take back to your organization and use as a case study to inspire your team to think beyond [usual ideas],” he said.
“The other thing we loved: They worked with very little budget, which proves once again that money isn’t requisite for a great idea,” Sirkin said. “But the way they executed was with a very agile mindset. They went out there with the idea and they moved tactics and dollars around to react to the response they were getting in the market.”
Sirkin reiterated that the only metric that counts is sales. “Effectiveness is business at the end of the day. You may have purchase intent, awareness measures and all of the digital metrics, vanity metrics, but unless it drives outcomes and that outcome is dollars in the bank, [it’s not effective]. [This work] directly drove American Greetings’ card sales.”
The top five most effective companies in the Effie Index include: IBM (brand),
Grand Effie Finalists (the top scoring Gold Effie Award winners) included the Grand Effie winner, along with: Big Heart Pet Brands and FCB/RED for Milk-Bone Brushing Chews Shopper Marketing Launch Campaign; British Airways and Ogilvy & Mather for “Visit Mum;” Newcastle Brown Ale, Heineken USA and Droga5 (with contributing agency Fast Horse) for “If We Made It;” NBC Sports Group and The Brooklyn Brothers (with contributing agencies Maxus, Ignited and Civic Entertainment Group) for “NBC Sports Network: Barclays Premier League;” Procter & Gamble’s Always and Starcom MediaVest Group and Leo Burnett (with contributing agency MSLGROUP for “#LikeAGirl;” Procter & Gamble’s Old Spice and Wieden+Kennedy (with contributing agency Citizen Relations) for “Smellcome to Manhood.”
In the end, as Ogilvy also said, advertisers mustn’t “worship at the altar of creativity.”
“Effective marketers don’t just think about a campaign and the creative assets, they think about the people they are trying to reach and the outcomes they’re looking to achieve,” said Carolyn Everson, VP, global marketing solutions, Facebook and chair of Effie Worldwide Board of Directors, in an email.
For the complete list of 2015 winners, visit www.effie.org.
