Integrating cultural insights, interactive experiences, strategic creator partnerships, and platform-native ideas into campaigns are key drivers of commercial success, according to a new report by WARC.
‘Creative Effectiveness Lions – Insights from the 2026 winners’, identifies trends and themes common to the winners of this year’s Cannes Creative Effectiveness Lions awards category, which rewards creativity that has also met business goals and driven sustainable impact over time.
Based on WARC’s exclusive access to the jury deliberations and analysis of the entries, the report unearths insights into what makes a campaign both creative and effective, offers a behind-the-scenes view on the strategies that led to success, and provides takeaways for advertisers, agencies, media owners, people and planet.
New Digital Age spoke with John Bizzell, Content Lead at WARC, to find out more…
What, for you, were the headline insights of the new report?
The headline insights of the report for me are threefold: the importance of having a cultural vision for your creative work, the growing role that creators have in the media landscape, and that the best work almost always now includes participatory or interactive elements, often in tandem with the creator layer of campaigns.
“Cultural vision” is a phrase stolen from this year’s Creative Effectiveness Jury President, Bertille Toledano, and I think it sums up how cultural insight should be seen as a strategic business tool that brands can use to find the right times and places to engage with customers. Increasingly, those places can be on social media platforms, where creators are bridging the gap between big brands and individual consumers, and creating trusted spaces for dialogue and engagement.
What were the standout campaigns for you this year?
The Grand Prix, AXA’s Three Words, has rightly won many awards for creativity and the strategy behind the work, but I think it’s really important that it has now been acknowledged for the impact it has had – on French culture, on the broader insurance sector, and ultimately on AXA’s business. Purpose might be a Marmite word, but done right it really works.
I also love the My Japan Railway campaign – the interesting thing here is that to be eligible to enter the Creative Effectiveness Lions a campaign needs to have previously won or been shortlisted in a creative category. My Japan Railway won its Grand Prix for design and the Design to Creative Effectiveness pipeline is not one we often see with Lions.
Does the report identify any other emerging trends?
I think this year’s winning campaigns showcased how brands are trying to find new ways to unlock growth: like Pedigree expanding its addressable market by flipping the script on its own brand name and focusing on non-pedigree dogs in Brazil; or like Uber Eats, which engaged a really diverse audience by entertaining across multiple channels and platforms.
We also discuss in the report the concept of reimagining social to build brand, and the three ceilings that social channels have: platform, cultural and self-sustaining. Brands that reach the latter have got to the point where creators are carrying forward creative ideas for them, and their influence compounds across communities. Vaseline Verified was awarded a Silver and is a great example of this.
Why does creative effectiveness keep evolving? What factors are at play in transforming things?
It keeps evolving because it has to. Creativity is in its definition the creation of original ideas, and the application of those creative ideas in marketing to produce effective outcomes isn’t a definitive science. Continual platform proliferation, technological advances and (obviously) AI are all factors, though the fundamental principles of creative effectiveness don’t see such rapid change – these are the common threads that you’ll see in the winners of Creative Effectiveness categories over time.
What factors remain constant in creative effectiveness no matter what?
Concepts like balancing brand and performance, distinctive brand assets, and the importance of emotion – these are all core principles of creative effectiveness that haven’t really changed over time. There is now a raft of evidence that creativity is key to delivering effectiveness, and the building blocks of how to get there remain pretty steady – what you build out of them might just look quite different over time.
The AI question – what role does AI have to play in creative effectiveness?
I think AI’s role in marketing until recently hasn’t actually been about effectiveness – it has been about efficiency. Applications of AI like synthetic data have reduced the cost and increased the speed of customer research. AI can crunch boatloads of data in no time at all, allowing us to isolate the key insights faster. It can create and test multiple creative assets at speed and scale, and it can personalise at scale.
I think its role in effectiveness is still nascent, but the issue at play here is around AI’s role as an audience for our marketing output. This is what we at WARC have been referring to as the “two audience problem”: we now need to be effective at both getting people to want our brand, and getting AI to choose our brand with its model to surface to those people.
But the good news is that those effectiveness principles that we talked about remaining constant – they still apply here. Building a brand’s core equity is as important when creating for AI as it is when creating for humans.
The full report is available to WARC Strategy subscribers. An upcoming WARC Podcast available from 20 August will discuss the findings.
