Emerging themes in creative effectiveness

0:08John Bizzell: Hello and welcome back to the WALK podcast. I'm Amy Rodgers and you may know me as Head of Content for WALK Creative, but I now also head up Effie Insights, which is a new Lions product launched this year and it's home to all of the Effie case studies and analysis of those case studies. and at the crossover of those two worlds there's a set of awards very relevant to my interests and that's the Can Lions for Creative Effectiveness. Today we're diving into Walk's report into what you can learn from this year's winners of those lions and some of the key themes emerging from the work. Joining me is the report's author and the other member of the Effie Insights content team it's John Buzell but before we hear from John a message from our sponsors.

0:51Amy Rodgers: If you're listening to this podcast, you'll know that WALK is the home of leading effectiveness thinking. And now we're teaching you everything you need to know about the fundamentals of strategy. WALK Strategy Fundamentals is WALK's new digital course for junior or entry-level strategists. You'll learn from award-winning case studies and hear directly from top strategists and WALK's own experts, giving you the latest industry insights alongside proven practical frameworks. Sharpen up your skills to excel in 2026 with Walk Strategy Fundamentals. Available now at walk.com slash learning.

1:30John Bizzell: Hello, John.

1:31Bertille Toledano: Hi, Amy. Yes, that's right. By day, FE Insights by Palais, the creative effectiveness lions. And yeah, we may have launched a new product, but come June, I just cannot wait to get back into the Cannes jury room. And this was actually my fourth year embedded with the Creative Effectiveness jury. And, you know, I think it always gives Walk's Report a real behind the scenes edge.

1:54John Bizzell: Yeah, definitely. It's something that I have spent time in that room before as well. And it just gives you such a great insight into what goes on judging those awards behind the scenes. And I spent some time with this year's jury myself. Actually, I interviewed the president, Bertil Toledano, and jury member, Jane Wakeley, for a previous episode of The Walk Pod. If you're interested in listening to that, you can find it in the walk feed. So hopefully I'll be able to throw some insights into this conversation too.

2:19Bertille Toledano: Great, I'm sure you can. There is certainly plenty to discuss.

2:23John Bizzell: Yeah, let's get into it then. First, for the benefit of listeners who might be unfamiliar, could you just give us an idea of how the entries into the creative effectiveness category differ from other Lions categories?

2:34Bertille Toledano: Yeah, good question. So the vast majority of the awards in Cannes focus on creativity, of course, But the Creative Effectiveness Lions are a little bit different because these campaigns have already been recognised for their creativity in a previous year. So they have to have either won or been shortlisted in order to be eligible for this lion. And then they come back to be considered by another jury for how effective that creative idea ultimately was for the brand. And, you know, this is often why the Creative Effectiveness Jury consider themselves to be judging the best of the best. and it's a tough gig and they take it really seriously.

3:11John Bizzell: Yeah, they definitely do. Bertil and Jane talked about this a lot in our chat, actually, how the team were really focused on getting this right, on getting the effectiveness part of the equation right. So the comparative indices entrants had used to measure success and interrogating the cultural context around the work to make sure that the results that they were looking at really made sense within the context of the work themselves. Let's drop in a clip from that conversation, actually, where Bertil and Jane are talking about analysing the data behind all of the entries. Because we were creative effectiveness, we're also looking at a lot of analytics and results.

3:47Amy Rodgers: And what I found was our different experience with the data made us as a collective much more incisive on whether, you know, this case, we may all love it creatively, but did it drive impact behaviourally in terms of the good it does, whatever the objective was. And we had some killer discussions. About retention, acquisition, penetration, growth in value, growth in volume. And you know, people, they were not joking about the figures. They all did their homework before to come. And so the level of the discussion was the level of CMO, CEO debating of, Is it a real growth or is it a value growth without volume growth?

4:37Amy Rodgers: Does it change in terms of share of market? And after all this, does it change in some way the life of people?

4:47John Bizzell: At the start of that clip, Jane spoke about the different experiences the jury brought to the data discussion. And she previously talked about how the diversity of the jury in the room really helped with that. They all brought kind of different perspectives from their different cultures into the room. And she talked about how much of a boost to the conversation that was, even when they were talking about data.

5:09Bertille Toledano: Yeah. And culture, or at least cultural insight, is the first big theme we look at in this year's report. And specifically, we're talking about brands who are really listening to culture and then putting the insights they find at the heart of their strategies, rather than perhaps more sort of traditional customer insight. And we saw this in the two most successful campaigns. So Pedigree Caramello, which took one of the golds, and then AXA Three Words, which took the second gold, but then also the Grand Prix.

5:40John Bizzell: Yeah, Three Words has performed incredibly, really, for AXA and Publicis, the agency behind that work. That campaign came top of the Walk Creative 100 ranking this year. And we actually have a podcast where I speak to Marco Venturelli from Publicis and Alice Holzman from AXA about this campaign. So if you want to hear more about the background to that one, check out the episode of the pod once you finish this one. And interesting to see pedigree there too. An Effie Grand winner, of course, both in its original market, Brazil, and then at the Latam Wide Show. And I also interviewed the CSO behind this campaign.

6:15John Bizzell: And that's Almat BBDO's Jao Fernandez when we were in Cannes for Effie Insights. And it's such a clever idea. We really talked a lot about kind of the background to it. And it's a huge campaign. So worth having a look at that one as well if you've got access to Effie Insights.

6:29Bertille Toledano: Both of these campaigns have genius elements, really. So first you've got Pedigree, who are kind of going against everything that name stands for, to recognise these mixed breed Caramello dogs. That's what they're called in Brazil. And they got them recognised as a breed. They set up a kennel club for them. And it's completely connected with Brazilian people. So we had a Brazilian member of the jury for creative effectiveness. And he talked about Brazilians seeing themselves as underdogs. And so that's why they connect with these literal underdogs. And of course, by doing that, Pedigree are just expanding the market for their product, which is so clever.

7:07John Bizzell: Yeah, it's a really impressive campaign. Let's put a clip in here from that interview I did with Zhao, where he gives a bit more context to why that campaign connected so well culturally with people in Brazil. And just to give this clip a bit of context, we'd just discussed that the addressable market for owners of mutts in Brazil was around 30 % of the population. One of the things that the FE judges remarked on when we interviewed them about this campaign was how effectively the campaign had used that cultural truth that the Caramello dog was this really loved dog in Brazil. And you obviously you gave that 30 % figure there.

7:42John Bizzell: How did you kind of come to that insight for the campaign? And also maybe just give our viewers an idea of what is a Caramello and why do they mean so much to people in Brazil?

7:52Amy Rodgers: Caramello is the most common dog in Brazil, in the streets, and it's like an icon. It's a kind of hero because Caramello is like it has something of the Brazilian-ness every person in Brazil has, which is like, okay, we are a kind of underdog. So it is like funny, it is sympathetic, it is smart. So this is a kind of we have a relation with Caramello as like it is our version in a dog version you know so this is very iconic in Brazil very celebrated but at the same time it's the least adopted dog so it's a contradiction you know so how how this dog is celebrated is like memes it is like a films every film has a Caramello so it's a very iconic but when you are going to adopt a dog you say no I'm going to adopt a purebred dog, not a caramello one.

8:48John Bizzell: You can check out the case study on WALK to have a look at the results for that campaign. But Pedigree really used that cultural insight to firstly make a huge difference to mutt adoptions in Brazil. But also, as I said before, the clip, they gained some of that 30 % of the population who owned mutts as Pedigree customers. OK, and now on to AXA.

9:07Bertille Toledano: This is a highly emotive campaign. Bateel, the jury president who you spoke to, she's French and she testified to the impact that AXA has made, not just for their business or even the broader insurance market, but across France as a country where domestic violence is finally being discussed as an issue that needs practical solutions built into French infrastructure.

9:31John Bizzell: So the idea here is that AXA added the three words and domestic violence to its home insurance policies so that women could be rescued from dangerous situations using similar support to what AXA has in place in case of fire or flooding.

9:45Bertille Toledano: Right. But the point that we try and make in the Creative Effectiveness report is what these brands are doing is not just reflecting culture, in a way they're rewriting it. So cultural insight, of course, you know, is well established as a strategic business tool and brands should be using it to actively respond and innovate in culture. But what both AXA and Pedigree have done in these campaigns is to find that intersection between their brands and cultural needs and then create these interactions between them.

10:15John Bizzell: Absolutely and I think it's important to point out that having a cultural impact in more cases than not means doing good in culture. I hesitate to use the kind of Marmite word of purpose but one of the things that Bertil set out at the start of the creative effectiveness judging was that she wanted to see campaigns that had made a difference in the world to people or to the environment that we live in and ones you could go home and tell your mother about and she would understand. The two I've talked about really do that and the report covers some of the other winners that do this too including the My Japan Railway campaign which won its creative line in design so it's interesting to see that come back in in the effectiveness category and to circle back to what we were talking about at the start of the pod regarding data that's an example that Batil and Jane spoke about as being one that they really interrogated to make sure that the design work really did translate into the business growth metrics that they are looking for in the creative effectiveness category.

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11:54John Bizzell: Okay, what's your next key theme?

11:57Bertille Toledano: So next, we look at campaigns that turn brand assets into interactive tools.

12:03John Bizzell: So just to be clear here, before we start unpacking that, we're not talking about creative assets like campaign assets. We're talking about actual products or kind of brand equity here.

12:13Bertille Toledano: Yeah, correct. So that's how we're using the term. And it's probably easier if I give an example. So Vaseline Verified is a good one. This is a brand that's over 150 years old, I think, and everyone has a jar or a tin of Vaseline in their cupboard. But it's not competing with these premium beauty brands, you know, selling retinol on a celebrity visage, right? The problem for Vaseline is that it's seen even internally as having limited growth potential. And so they know that people use Vaseline for a million different things. And if people post videos of these in this campaign, they had scientists verify whether the hack actually works.

12:54Bertille Toledano: And if so, they then give them a Vaseline verified badge. What this means is there is zero investment in product innovation by the brand and really very little investment in marketing as the users are creating all of this content. And then suddenly they have this explosion of new use cases and community driven reach. They ran it in a few markets, but I include a chart in the report specifically from Thailand, which shows that Vaseline broke an 18 month plateau to reach record 7.1 % penetration following this campaign.

13:26John Bizzell: Yeah, a brilliant result. And this campaign was fourth on Walk's Creative 100 ranking this year, which reflects creative award wins from 2025. So it won a lot creatively. And now we're starting to see all of those really great results come out of that creativity. So really strong work.

13:41Bertille Toledano: Yeah, for sure. And there are examples in the report from Ziploc and Ikea. They're all creating interactive experiences from product elements that they already have. And they use these to foster deeper brand involvement.

13:55John Bizzell: Yes, it's really interesting and some really great examples of where brands have really baked their product into the mechanic of the campaign. Right, we better get onto your third key theme, which is all around reimagining social to build brand. So what campaigns fell into this group?

14:10Bertille Toledano: Well, I think you could put Vaseline in this group again, another good example of a social first strategy. But we also look at the Uber Eats Super Bowl campaign. This is where they have people identifying sort of hidden food terms throughout American footballs, kind of a conspiracy idea. And then we have the IKEA Canada campaign, You Up. You Up? I'm always up, but mostly for the same reason as most of the audience for this campaign, because I too probably need a new mattress. So this is a really cute idea from Ikea. Basically, they found that Canadians just weren't thinking of Ikea as somewhere where you could buy a new mattress.

14:48Bertille Toledano: And so the brand sends out these late night DMs asking customers, you up. And this is, I guess, playing into a, let's say a famous exploratory approach to asking if someone wants company. I think that's the best way I can describe it on a podcast. And then if customers replied to this message, IKEA told them that they're up probably because they needed a new mattress and then they offered them a 15 % discount. Now, the interesting thing for me here, I think, from being in the jury room is that whilst DMs are the nugget of the idea of this campaign, they weren't really sent out en masse. And the jury actually really interrogated that in the room because it's not technically possible to do that in a lot of platforms.

15:28Bertille Toledano: But what happened is the way that the people who received these DMs interacted with them and then shared them across their own socials. That's what really made the campaign blow up. And IKEA, what they're doing here is leaning into platform native behavior. They then let the customers become the creators whose buy-in means that the campaign's reach continues even when their investment stops.

15:51John Bizzell: Got it. Yeah, a really interesting one. You also share some really useful insights into what future entrants for the Creative Effectiveness Lions should do to boost their chances of winning. I know Bertil and Jane shared some tips with me on the podcast too. So listeners, if you're thinking about entering for this award next year, WALK has you covered.

16:10Bertille Toledano: We certainly do. And as well as the report, WALK has all of the entries for this year's Creative Effectiveness Lions. So there's a whole new treasure trove of case studies live for subscribers to get their teeth into.

16:21John Bizzell: Yeah, and if effectiveness case studies are your thing, you should definitely also check out Effie Insights, where we have thousands more award-winning campaigns from around the world available now.

16:31Bertille Toledano: Yes, and more analysis from you and me to help people get the most out of those too.

16:36John Bizzell: Absolutely. But start with WALK's report on the insights from the Creative Effectiveness Lions, available to all WALK subscribers now. John, thanks for joining me and sharing some highlights. And listeners, thank you for joining us too. there's lots more content from can in the podcast feed so don't miss that and make sure you subscribe to get future episodes delivered straight to your preferred platform that's all from me goodbye