The 2016 QDaily Advertising Oscars: The Final List, and What Happened in Advertising Last Year

"Advertising has gotten a bad name, which is why some people now prefer to call it 'content.'" But truly great advertising ideas can break through the medium on their own.

In 2016, the Chinese internet and YouTube each had one ad that passed 100 million views: Pepsi's Bring Happiness Home: The Monkey King's Homecoming, and an ad for the war mobile game Mobile Strike starring Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The Monkey King's Homecoming came out just before Chinese New Year 2016 and set off an unprecedented wave of sharing. The Mobile Strike ad ran during Super Bowl 50 in the US, where the slot alone cost 10 million US dollars.

If the two ads had anything in common, it is that both went out during the year's hottest advertising windows in China and the US — the Spring Festival Gala and the Super Bowl (yes, it's coming around again soon) — but the real spread, the hundreds of millions of views, happened online.

In the words of Kate Stanford, YouTube's global head of advertising marketing: "Even Super Bowl ads have moved from the 40-inch screen to the 4-inch screen." Pepsi, with The Monkey King's Homecoming, was the first beverage brand to run video ads in WeChat Moments. Not long after, on January 7, WeChat announced it was cutting the minimum spend for Moments ads from 200,000 yuan to 50,000 yuan.

It took the year's hottest slots and heavy spending on both TV and digital to produce results like these. According to data from AppScotch, after Mobile Strike launched it ran cross-promotions inside nearly 40,000 other games — the mechanism where you watch an ad inside another mobile game to earn coins or extra lives.

Reposts, shares, likes: these have become the yardsticks for judging an ad's impact in today's digital media. According to the latest figures from IHS Markit, 30% of global ad spending in 2016 went to digital media, or 160 billion US dollars. In the world's two biggest ad markets, digital already accounted for 36% of US ad spending, very close to TV's 38% (TV advertising last year was helped along by the Olympics, the World Cup, the US presidential election and other big events); in China, digital ad spending ran 15 billion US dollars ahead of TV.

That more and more brands are putting more and more money online is beyond dispute. But what makes advertising people around the world anxious now is the splintering of channels, and a crisis of trust in digital ad buying.

When every advertiser is trying to read today's media landscape in their own way — 500,000 iOS apps, 10,000 WeChat official accounts, 21,000 news websites, hundreds of video sites, and these numbers may be changing by the second — you start to see how thorny the problem is:

We've reached a stage where the creative work has to follow the medium. You can no longer make one ad, put it in one medium, and reach everyone. Instead, more pieces of content reach different consumers.

Rob Norman, Global Chief Digital Officer, GroupM

What I mean is, I have a lot of jobs to get done. It's not as if a consumer sees my TV ad and walks into the store — they're hard to please.

You need word of mouth, you need to build the whole reputation up. Even then they may not believe you — they might first go and see what the big WeChat accounts recommend, or check what friends around them are saying in Moments.

Zheng Leiming, senior consultant at global market consultancy R3

The company's core business is finding ad agencies for advertisers

Distributing content is the key phrase. Everyone is making content and then looking for channels to distribute it. This isn't really an ideal state — for now I'd define this as the era of content distribution.

Yang Weijia, Senior Director of Brand Marketing, Tencent Social Ads

A recent report from the market research firm TNS found that only about a third of marketing people in China feel confident about handling the places where consumers meet media. Put another way, advertising people no longer agree on what counts as a good media property.

Even digital media itself — the platforms that claim precise targeting and big-data analysis — ran into trouble. Last September, WeChat's official account platform in China and Facebook were both caught up in traffic-fraud scandals. Advertisers suddenly found that some big-name WeChat accounts charging more than 100,000 yuan a post (and not necessarily the lead post) had real readerships of only 10% of what they claimed, while Facebook's stated average viewing time for video ads over the previous two years had been 60% to 80% higher than the real figure.

Add the "transparency report" that the US ANA (Association of National Advertisers) put out last June, and "trust" became the single biggest topic at Advertising Week in New York. Advertisers suspected media-buying firms of overcharging them, agencies suspected media platforms of faking their numbers, and the ad-blocking plug-ins consumers installed on their phones cost everyone 22 billion US dollars.

There used to be a line in the ad trade: you never know which 50% of your ad budget is wasted. Now that the digital age is here, the answer may well be that 90% of it is spent in the wrong place.

One thing is certain, though: traditional advertising people and tech companies are working together on creative ideas more and more. The Mobile Grand Prix at last year's Cannes Lions went to a campaign that made full and clever use of Instagram. And last May, WPP cut a "deal" with Tencent, under which Tencent would set up a "China Social Brand Lab" with Bessie Lee, CEO of WPP China, as an adviser to it. Before that, the companies with deeper or shallower partnerships with WPP included Google, BuzzFeed and Facebook — all of them aiming, in the end, to trade data and place ads more efficiently.

Zheng Leiming, the senior consultant at R3, has noticed that advertisers increasingly look for agencies that are good at one particular field or one particular media platform: "Right now we don't see a single ad agency that can say, 'I can take all your so-called integrated marketing off your hands.'" Jin Pengyuan, CEO of Huanshi Interactive (Durex's agency), wrote recently on his personal WeChat account that he had read a lot of management books over the year, hoping to find lessons in companies like Google: "It's actually very hard for an ad agency to scale up, because its core competitiveness is people... This is the third time I've read this book, and really it's mostly about digesting the parts on how to hire." The book Jin Pengyuan was reading was How Google Works.

Yang Weijia, senior director of brand marketing at Tencent Social Ads, sees more finely targeted creative work as the trend: "Nobody has yet worked out the kind of formula we had in the previous three eras — what the main vehicle for measurement should be, or how ideas should be expressed. This is exactly the era in which we ought to be arguing about which way creative work should go."

Last October, Marc Pritchard, chief brand officer of Procter & Gamble, the world's largest advertiser, called for "raising the bar on creative" at the ANA Masters of Marketing conference. He said: "Advertising has gotten a bad name, which is why some people now prefer to call it 'content.' That's not wrong, because too much of what we put out as 'content' today belongs in a Pandora's box we should never have opened."

The remarks won applause: of the 2,700 people at the conference from the Association of National Advertisers, including 1,500 registered members, most were American brand owners — the people who actually pay for the advertising.

At the same time, P&G announced last August that it would adjust how much of its ad spending goes to Facebook, especially the budget for precise targeting, after finding that conversion rates were not as high as expected and that so-called precision marketing had cost it reach among a wider audience.

The P&G ads Pritchard held up at the conference as good ones: Always's Like a Girl, Gillette's Father's Day campaign Go Ask Dad, and SK-II's Marriage Market Takeover in the China market. What they seem to have in common is that each set up an issue and used the idea to break through to a wider public and across media, shaping the culture of online communities and getting people talking.

Everyone has a different answer to what makes a good idea. But people do broadly agree on whether a given idea is good or bad. Over the past year, QDaily's Agency Daily column recommended more than 200 ad campaigns we thought were worth watching, and that is one of the reasons we decided to hold this Oscars-style vote.

You may have noticed that our criteria differ from most advertising awards, which sort entries by media format — "Best Costume," "Best Soundtrack," "Wildest Idea." An idea can be tossed off with a buzzword, or it can be carried off with real class. And marketing in the social era should not be at odds with the spirit of traditional copywriting. So we wanted to pick out good ads on the strength of being funny, moving, well told, or even just "beautiful."

All of these ads did well on views, too, which shows that a good idea can still get the word out far and wide.

Starting December 16, we ran an online reader vote for 11 days straight. In each category, the top three vote-getters were awarded 5, 3 and 1 points.

We also put together a panel of eight judges: Li Huina, deputy editor-in-chief of QDaily; Zhu Kailin and Xuan Hailun, the lead reporters on the Agency Daily column; Hu Yu, head of the Life Research Institute; Yang Weijia, senior director of brand marketing at Tencent Social Ads; Zheng Leiming, senior consultant at R3; Li Zhimi, an ink-wash painter; and Zhou Yan, a senior in the advertising department at Shanghai Normal University. Each judge could likewise cast three votes per category, worth 5, 3 and 1 points from high to low.

Why have a panel at all? Not (entirely) for the expertise. Beyond the votes themselves, we wanted to know why people voted as they did. Standing where they stand — as consumers, as practitioners, as brand owners — each person has their own measures, and their own definition of what an award means.

Because of their different jobs, everyone's criteria (on top of the ones we set) were a little different. The painter cared more about beauty and care in the making; QDaily cared more about whether an ad was interesting and effective; Tencent cared more about how it travelled on social; the consultancy R3 cared more about what the client needed; and the advertising student judged the ads more as a consumer.

The final round took five hours in a meeting room at QDaily's Shanghai office, and it was a serious, careful process. Here are the results.

For each category we've attached the one ad most worth watching. To look back at more entries, click the award name at the start of each section to see the related article.

Best Script

Top 1: Shachihata – Failing at 50

Top 2: Pepsi – Bring Happiness Home: The Monkey King's Homecoming

Top 3: Nike – Soul Swap

Reader vote results:

Tide – Double Mystery 39.6%

Pepsi – Bring Happiness Home: The Monkey King's Homecoming 20.4%

Shachihata – Failing at 50 9.7%

Shachihata – Failing at 50

Five points is five teardrops, three points is three teardrops.

Yang Weijia, Senior Director of Brand Marketing, Tencent Social Ads

Does a good cry make an ad easier to remember? Judging from the eight shortlisted ads, at least half of them were fairly tear-jerking.

In terms of the story behind it, The Monkey King's Homecoming was more familiar to Chinese audiences and came with a built-in following, but its tie to the Pepsi product was on the weak side — the same script could have been dropped into another brand's Chinese New Year ad.

On that count Failing at 50, which cast a name stamp as its lead, was more distinctive — as an ad marking the 50th anniversary of the stationery brand Shachihata, it fit the subject exactly.

It was a bit of a surprise that Soul Swap made the top three. This classic Nike blockbuster was, as always, exciting, good-looking and cinematic, but it was also full of the air of assembly-line production, and it doesn't stand out among Nike's ads over the years.

Then again, you know it's a Nike ad the moment you see it — maybe that counts as a kind of success too?

Luzhou Laojiao's Father's Excuse, which readers liked a great deal, came fourth, one point behind.

Best Costume

Top 1: Burberry – The Tale of Thomas Burberry

Top 2: H&M – Come Together

Top 3: Eight – Business Card Exchange; Georgetown Optician – The Eye Ball

Reader vote results:

Burberry – The Tale of Thomas Burberry 23.1%

IKEA – Let's Relax 18.6%

H&M – Come Together 16.2%

Burberry – The Tale of Thomas Burberry

Whether the clothes look good doesn't matter much to me.

Zheng Leiming, Senior Consultant, R3

Dressing the lead of an ad well is not easy.

When clothing plays a supporting part, it has to sit right and not upstage the lead. It can even work as a tool for visual unity, as in Eight's Business Card Exchange or Shell's The Best Day of My Life, or as a symbol of cultural export, as in Nissin's samurai series.

The fashion brands, for their part, lived up to expectations and took the top two spots in "Best Costume." Even in these two blockbuster-scale ads, the clothes remained the undisputed star — and the same palette as The Grand Budapest Hotel gave H&M's ad an extra touch of class.

Best Endorsement

Top 1: Adidas – Kanye West

Top 2: Apple Music – Taylor Swift

Top 3: Jaguar – Stephen Hawking; New Balance – Jonathan Lee

Reader vote results:

Apple Music – Taylor Swift 25%

Adidas – Kanye West 14.9%

New Balance – Jonathan Lee 14.6%

I could tell the celebrity really gave it everything...

Li Zhimi, ink-wash painter

The days when a star could just show up and collect the traffic are gone. Whether a celebrity really worked at it, whether they were "professional" enough — audiences make up their own minds.

Kanye West, who took first place by a wide margin, is at once Adidas's spokesman, its designer and its runway presence. On social media, Kanye and the Kardashian family behind him handled nearly everything the campaign needed in order to spread, including writing the Yeezy shoes into a new song.

How do you make deep use of a celebrity's pull? Adidas really did make every dollar it spent on Kanye West land with a bang.

The other finalists won mainly on their choice of spokesperson and their timing. The series of goofy ads Taylor Swift shot for Apple Music were seen as her setting the idol pose aside, and in the end they paid off handsomely. Swift's earlier "royalties dispute" with Apple was handled like a textbook case of crisis PR.

New Balance – Jonathan Lee

Jonathan Lee's long-running work with New Balance was also seen as the most successful endorsement in China over the past year, and picking Lee was seen as an unorthodox but inspired move. As one judge put it, "When it comes to selling nostalgia, you probably won't find anyone better suited than Jonathan Lee."

Lee is not one of today's hot young heartthrobs, and he is a long way from the image sports brands usually go for, so some judges in the room worried that he might "age" the brand. The other view: set against the line New Balance loves to repeat — that it has "the only UK and US production lines left among today's global sports brands" — Jonathan Lee was precisely the person who could move middle-class consumers.

Best Soundtrack

Top 1: Under Armour – Rule Yourself

Top 2: Heineken – The Chorus

Top 3: Shell – The Best Day of My Life

Reader vote results:

Under Armour – Rule Yourself 19%

Heineken – The Chorus 17.3%

Adidas – Your Future is Not Mine 12.2%

Under Armour – Rule Yourself

Whether music sounds good is just as subjective. We found far more disagreement over "Best Soundtrack" than over the visual categories, "Best Costume" and "Best Script" — one judge, for instance, found Heineken's The Chorus, which ended up scoring high, unlistenable. Personal taste did most of the work here.

In both the final scores and the reader vote, we found that audiences paid little attention to the lyrics or to how well the song fitted the brand. Nike's custom theme song for Kobe Bryant, The Conductor, and Nissin's Japanese rap telling its founder's story both failed to reach the final top three.

Wildest Idea

Top 1: Sony PS4 – PS4® New Price

Top 2: Sony – If Your Camera Were a Bodybuilder

Top 3: Eight – Business Card

Reader vote results:

Eight – Business Card 21.3%

Sony – If Your Camera Were a Bodybuilder 20.3%

Sony PS4 – PS4® New Price 18%

Sony PS4 – PS4® New Price

When you're working up an idea, the first ten you think of should all be thrown out, because other people could think of them too. But I never imagined the portrait on a banknote could turn into an ad.

Zhu Kailin, QDaily reporter

"Wildest Idea" was expected to be hotly contested, and the result turned out to be unusually unanimous.

The promotional ad Sony made for the PlayStation 4 got top marks from nearly every judge, for a simple reason: "There are plenty of ads with wild ideas, but not many that make a price-cut ad this much fun." In the end, however wild the idea, you still have to think about what the brand actually needs and how well the ad delivers it.

And Japanese advertising was genuinely hard to look away from in this category.

Best Extra

Top 1: Sweden – The Swedish Number

Top 2: Reclame Aqui – Rights Dinner

Top 3: IKEA – "Shooting the New IKEA Catalogue"

Reader vote results:

Mentos – Pick-Up Coach 25.5%

IKEA – "Shooting the New IKEA Catalogue" 17%

Gillette – Go Ask Dad 15%

Sweden – The Swedish Number

The votes here were fairly scattered, and the main argument was over what "Best Extra" should mean. None of the shortlisted ads had a big-name star holding them up, and some had no clear lead at all — they filmed consumers' "natural reactions" and made that the ad, a form known as the "social experiment ad."

Judging by the results, the more "natural" the footage, the better it went down.

Most Viral

Top 1: HelloFlo – A Visit From Aunt Flo

Top 2: SK-II – Marriage Market Takeover

Top 3: Intermarché – Sugar Detox

Reader vote results:

HelloFlo – A Visit From Aunt Flo 29%

Doritos – Ultrasound 18.5%

Pokémon – Train On 14.5%

HelloFlo – A Visit From Aunt Flo

I don't like this ad, and I voted for it anyway.

Xuan Hailun, QDaily reporter

Reach is the first measure in this category. It also helps if the ad comes from a company nobody had heard of before. HelloFlo's sanitary-pad ad fitted both criteria perfectly, taking first place by a wide margin in both the final round and the reader vote. But some judges felt HelloFlo's ad was only loosely tied to the service the company actually provides, and left a flat impression of the product.

That points, indirectly, to one trait of "Most Viral" ads: the one flooding your WeChat Moments is not necessarily flawless.

It might, on the contrary, be wildly catchy and strange, like Mountain Dew's Super Bowl ad Puppy Monkey Baby; or it might look perfectly wholesome and still be full of talking points and made to be shared, like SK-II's Marriage Market Takeover — which posted lovely reach numbers, though SK-II never went back to make more of that contentious subject.

For big companies in particular, handling ads on subjects like this takes extra care. Flooding everyone's feed is not necessarily a blessing.

Most Cinematic

Top 1: Burberry – The Tale of Thomas Burberry

Top 2: Magnum – Release the Beast

Top 3: BMW – The Escape

Reader vote results:

Burberry – The Tale of Thomas Burberry 36.5%

Magnum – Release the Beast 23.5%

BMW – The Escape 20.9%

Magnum – Release the Beast

It has the feel of a film, but the main thing is that after watching it I really did want to go and eat a Magnum.

Hu Yu, Head of the Life Research Institute

Of the 11 categories, "Most Cinematic" is the only one where the final round and the reader vote produced exactly the same result, even though all six shortlisted films were strong. Among them, Australia Day, made by Meat & Livestock Australia to sell lamb, came fourth, two points behind.

On criteria, "looking expensive" was the main basis for choosing. Some judges also said they watched for the typical big Hollywood set pieces, such as a car chase.

Best Actor

Top 1: SickKids Toronto – The Most Vulnerable

Top 2: Audi – The Comeback

Top 3: MACMA – Man Boobs

Reader vote results:

SickKids Toronto – The Most Vulnerable 38.1%

Audi – The Comeback 24.6%

Netto-Katzen 17.5%

SickKids Toronto – The Most Vulnerable

Good ideas expressing "strength" are not rare, but turning "weakness" into "strength" the way SickKids Toronto did, with that much force and penetration, is extremely rare

Li Huina, QDaily editor

The patients from SickKids Toronto won the audience over with real strength, and this was the only one of the five shortlisted ads to cast actual human beings (the MACMA ad counts only as a partial body performance).

The other high scorers all seem to have been clever about their choice of "actor." A Tyrannosaurus rex became the biggest attraction in Audi's self-driving ad, and the director put real work into the T. rex's "insecure" and "sorrowful" expressions.

The gap between the reader vote and the final round showed up mainly in third place — cute animals, it seems, are still the surest way to people's hearts.

Most Politically Correct

Top 1: Momondo – The DNA Journey

Top 2: Communist Party of China – Who Am I

Top 3: Nike – Unlimited series

Reader vote results:

Momondo – The DNA Journey 25.1%

McDonald's – Acceptance 18.3%

Always – Girl Emojis #LikeAGirl 16%

Momondo – The DNA Journey

Maybe because there were (too many) disastrous events, the past year was a particularly big one for politically correct ads.

Zhou Yan, advertising student

Generally speaking, it is not easy to get consumers to swallow inspirational uplift willingly. Fine ideas and planning made Momondo's The DNA Journey and Nike's Unlimited series stand out. The win for the Communist Party of China's Who Am I looked more like a "Most Improved" award.

Setting a public agenda on purpose is also something of a risk for brands. In Taiwan, where the argument over legalising same-sex marriage was fierce, McDonald's used an ad to state its position, but most other companies chose to sit the movement out and watch.

Over the past year, LGBT-themed ads became almost a compulsory move for brands in Europe and the US. Click here for the list we put together.

Best Local

Top 1: Little Sheep – A Bite of China, Little Sheep Edition

Top 2: Pepsi – Bring Happiness Home: The Monkey King's Homecoming; Nongfu Spring – 20th Anniversary series

Top 3: New Balance – Every Step Counts

Reader vote results:

Little Sheep – A Bite of China, Little Sheep Edition 67.8%

Uniqlo – Dialect series 14.5%

Pepsi – Bring Happiness Home: The Monkey King's Homecoming 6.4%

Every frame can be used in any form of distribution. Little Sheep shot a very practical ad.

Yang Weijia, Senior Director of Brand Marketing, Tencent Social Ads

"Best Local" here means ads placed in China and made for the China market. This was also the category with the most evenly spread votes and the fiercest competition.

Against the much louder The Monkey King's Homecoming and Every Step Counts, Little Sheep's "A Bite of China" ad came from behind as the dark horse to take first place in both the reader vote and the final round.

The execution was on point, and the "A Bite of China" look wins audiences over every time. More important, this Little Sheep ad does not depend on a complete plot or story: any frame can be pulled out and used as a GIF on social platforms or as a print ad offline. It also goes straight to the point, showing how fresh the ingredients are and making you want to eat.

The Agency Daily Advertising Oscars' preliminary shortlist ran to 79 nominated ads, selected jointly by QDaily and the market consultancy R3.

Cover image credit: Pexels