The advertising industry spends approximately $129 million annually at Cannes Lions alone – entry fees, festival passes, sponsorships – to celebrate its own work. This figure excludes the creative hours dedicated to producing award-specific case study films, the strategy time spent identifying “awardable” briefs, and the opportunity cost of work optimised for jury preferences rather than commercial impact.
This would be defensible if award-winning work reliably delivered business results. It increasingly does not.
Research from System1, which has mapped emotional response data to WARC’s global effectiveness database, reveals a troubling pattern: creatively awarded campaigns scoring poorly with consumers return less than half the ROI of campaigns that score well with audiences. Peter Field’s analysis for the IPA – tracking this trend over two decades – documents the evolution from creatively awarded work being twelve times more efficient at gaining market share to achieving roughly average effectiveness today.
The industry has not become less creative. It has become creative in ways that impress other creative people rather than commercial audiences.
Award-Winning Ads ROI Problem – Jury-Audience Divergence
Understanding how this divergence emerged requires examining what award juries actually reward.
Juries are composed of senior creative professionals whose daily work involves solving communication problems. After decades of exposure, they have seen most conventional approaches hundreds of times. Their attention naturally gravitates toward novelty – the unexpected angle, the surprising execution, the brave departure from category convention.
This gravitational pull toward novelty is professionally appropriate. Creative professionals should push boundaries. Innovation requires risk tolerance. The problem emerges when novelty becomes the primary criterion rather than one factor among several.
Commercial audiences are not creative professionals. They encounter advertising incidentally while pursuing other goals – scrolling social feeds, watching programmes, navigating websites. They have not seen thousands of campaigns in the same category. What feels derivative to a jury may feel fresh to an audience. What strikes a jury as bold innovation may confuse an audience encountering the brand for the first time.
The 2016 study “Marketers’ Intuitions about the Sales Effectiveness of Advertisements” quantified this disconnect precisely: marketing professionals correctly identified effective advertisements 51% of the time. Functionally equivalent to random chance.
Metrics Mirage
Award entries invariably include impressive statistics. Billions of impressions. Millions of earned media value. Viral social engagement. These numbers create an appearance of commercial success without necessarily reflecting it.
Consider earned media value, a metric that appears in virtually every case study. The calculation typically multiplies coverage reach by some notional advertising equivalent cost. This produces large numbers that sound impressive but measure media attention rather than commercial impact. A campaign can generate substantial earned media while failing to move any meaningful business metric.
Similarly, social engagement measures whether people interact with content, not whether that interaction translates to brand consideration or purchase behaviour. A clever concept might generate shares and comments from people who will never buy the product. The engagement was real; its commercial relevance was not.
The most rigorous effectiveness research – from the IPA, from Kantar, from field experiments at major platforms – consistently finds that linking creative execution to sales requires sustained attention to brand recognition and product benefit communication. Creativity that sacrifices these fundamentals for novelty may generate metrics while failing to generate revenue.
What Effective Creative Looks Like
Heinz won the 2024 Cannes Lions Grand Prix in Creative Effectiveness for its “It Has To Be Heinz” platform – work that delivered 12% global sales growth year over year since 2019 and captured 3.2 market share points from competitors. The jury praised the campaign for achieving “Icon” status in Kantar’s brand tracking, placing it among only 4% of measured brands.
What distinguished this work? Not revolutionary creative techniques or unprecedented media approaches. The campaign consistently reinforced an emotional truth that consumers already felt about the brand – that Heinz ketchup occupies a unique cultural position other ketchups cannot replicate. The creative varied in execution while maintaining strategic coherence across markets and touchpoints.
This pattern recurs in effectiveness award winners. Apple’s “Shot on iPhone” campaign, which ran for a decade, demonstrated product capability through user-generated content. Cadbury’s Shah Rukh Khan work used technology (AI-generated personalisation) in service of local business support – a commercial objective, not a creative showcase. Each campaign subordinated creative technique to commercial purpose.
The contrast with purely creative award winners is instructive. Work optimised primarily for jury recognition often exhibits what might be called reverse engineering – starting from a desired creative execution and constructing commercial justification around it. The case study emphasises the boldness of the idea, the craft of the execution, and the cultural conversation generated. Business results receive less attention, often because they are less compelling.
Client’s Dilemma
Creative agencies have structural incentives to pursue awards. Lions and similar recognition attract talent, justify premium fees, and generate industry visibility. The agency that wins consistently can charge more and recruit better.
This creates an agency-client interest divergence that sophisticated clients navigate carefully and naive clients discover painfully.
The sophisticated client recognises that creative ambition can serve commercial objectives – genuinely innovative work can break through cluttered media environments and establish memorable brand associations. But they insist that creative execution serve defined commercial purposes and measure success accordingly. They approve bold work when the boldness is strategically justified, not merely aesthetically appealing.
The naive client mistakes creative enthusiasm for strategic alignment. When an agency presents work it clearly loves, the client interprets this passion as confidence in commercial performance. The client approves work that the agency intends to enter into awards without fully understanding that the agency’s success metrics and the client’s success metrics may diverge.
The tell is often in the briefing process. Agencies oriented toward commercial effectiveness begin with business problems: what customer behaviour needs to change? Agencies oriented toward creative recognition begin with creative territory: what has not been done in this category?
Recalibrating Creative Development
Effective creative development balances three sometimes-competing demands: breakthrough attention, brand recognition, and benefit communication.
Breakthrough attention is necessary because advertising exists in environments competing for limited cognitive resources. Creative work that does not capture attention cannot communicate anything else. This is where creative professionals’ instincts are most reliable – they understand what earns attention because they compete for it constantly.
Brand recognition ensures that attention translates to the right commercial entity. If an advertisement captures attention but fails to create clear brand associations, competitors can capture the benefit. This explains why distinctive brand assets – visual elements, sonic cues, consistent stylistic approaches – often matter more than messaging cleverness. Attention without attribution is wasted attention.
Benefit communication connects brand recognition to purchase motivation. Audiences must understand what the product does for them, even if that understanding is emotional rather than rational. Ipsos research indicates that award-winning advertisements connecting creative execution to clear brand benefits deliver 29% higher short-term sales lift potential than those prioritising creative novelty alone.
The challenge is that these three demands can conflict. Maximum attention-getting often requires departing from established brand conventions. Strong brand recognition often requires repetition that juries find boring. Clear benefit communication often requires directness that feels unsophisticated.
Creative directors who consistently deliver commercial results navigate these tensions without collapsing them. They find the creative expression that achieves all three rather than sacrificing two for one.
Brief as Safeguard
The most effective protection against creative-commercial misalignment is the brief itself. A properly constructed brief makes commercial objectives explicit, measurable, and non-negotiable while leaving genuine creative latitude in how those objectives are achieved.
Weak briefs specify outputs (“we need a video campaign”) without outcomes (“we need to increase consideration among first-time buyers by 15 points”). This invites creative interpretation that may or may not align with commercial needs.
Strong briefs specify the business problem, the target audience’s current beliefs and behaviours, the change required, and the measurement approach that will determine success. They constrain creative latitude at the strategic level while expanding it at the execution level.
When creative work genuinely serves a well-defined commercial objective, awards become a potential byproduct rather than a primary goal. Some effective work wins awards; some does not. The correlation, while imperfect, at least points in the right direction.
Creative development that delivers commercial results requires strategic clarity before creative exploration begins. If your current creative approach generates more agency enthusiasm than business growth, a strategic consultation can identify where the misalignment originated. Explore our Creative Concept Development services to see how we approach creativity that works.
