Feel. Focus. Forge: Three moves to win Effies and grow brands

We’re halfway through this decade and man, has the first half been a relentless roller coaster: a pandemic that rewired life and work, economic whiplash, social reckoning, political volatility, and the meteoric rise of our new pal, generative AI. Brands, and the marketers behind them, rode the same roller coaster, showing up in a divided culture while transforming at an exhausting pace. That’s why Ipsos and Effie launched Dynamic Effectiveness: to navigate shifting consumer needs and show what actually drives outcomes now.

We thought, what better way to understand how to tackle the back half of this decade than to take a look at the choices we made in the first half? We analyzed every U.S. Effie entry from 2020–2025 (objectives, plans, and budgets), hand-coded the creative tactics they used (distinctive assets, humor, music, etc.), and mapped those choices to Ipsos’ ad effectiveness database of over 10 million human responses to advertising.

What we found: Budgets feel tight, competitors feel louder, channels keep multiplying with marketers navigating all of it in real time. What stood out: the brands that won made distinctly different creative choices. They leaned into consumer empathy, broke category conventions, and built enduring ideas instead of campaign-to-campaign pivots. The gap between winners and the field wasn't about money or effort. It was about where they focused their creativity.

The back half of the decade demands bigger ideas that survive turbulence, sharper consumer tensions in the brief, and braver craft that is intentionally uncommon and unmistakably branded. And it demands practical guidance, not another chart dump on LinkedIn.

With that, over to my colleagues who turn evidence into effective work that wins in the market (and at the Effies).