2025 WARC Effectiveness Grand Prix winners revealed

2025 WARC Effectiveness Grand Prix winners: If you're a time‑pressed marketing leader, this concise brief lists who won, why they won, the hard KPIs, judges’ rationale highlights and clear takeaways you can use to justify tactics and budgets.

Quick at-a-glance winners

Why the judges elevated these five campaigns

WARC’s 2025 Effectiveness Grand Prix winners were explicitly picked for the direct line between creative strategy and measurable commercial outcomes. The awards—part of a program that produced 71 regional winners and five Global Grand Prix—favored work that changed behaviour, delivered sales or category shifts, and scaled with earned amplification. In short, judges rewarded:

• culture‑first insight coupled with data or operational activation, measurable KPIs tied to commercial impact, and multi‑channel rollouts that amplified reach and participation.

These patterns show what the jury values: creativity that creates measurable business change, not creativity for creativity’s sake.

Campaign deep‑dives (objectives, strategy, KPIs, outcomes and marketer takeaways)

Find Your Summer — Magnum (Lola MullenLowe, UK)

Objective: Break ice‑cream seasonality and convert winter shoppers.
Strategy: Emotion‑led black‑and‑white film framed around warmth and pleasure, linked to real‑time sunlight and nearby store availability to trigger purchase.
KPIs & outcomes: 38.9% uplift in winter sales (brand’s best off‑season), improvements in brand power and purpose perception.
Judges’ rationale: Reframed seasonal behaviour by pairing cultural storytelling with operational triggers.
Takeaway: Combine an emotional creative hook with real‑time operational data (stock/store/availability) to make “out‑of‑season” behaviour feel immediately accessible and relevant.

Horror Codes — Uber Eats (Rethink, US)

Objective: Drive trial in non‑restaurant verticals (convenience, grocery) and grow basket value.
Strategy: Gamified Halloween mechanic—complete iconic horror quotes to unlock promo codes—tied to rewards that incentivised higher‑value purchases.
KPIs & outcomes: Over 2,000,000 code redemptions; +20% convenience orders; +18% grocery orders; engaged users had 65% larger baskets.
Judges’ rationale: Clever cultural gamification that directly shifted category mix and AOV.
Takeaway: Design promotion mechanics that explicitly reward the commercial behaviour you want (bigger baskets, new categories) rather than one‑off downloads.

Michael CeraVe — CeraVe (Ogilvy, US)

Objective: Build cultural relevance and drive short‑term sales spikes around moisturizers.
Strategy: Name‑led cultural insight (Michael Cera association) seeded with teasers and amplified by a Super Bowl‑era paid buy to secure reach and earned pickup.
KPIs & outcomes: 30 billion earned impressions; 1.44 billion paid impressions; 9% brand lift; best‑ever sales week post‑Super Bowl.
Judges’ rationale: Paid + earned scale around a simple, shareable cultural hook produced measurable sales.
Takeaway: When you can secure a culturally resonant hook, combine concentrated paid support with assets that invite organic sharing to maximize short‑term commerce.

A Piece of Me — KPN (Dentsu Creative, Netherlands)

Objective: Tackle non‑consensual intimate image sharing and increase brand relevance.
Strategy: Commissioned a song and video based on victims’ testimonials; distributed through social, TV and PR; partnered with victim support organisations to amplify credibility.
KPIs & outcomes: Viral social reach (TikTok), national press and specialist coverage, higher brand relevance and sales contribution.
Judges’ rationale: Purpose work that created a shareable cultural asset and catalysed partnerships with NGOs and authorities.
Takeaway: Purpose work can be commercially effective if you create cultural assets that NGOs and media can amplify—invest in partnerships and shareable creative formats.

Turf Finder — Gatorade (Leo Burnett Mumbai, India)

Objective: Grow participation in sport and expand presence in underserved urban areas.
Strategy: Used 20 years of Google Maps traffic data to find low‑traffic urban spaces, installed pop‑up modular turfs, and drove local activation with targeted ads and influencers.
KPIs & outcomes: 50,000+ participants; 59% overall sales growth; 124% uplift in Mumbai; doubled top‑of‑mind awareness.
Judges’ rationale: Data‑informed site selection turned infrastructure investment into measurable local demand.
Takeaway: Use long‑run movement or location data to identify white‑space activation opportunities where local infrastructure plus owned activations can create lasting demand.

KPI benchmarks to request and use internally

Use these three priority KPIs to benchmark effectiveness and build stakeholder cases:

• Sales uplift percentage (overall and market/submarket) — primary commercial proof.
• Behavioural shifts: promo redemptions, category penetration or order‑mix changes (e.g., convenience/grocery share).
• Reach and conversion metrics: paid vs earned impressions, brand lift percent, and participation counts (events/activations).

Map these to your fiscal goals: sales uplift ties to ROI; behavioural shifts show sustainable category change; reach + conversion quantifies media efficiency.

Translating award mechanics to different budgets and sectors

If gated case studies block full details, request agency case decks (they usually exist beyond WARC summaries). For internal adaptation, follow a practical three-step rule: identify the single mechanism that drove the outcome (e.g., a real‑time trigger, gamified promo mechanic, infrastructure placement), test it small with a clear KPI and control, then scale media and activation intensity when the mechanism proves causal. Prioritize extracting one or two replicable mechanics per award winner rather than attempting to copy entire campaigns end‑to‑end.

Practical scaling tips:

• Low budget: run the creative mechanic with owned channels and micro‑influencers; measure conversion with promo codes or unique landing pages.
• Mid budget: add targeted paid media to validate lift and reach; use geo‑controls for local activations.
• High budget: combine paid scale and earned seeding; secure partnerships with NGOs, media or platform owners for credibility and reach.

Conclusion

WARC’s five Effectiveness Grand Prix winners illustrate a clear rubric: culture‑led insights, data or operational activation, measurable KPIs tied to commercial outcomes, and multi‑channel amplification. For busy marketing leaders, the actionable path is simple—pick one clear business KPI, adopt one replicable mechanic from these cases, measure it with control where possible, and scale media only after the mechanism proves effective. These winners give you concrete metrics and playbooks to justify budgets and replicate effectiveness across categories.