These 20 ads were the most effective of 2020: Kantar

Kantar has announced the winners in what it calls its Creative Effectiveness Awards for 2020. The list of the year's 20 most creatively effective ads was generated not by a jury, but via Kantar's Link ad-testing technique, which analysed more than 10,000 ads on behalf of clients.

Publicis and Heineken earned top honours with a US spot entitled 'Cheers to all', in which waiters and bartenders make incorrect and gender-biased assumptions about who ordered a beer versus who ordered a cocktail. 

Two APAC works made the top 20:

• At 17: 'Delivery Rider Malaysia' for Panadol Actifast by Grey Group Singapore, in which a harried delivery driver asks, 'Do I look like I have time for a headache?'
• At 18: 'The Fast and the Furious' for EBay Australia by CHE Proximity, part of an amusing series in which two postal workers speculate about the contents of EBay packages passing through their facility (here are some other examples from the series).

The complete list, with links to most of the videos, appears below. Kantar also distilled a list of the five habits of highly effective advertisers, to wit:

Be distinctive: Create the ability to be noticed and remembered in a world where there’s a profusion of ads. Your ad is not just competing in its category. It is competing for attention against the world. Stand out from the category as a minimum, and ideally from any other advertising.

Brand intrinsically: Make sure that the attention won by the ad is at the service of the brand. Get your branding cues right. A surprising number of companies forget this basic rule.

Be meaningfully different: To grow market share or defend premium pricing you need to fulfil consumers’ functional, emotional and social needs in the category AND illustrate your uniqueness compared to the competition.

Trigger an emotional response: Making the viewer feel something wins engagement for the ad, bypassing the natural tendency to screen out advertising. It also has positive effects on the brand’s emotional associations.

Talk with your consumer: Successful marketers know they can get ‘too close’ to their creative journey and lose perspective, so they listen to viewer feedback during creative development.

The company's advice is also available in expanded form in a download.