Top 5 Traits Of Amazingly Successful Girl-Power Ads

These Microsoft, Pan­tene, Always, and Mat­tel ads have the per­fect blend of atten­tion, like­abil­i­ty, mes­sage, emo­tion, and authen­tic­i­ty.

Miriam Tremelling By Miriam Tremelling from Ace Metrix. Join the discussion » 0 comments

These Microsoft, Pan­tene, Always, and Mat­tel ads have the per­fect blend of atten­tion, like­abil­i­ty, mes­sage, emo­tion, and authen­tic­i­ty.

Anoth­er area where we’ve seen brands gen­er­ate excel­lent ad per­for­mance is the theme of empow­er­ing or sup­port­ing young girls. Microsoft’s “Women Made” (first aired in March) is part of the brand’s ongo­ing cam­paign to encour­age girls to enter tech fields:

Pantene’s “Dean­ge­lo Williams & Jason Wit­ten Girls into Women” ampli­fies the impor­tance of dads spend­ing qual­i­ty time with their daugh­ters:

Both of these ads were high­light­ed in the recent list of the Top 10 Break­through Ads of Q1 2016 by Ace Metrix as #1 and #3 respec­tive­ly. What’s real­ly impres­sive is how they caught atten­tion and were high­ly like­able, and also out­per­formed many Super Bowl ads. Suc­cess­ful use of female empow­er­ment themes is a con­tin­u­ing trend seen in two high­ly tout­ed ads from 2015, Always’ “#Like A Girl”:

And Mattel’s Bar­bie ad, “Imag­ine the Pos­si­bil­i­ties”:

Here are five com­mon traits these girl-pow­er ads share that helped dri­ve their amaz­ing suc­cess.

1. Achieve High Breakthrough

Many, though not all, ads strive to grab atten­tion. How much view­ers like an ad is one pri­ma­ry mea­sure of suc­cess. All four of these girl-pow­er ads proved to have the char­ac­ter­is­tics need­ed to achieve high break­through. In test­ing, they showed a propen­si­ty toward Atten­tion and Like­abil­i­ty, two com­po­nent scores that com­prise Ace Metrix’s Break­through dimen­sion. In fact, all four ads were more than 22 per­cent above their cat­e­go­ry norm for Atten­tion and more than 26 per­cent above norm for Like­abil­i­ty. Where these ads diverged in their over­all “Ad Per­son­al­i­ty” is in the way they change per­cep­tion of the brand; Mat­tel and Always demon­strate this, as does Pan­tene, though to a less­er degree. Microsoft, on the oth­er hand, proves high its abil­i­ty to inform.

2. Convey A Clear Message

Anoth­er key to the suc­cess of these ads: the brands have a clear mes­sage. For each, the “Mes­sage” is over­whelm­ing­ly named the sin­gle best thing about the ad by view­ers, out of a choice between Char­ac­ters, Visu­al Scenes, Music, Brand, Prod­uct, and Deal. “Women Made” has the high­est response rate for Mes­sage at 65 per­cent, fol­lowed by “#Like A Girl” at 54 per­cent. For the Mat­tel and Pan­tene ads, the “Mes­sage” came in at 46 per­cent and 34 per­cent, and the cute “Char­ac­ters” was named the best thing at 22 per­cent and 20 per­cent, respec­tive­ly. In addi­tion to a strong mes­sage, adorable kids can con­tribute to an ad’s suc­cess.

3. Make An Emotional Connection

Where these ads real­ly find their stride is in their abil­i­ty to form an emo­tion­al bond with the view­er. Through nat­ur­al lan­guage min­ing of between 300–500 ver­ba­tim com­ments for each ad, all four ads exhib­it­ed an extreme­ly pos­i­tive reac­tion. The words “great” and “love” appeared with high fre­quen­cy for all. Where we see sub­tle nuances are in the lev­els of heart, hook, and humor exud­ed in these com­ments. All but the Pan­tene ad were high­est in words that indi­cate they tugged at the viewer’s heart, albeit in dif­fer­ent ways. Always’ ad was described most fre­quent­ly as “mov­ing” and “pow­er­ful”, while Microsoft’s ad was called “encour­ag­ing” and “inspir­ing.” Mattel’s ad drew out words like “cute” and “adorable,” but also veered toward humor as we saw “fun­ny” used often as well. Those three also saw a heavy degree of “hook” words such as “amaz­ing,” “awe­some” and “inter­est­ing.” Pan­tene was the most humor­ous of all four with “fun­ny” used quite a bit, along with the heart­felt “cute.”

4. Appeal Across Audiences

A final com­mon char­ac­ter­is­tic for all four ads was the low degree of polar­iza­tion. They all scored above their cat­e­go­ry norm across all break­downs by gen­der, age, and eth­nic­i­ty as being min­i­mal­ly polar­iz­ing – mean­ing view­ers across the board were in agree­ment of the ads. A new mea­sure for Ace Metrix, the Polar­i­ty Score works in con­cert with demo­graph­ic break­downs and view­er com­ments to help under­stand why an ad is effec­tive. The met­ric ranges from 1–100, but we typ­i­cal­ly see most ads score between 30 and 70, with scores below 40 indi­cat­ing low polar­iza­tion. Out of all four ads, “Women Made” shows the low­est lev­el of polar­i­ty, with a score of 24. “#LikeA­Girl” is the most polar­iz­ing of our set of ads, with a score of 40.

5. Authenticity

One final char­ac­ter­is­tic that is dif­fi­cult to mea­sure is authen­tic­i­ty. For exam­ple, Always’ prod­ucts are rel­e­vant to the idea of a girl’s con­fi­dence drop­ping dur­ing puber­ty. None of the ads dis­cussed feel like forced vehi­cles for their encour­ag­ing mes­sage, and that might just be the final ingre­di­ent to cre­at­ing mar­ket­ing gold.

Miriam Tremelling

Written by Miriam Tremelling

Senior Manager, Marketing, Ace Metrix

Miriam serves as senior marketing manager at Ace Metrix where she is responsible for developing compelling stories that articulate Ace Metrix's value proposition. Prior to joining Ace Metrix, Miriam worked at Conversant, Twelvefold Media and CBS Interactive.

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