Kantar Creative Effectiveness Awards 2025. Connecting with people in the age of AI

See the full list of winning ads here.

The secret ingredients in the world’s most effective ads

The winning ads highlight four rising creative trends in the industry, giving marketers inspiration for how to use creativity to connect with audiences and predispose people to their brand:

Relatable Realities: Connecting with people through real moments that reflect their everyday lives. Coca-Cola’s #1 winning print/outdoor ad 'Pick up a Coke, light up the dark’ lit up the opportunities that hide in the dark for those living in places where the winter months bring long hours of darkness.

Bizarrely Bold: Surreal ideas like exaggerated visuals and fantastical scenarios don’t just grab attention, they differentiate these ads from the crowd. Deliveroo’s TV winner ‘Octoman’ unexpectedly presents Octopus Triton on a date ordering his takeaway to an isolated island, stopping viewers in their tracks.

Roots Reimagined: Brands looking to their past to help connect with people today, whether that’s emphasising the way they’ve always been there for people or celebrating they ways they’ve changed and grown. The #3 TV winner Volkswagen’s ‘YourWagen’ ad spells out the literal meaning of the brand’s name, ‘people’s car’, and spotlights the personal stories of its owners over time, involving genuine Volkswagen fans in its storytelling.

Trend Tapping: Embedding a brand in the conversations people are already having, through music, sports, or borrowing attention by jumping on viral hype moments and contemporary culture. Tourism Australia did this with its #3 digital/social winner ‘Colours of Australia, Taylor’s Version’, released just as Taylor Swift arrived to tour the country.

Commenting on the winners, Věra Šídlová, global creative thought leadership director, Kantar, said “Demands on our time and attention can feel endless. It’s not surprising that marketers can struggle to find the secret ingredient to ads that connect with us on a personal level, make us stop what we’re doing and focus.

Our winners show how creativity can truly connect with audiences. Whether it's bizarre moments that stop us in our tracks, relatable stories that touch our hearts, or helping us find our place in today's world, these ads prove that genuine connection and fresh thinking go hand in hand. The power of creativity in shaping brands and driving commercial impact has never been clearer. Testing creative content throughout every stage of the development process is key to creating campaigns that are both creative and effective, and has never been easier.”

Commenting on Desperados’ first-place winning ad in the digital/social category, Jan Maarten Zandbergen, global strategic insights manager for Tiger and Desperados, added: “The insight we started with for the campaign was that younger people have a real tension when it comes to letting loose and being spontaneous. The world is a chaotic place and as a result they value control in their own lives. From there, we developed the ‘Beer with Latin Vibe’ campaign by testing ideas right from the very beginning to find the role Desperados could play in that dynamic. We were almost co-creating the campaign with consumers, testing creative iteratively throughout the process until we had got it right. By testing early on, our aim was to take out our own subjectivity and move forward with the ideas that are highly creative and most likely to be successful.”

A shout out to three South African ads the made the Creative Effectiveness Awards shortlist:

TV: Savanna Neat, Giving, TBWA\South Africa
TV: Albany, Malume, Grey Advertising – South Africa
Digital/Social: Cadbury Lunch Bar, LunchBar Man Lucas, VML South Africa

To see the full list of award winners in each category and download the report, visit kantar.com/campaigns/creative-effective.

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About Kantar’s Creative Effectiveness Awards

All the ads showcased are tested by Kantar clients and their agencies. Winners are selected on a quantitative level from LINK+ scores ‘as judged by the consumer’ and a qualitative level by a review of top scoring ads by Kantar’s diverse global creative team. The LINK solution gives benchmarked creative performance metrics and a validated predicted short-term sales lift, so award winners are a magic combination of creativity and effectiveness, driving sales and brand equity. Awards are split into three categories: digital/social, TV and print/outdoor, with winners selected from thousands of ads researched in the previous year from around 80 different countries. The final category is creative evaluated by LINK AI, a powerful, AI-based solution for testing digital and TV advertising. This is trained with consumer insight, backed by Kantar’s LINK+ database of over 260,000 ads.