Ogilvy is the most creative agency and Hindustan Unilever the most creative corporate, according to the third edition of Kantar’s Creative Effectiveness Awards for television and digital, unveiled on Wednesday. Across TV, Kantar awarded standout performers for eight categories — food & beverage (in which Red Label from HUL won the award), personal care (Mamaearth from Honasa Consumer), services (Burger King), home care (HUL’s Surf Excel), short format or under 15 seconds (Godrej Consumer Products for Kala Hit), and the two newly added categories — technology (Google) and OTC (Iodex Ultragel from Haleon).
Kantar had introduced an ‘un-stereotype’ category last year to celebrate gender progressive advertising, which has been included this year as well. HUL won this category for Ogilvy’s work on Bru.
Welspun won the best creative in the digital category for its QuikDry Towel ad.
All these ads exemplify creative engagement and persuasive storytelling that enhance brand sales, the report noted. Soumya Mohanty, MD & chief client officer, South Asia, Insights Division, Kantar, says Kantar’s research shows creative and effective advertising generates more than 4x as much profit as those that score low on effectiveness measures. Hence, ad testing is possibly more cost-effective than airing untested ads.
The report highlights how creativity needs to connect intuitively to a brand as also each experience coherently. It observes non-metro audiences want ads to have an impact in 15 seconds. The key elements to making an impact through short-format ads are reason to believe, vivid dramatisation, creative visualisations of the product and humour.
Prasanna Kumar, head of creative domain & EVP, South Asia, Insights Division, Kantar, adds that brands today face the task of adapting to new advertising structures and storytelling styles as short-form advertising catches on. “The growing use of 15-second ads is led by factors like budgets, optimisation objectives, the short attention span of consumers and brands need to master the art of creating an impact in 15 seconds,” he adds.
Mohanty says the award winning ads have been able to integrate the products into the consumer life in a seamless manner and layered them to some kind of an emotional benefit as well. “India likes emotions, whether it is offline advertising or online advertising, but that emotion has to have a connection to the product that is being advertised,” she says.
So what are the tricks brands can use to be impactful during an economic slowdown? Mohanty says brands must never go dark in such situations. “Amid the slowdown, marketers end up focusing a lot more on the short-term goals because that’s what their CFOs want them to do and they forget that if you do not keep investing in the brand and if a brand is out of sight, it is out of mind. Keep investing in the brand, while also keeping in mind that anything that a brand is putting out in front of the consumer should align with the overall strategy.”
To decide on the awards, the marketing data and analytics company tested more than 13,000 creatives around the world in 2022, over 10% (1,400+) of those creatives were tested in India alone; the measures for creativity and impact included the probability of driving short-term sales uplift and the potential to contribute to future brand equity.