Effectiveness 2025: Effective advertising is once again resembling people more than algorithms
In an increasingly uncertain, saturated, cold, fragmented and polarised social context, advertising effectiveness is rewarding brands that manage to be more human, clearer and more meaningful. Not the most complex, strident or noisy, but the most relevant. This is confirmed by the Eficacia Awards 2025 Trends Report, what part of an unavoidable fact.
We live in an increasingly unsettling world: an overload of choices, a sense of uncertainty, a lack of connection to institutions, nostalgia and a need for connection. In Spain, 57% say they feel overwhelmed by too many choices, 74% say they live in the present because the future is uncertain, and a significant proportion express disillusionment and a desire to return to an idealised past. This interpretation appears in the opening pages of the study and is not merely a sociological framework: it is the starting point for contemporary effectiveness.
The conclusion is significant. Campaigns no longer compete solely for attention. They compete to connect emotionally in a world that is more hostile, fast-paced and difficult to interpret. It is therefore no surprise that the report identifies empathy as one of the key drivers of effectiveness today. In the sample analysed, campaigns that seek to empathise with the audience are set to grow from 64% in 2023 to 85% in 2025, and empathy also predicts 70% of an advert’s short-term impact on sales.
This is not a trivial fact. It is a rather forceful amendment to a part of recent communication, the part that confused notoriety with interruption, performance with extreme simplification, and creativity with empty exhibition.
Soft? No, smart.
One of the report's great successes is that it dismantles a lazy idea: that talking about empathy, emotion, or humanity means abandoning commercial effectiveness.
In fact, the report shows quite the opposite. Empathetic advertising doesn't work because it “emotes” in the abstract, but because it generates recognition, a natural fit, and a connection that mobilises behaviour. Stories that provoke emotional identification multiply choice change fivefold compared to those that merely emote, and campaigns that present new ideas through an empathetic story double their mobilisation capacity compared to a purely informative campaign.
The difference is decisive. It's not sentimental communication that wins, but meaningful communication. This forces us to refine the conversation about effective creativity much better. The creativity that works today is not the one that merely grabs attention, but the one that manages to articulate a relevant truth about the consumer and translate it into a simple, direct, and natural execution.
Deep and simple
Probably, the most valuable synthesis of the report is in that final formula: the most effective campaigns are “profound in meaning and simple in execution”.
It's an excellent combination because it summarises a tension that many brands continue to mismanage. On the one hand, depth: real, bold, human, authentic and emotional campaigns. On the other, simplicity: easy-to-understand messages, short, direct, targeted and natural.
This implies something very relevant for advertisers and agencies: strategic sophistication should not translate into perceptual complexity. The more complex the context, the clearer the expression must be. The more saturated the media ecosystem, the more important it is for a brand to arrive with a clear truth, not with an over-engineered message.
In other words, effectiveness is not rewarding trivial simplification, but well-founded clarity.
The importance of research
There is another reading of the report that deserves more attention than it usually receives: the most effective campaigns are not born from well-packaged ideas, but from a rigorous understanding of the consumer.
The 75% in the list of winners is based on a clearly identified consumer insight, whereas in the 59% case studies, that insight is arrived at through research. This should serve as a warning to a market that sometimes seems to trap us in a debate between two unproductive extremes: creative intuition disconnected from evidence, and a tactical obsession with optimising individual elements without ever raising the strategic question.
The report suggests that effectiveness grows when creativity is well-nourished. When the brand understands something important about people's tensions, fears, aspirations, or contradictions. And when that insight doesn't remain in the strategy document, but becomes a recognisable creative platform.
The brand is regaining centrality
Another particularly interesting finding is the growth in brand image and positioning targets, which rise from 57% to 79% between 2024 and 2025, whilst long-term brand health also improves.
In parallel, the weight of emotional benefits as a strategy for connection and differentiation soars, while functional ones recede.
Strategic reading is clear: in a market where many categories experience promotional pressure, message saturation, and erosion of differentiation, the brand regains its role as a framework of meaning.
Not because the functional has stopped mattering, but because the functional alone is no longer enough. In too many markets, the difference is no longer won by better explaining an attribute. It is won by building a richer, more credible, and more ownable relationship.
That is why it is so significant that the report also identifies an increase in the use of brand heritage to lend authenticity to the emotional connection. Campaigns referencing brand heritage have risen from 12% to 22% over the past two years.
The relevance of branded content
One of the most interesting findings in the report is the growing prominence of branded content as one of the most natural ways to connect with audiences. Its usage is set to rise from 26% in 2023 to 70% in 2025, and it demonstrates a higher effectiveness rate among shortlists and longlists.
This should not be read merely as a format data point, but as a paradigm shift. The most effective brands are not just interrupting content consumption; increasingly, they are creating their own content that the public accepts, seeks out, or integrates more naturally.
This demands greater discipline. Because producing effective branded content isn't about making ads longer or disguising commercial messages as entertainment. It's about contributing something of sufficient cultural, narrative, or useful value so that the brand gains space without forcing it.
More social truth
There are two more signals from the report that are also worth analysing. The first is the rise of user-generated content versus influencer-generated content. According to the analysed base, user content shows a significantly higher effectiveness rate, associated with more authentic credibility and engagement.
The second factor is the growing influence of short-form video platforms. TikTok and Instagram are already emerging as key platforms for cultural relevance and tangible results, and on TikTok, ads created by content creators are 131% more memorable than professionally produced ones.
Both signals point to the same idea: effectiveness is rewarding less staged forms of communication, more integrated into actual consumer codes, and closer to how people talk to each other.
That doesn't mean lowering the standard of craft. It means applying craft where it truly matters: in understanding context, in narrative decision-making, in the legitimacy of tone, and in the cultural adaptation of the message.
What lessons should we learn?
- The first lesson is that efficiency isn't in the extremes today. Neither in emotional inflation without strategy nor in soul-less tactical hyper-rationalisation.
- The second is that Empathy is not a soft resource, but a hard business lever when connected with a relevant consumer truth.
- The third is that the brand is once again a structural competitive advantage. It is not enough to activate. You must signify.
- The fourth is that Simplicity is not superficiality. It is a form of respect for user attention and a condition for effectiveness in complex environments.
- And the fifth is that Effective creativity today seems less obsessed with impressing and more committed to genuinely fitting into people's lives..
In summary, in the era of AI and technological disruption as a constant, present-day advertising effectiveness consists of regaining the ability to say something important, in a simple, human, and memorable way.