Creativity is a key factor for campaign performance and advertising effectiveness. Numerous investigations have concluded this over the years and new conclusions from Warc are now added to them, collected in the analysis “The health of creativity 2025”.

The consultancy has sought to establish a new correlation between creativity and effectiveness and to do so it has studied the data from the results of the Warc Rankings – which considers the awarded works at a regional and global level – between 2016 and 2025. That is, it has considered more than 5,600 ideas to identify the impact of creativity on effectiveness.

The greater the creativity, the greater the effectiveness.

One of the highlights of the research is that one in five (21%) ideas awarded for their creativity in competitions analyzed by the consulting firm have also been recognized for their effectiveness. This is 1,155 of the 5,603 ideas studied.

6% of all of them (311) were highly effective ideas, that is, they are part of the Warc Effective 100 list. This represents an increase of 1% compared to the results of the previous report, when the overall effectiveness was at 20% and highly effective ideas at 5%.

On the other hand, the report points out that as creativity increases, effectiveness also increases. That is, when ideas are highly rewarded for their creativity (those that are part of the Warc Creative 100 ranking) they are also highly rewarded for their effectiveness (those that are part of the Warc Effective 100 ranking). Thus, the conversion to rewards for effectiveness doubles, going from the 21% mentioned above to 44%.
Thus, of the 749 ideas highly awarded for their creativity, 331 have also been awarded for their effectiveness and 151 (20%) have been highly awarded for their effectiveness.

The report has focused on those 151 of the best ideas, that is, those that have been classified in the Warc Creative 100 ranking between 2016 and 2025 and also in the Effective 100 list in the same period, and has drawn a series of conclusions and data of interest:

• The best ideas use a balance between informational and emotional strategies: 35% of the 151 best ideas still included an informative message, while 33% turned to emotion
• 57% of highly creative and effective ideas generate brand value. Brand promise is delivered through product performance, advertising and pricing strategy
• 61% of the most creative and effective ideas had a measurable impact on sales
• 26% of the best ideas had television as their main medium in 2025. However, the medium has decreased in weight over time, since in 2018 43% of the best campaigns were based on television.
• More than a fifth of the most creative and effective ideas came from the retail sector

The creative commitment

The consulting firm has also analyzed the creative commitment of the campaigns, a measure that considers the budget, the duration of the campaign and the number of channels applied to it. From Warc they point out that creative commitment is closely related to effectiveness, since it affects sales, brand development or market share the longer the duration of the campaign, the more channels used and the greater its total investment.

When comparing creative campaigns with those classified in the Creative 100 and Effective 100 rankings, creative commitment is higher (score of 7) in highly awarded ideas than in average ones (5.9).