Snickers turned online negativity into a cheaper chocolate promotion. Its Australian “Hungerithm” campaign tracked the mood of social posts and lowered the promotional price of Snickers as the internet got angrier. Shoppers could claim the price on phones and redeem it at 7-Eleven. The agency behind the campaign reported a 67% increase in sales from the campaign.
A result worth celebrating. But did shoppers keep buying after the offer ended?
That’s the distinction the Creative Effectiveness Ladder helps marketers make. Developed for Cannes Lions and WARC by James Hurman and Peter Field, it identifies six types of creative impact, ranked by commercial impact, from strong campaign engagement to sustained brand and sales growth.
Their original report, The Effectiveness Code, places Snickers’ long-running “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry” platform at the top of the ladder. A promotional sales lift and a durable creative platform are both valuable, but not in the same way. They need different evidence to demonstrate their success.
That’s what’s useful about the ladder. Asking whether the campaign worked opens the door to the next questions. What worked about it and for how long? What did you learn from it to apply to the next campaign?
In this article, I break down the six creative effectiveness levels, show how to match campaign objectives with meaningful measures and explain where consumer feedback and creative testing fit in.
The Creative Effectiveness Ladder identifies six types of results advertising can produce, ranked by commercial impact. It gives marketers a more useful answer to “Did it work?” by asking what the campaign achieved and how long the effect lasted.
Advertising effectiveness experts James Hurman and Peter Field introduced the ladder in The Effectiveness Code published by Cannes Lions and WARC in 2020. Their research drew on thousands of campaign case studies to distinguish immediate responses from lasting business growth.
Whether you encounter it as the Cannes Creative Effectiveness Ladder or the WARC Creative Effectiveness Ladder, it’s the same jointly developed creative effectiveness framework.
The framework also gives marketers and agencies a shared language. “It worked” might mean people shared the ad, tried the product or kept buying for years. Naming the effect makes those conversations more precise.
The creative effectiveness hierarchy ranks the impact of those results. It isn’t a checklist every campaign must complete. A promotion can do its job by generating immediate purchases, while a brand platform needs evidence of a longer-lasting effect.
To use the ladder, you should start with what the business needs, then use the ladder to define the outcome and the evidence that would demonstrate it. But it’s important to remember a higher rung isn’t automatically the right brief.
Let’s dive deeper into each level.
The six levels run from Influential Idea to Enduring Icon. Each rung describes a different result and the evidence needed to demonstrate it. At the higher levels of the ladder, the definition includes how long the impact lasts.
Here’s what each level looks like in practice.
An Influential Idea gets people talking. It uses creativity to generate strong engagement, sharing or media efficiency. Relevant measures include campaign recall, social shares, earned impressions and earned media value.
Burger King showed what this could look like with “The McWhopper Proposal.” It publicly invited its rival McDonald’s to collaborate on a burger for Peace Day. McDonald’s declined, but the idea still got people talking, according to The Effectiveness Code.
Getting people to notice, remember or share your campaign is an achievement, but before calling it a business breakthrough, check what that attention led to.
A Behavior Breakthrough gets consumers to take a relevant action such as buying more frequently or completing a screening.
Optical retailer OPSM’s “Penny the Pirate” used a children’s storybook with vision-screening tools to help parents check their children’s eyes. The Effectiveness Code reports that 126,000 parents used this book to test their children’s vision.
For a campaign encouraging a first-time trial, enthusiastic comments and usage are a good sign, but you also want to see that they bought the product or participated in the initiative.
A Sales Spike lives up to its name with a short-term life in sales or profitability during the campaign window.
Snickers’ “Hungerithm” illustrates this level because the campaign gave shoppers a timely reason to buy and the agency reported a substantial increase in sales. But remember to keep measuring after the offer ends to understand whether the lift continues.
A Brand Builder strengthens the brand’s position in consumers’ minds by improving awareness, consideration, preference or other relevant brand associations. The goal is to increase recognition and support future purchases.
P&G’s “Proud Sponsor of Mums” put the mothers behind Olympic athletes at the center of the story in a campaign that thanked mothers of athletes and ultimately improved familiarity, favorability and trust for the P&G brand.
To track the success of campaigns like this, make sure you identify the brand measure you intend to lift and then examine how that improvement connects to business results.
A Commercial Triumph delivers profitable sales and market share growth beyond a single quarter or the campaign itself. Evidence includes sales, market share and ROI for more than three months.
Compared with Brand Builder, the evidence shows sustained commercial results. Compared with Sales Spike, the key difference is persistence. The growth outlasts the immediate campaign response.
Burger King’s “The McWhopper Proposal” appears at this level too. Alongside its earned media results, The Effectiveness Code reports sustained Whopper sales growth above 15%.
One campaign can produce several types of effect, but each claim needs supporting evidence. The headlines demonstrate attention; the sales record demonstrates commercial growth.
That’s why it’s also important to plan follow-up measurement before launch. Otherwise, the campaign could stop running just as the most useful part of its story starts.
An Enduring Icon is the final rung of the ladder, and you’ll likely recognize these campaigns. To reach this rung, a campaign must demonstrate brand and sales growth for at least three years with the same creative strategy or work in place.
Dove’s “Campaign for Real Beauty” is one example of an Enduring Icon. Since 2004, the campaign has challenged conventional beauty standards and become a foundation of Dove’s advertising. Consistency leaves room for fresh executions, but the underlying idea remains recognizable.
When you find an idea is working, keep measuring what it does for the brand. It could become an Enduring Icon.
A campaign racks up thousands of shares, and the team feels great. Then someone asks what it did for the business.
The awkward part is that everyone may have been using a different definition of success. The creative team is celebrating attention. Finance wants to understand the return, and the marketing team is asking whether consumers are more likely to choose the product next time.
That’s where the ladder comes in. When you agree on the intended outcome before launch, it’s easier to measure whether the campaign delivered it.
Look at two Snickers examples. “Hungerithm” delivered a measurable lift during a promotion. “You’re Not You When You’re Hungry” achieved Enduring Icon status. Both are valuable. But the promotional sales figure alone can’t tell you whether shoppers developed a lasting preference for Snickers.
Binet and Field’s research for the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) recommends integrating sales activation and brand building, then measuring both short-term and longer-term effects.
Use the ladder to ask: does our evidence support the result we’re claiming? Yes, celebrate the sales bump and keep measuring before giving it a lifetime achievement award.
A strong creative idea needs a chance to work. Creative commitment measures the support behind it through media spend, campaign duration and the number of media channels. In The Effectiveness Code, each factor receives a score from 1 to 5, producing a total between 3 and 15. Creative quality is assessed separately.
There’s always another campaign idea, but before moving on, it’s worth asking whether the current idea has run its course—or whether the team simply wants something new.
The research gives you a reason to pause. The IPA’s summary reports a strong association between greater creative commitment and effectiveness. It also notes that the benefits can plateau or decline beyond optimal levels because you still need to make the business case for a bigger budget.
Bring the ladder into planning before the creative brief is signed off. Use it to agree on the result you need, the evidence that would demonstrate success and what you want to learn for the next campaign.
“Create an effective campaign” can mean very different things depending on who’s in the room.
OPSM’s “Penny the Pirate” shows what a specific objective can look like. The intended action was for parents to screen their children’s vision. That goal gave the team a clear direction.
The result to track was parents completing screenings. Campaign awareness could support that goal, but it wouldn’t show that the action happened.
Start by defining the audience and the change you want to see. Then put a number against it, using current performance as your baseline.
From there, look at what you’re planning to run. If the business needs to build preference but the calendar is packed with discount promotions, there’s a mismatch.
Choose your success measures before launch so the best-looking number on the dashboard doesn’t inadvertently become the objective. The Creative Effectiveness Ladder offers guidance for connecting each outcome with the appropriate evidence:
Give the outcome enough time to appear. Launch-week results can reveal an immediate response but they leave the question of sustained growth open. Likewise, keep stated purchase intent separate from evidence that people bought.
Investigate what contributed to the result, too. A sales increase could coincide with wider distribution, a price change or seasonal demand. Work with your measurement team to establish the advertising’s contribution before giving the campaign all the credit.
Your next brief should carry forward what you learned from the last one. WARC describes the ladder as a way to identify and learn from effective work within your organization and across the industry.
Compare executions that communicated the same benefit. Look at whether consumers understood the message, connected it to the brand and felt the intended emotion. Then examine the results when those ads reached the market.
PepsiCo built this approach into how they use Zappi’s Amplify Advertising system. In Zappi’s account of the partnership, insights leader Stephan Gans describes using the accumulated data to deepen learning across markets and improve with each ad tested.
“We've seen a 30% percent increase in the effectiveness of the content of our creative work.”
- Stephan Gans, SVP, Chief Insights and Analytics Officer at PepsiCo
For your team, the useful question is what past results tell you to preserve, change or investigate in the next brief.
Be careful not to treat research findings and business results as interchangeable. Strong purchase intent in a pre-test tells you the creative has potential, while incremental sales are in-market evidence.
Finish the review with a decision: what will you preserve, change or test next? The useful output is a better brief, not another presentation destined for the archive.
The ladder looks at what advertising achieved, while Zappi’s perspective adds a practical question: what can consumers tell us while there’s still time to strengthen the creative?
PopCorners’ Super Bowl ad offers a useful example. During development, consumer feedback with Zappi repeatedly mentioned sister brand Doritos when the ad featured a red PopCorners bag. Because of this, the team switched from the red kettle corn packaging to the blue white cheddar bag to ensure better brand recall. With this change and many more, PopCorners doubled the “creative sales impact” measure on consumer testing (from 44 to 91 on a 100-point scale) and prompted a 20% increase in brand recall in the process.
That’s the kind of finding a team can act on. An entertaining ad loses some of its value when people remember another brand. Testing surfaced the problem before production was complete.
Zappi’s Amplify Advertising system supports that process from early ideas and storylines through to finished ads. Consumer response helps teams understand whether people connect the work to the brand, understand the message and feel the intended emotion.
Using comparable measures across campaigns also helps teams see patterns in consumer response, which is a key feature of Zappi’s connected insights platform. They can carry those lessons into the next brief, then examine whether stronger test results translate into better results.
Testing gives you evidence of creative potential.
So the next time someone says an ad worked, ask: what changed, for whom and for how long? Then put the answer to work in your next brief.