What separates an award-winning ad from one people simply enjoy? SAN and Toluna went back through 15 years of SAN Case Base entries to find out. The 2026 analysis re-tested 46 cases from 2022–2024, spanning non-nominated work, nominated campaigns and SAN Accent winners, and compared the results with the jury’s decisions.
The clearest pattern was not likability. Winning campaigns delivered 37 percent higher brand recall and 15 percent higher message recall than other entries, even though nonwinning work was often slightly more liked. For marketers, the takeaway is practical: entertainment can earn attention, but effectiveness comes from making the brand and message stick. AI can help surface those patterns, while human interpretation provides the context.
What makes advertising effective? The industry has been debating that question for decades. We can often sense when creative work lands, but marketers increasingly need to understand why. That is the focus of the renewed collaboration between Stichting Adverteerdersjury Nederland (SAN), the Dutch Advertisers Jury Foundation, and consumer insights company Toluna.
SAN and Toluna are working together to turn the SAN Case Base into a more consistent source of learning for the industry. Toluna has reviewed and recoded 15 years of entries, giving the archive a common data framework and making it easier to compare campaigns over time.
Reassessing effectiveness
To compare the judgment of an experienced industry jury with data-led testing, SAN and Toluna analyzed 46 cases from 2022-2024:
cases that were not nominated
nominated cases
winning cases
One representative ad from each case was assessed on two measures: breakthrough potential – its ability to attract attention and build brand recognition – and brand impact, or the response the ad generates.
For Joost Vossen, former SAN board member and vice president of brand and go-to-market at Elsevier, the value lies in what the industry can learn from the comparison. “In an era when technology seems to be moving faster than we can keep up, interpreting analysis remains a human task,” he says. The aim is to surface patterns across years of strategic and creative work that might otherwise be easy to miss.
What synthetic personas add
Toluna brought their solution, Creative Pre-Test Instant into the analysis. The tool uses synthetic personas built on large-scale, validated consumer data to estimate how people are likely to respond to advertising. Rather than treating those profiles as a replacement for consumers or expert judgment, the analysis uses them as another source of evidence.
Toluna reports 92 percent agreement with traditional survey findings. For this study, the question was straightforward: would the AI-based evaluation point in the same direction as the SAN jury across the 46 cases?
Creativity that pays off sits at the intersection of entertainment and meaning.
Why likability is not enough
The answer was often yes. Winning campaigns scored higher on two core measures of effectiveness, with a 37 percent uplift in brand recall and a 15 percent uplift in message recall compared with other entries.
What they did not always win on was likability. Nonwinning campaigns often scored slightly higher on overall likability. The difference was that winning work had a stronger connection to the brand and communicated the message more clearly. As one jury member put it: “It is not about how much people like you, but about the impression you leave.”
What 15 years of cases can teach us
The SAN Case Base gives marketers, agencies and students a rare view across 15 years of strategies and executions. With the archive recoded into a consistent framework, it can now support more systematic analysis of how creative choices, brand cues and outcomes connect.
Access: Browse 15 years of strategies and executions.
Inspiration: Search across categories, audiences and creative approaches.
Research: Compare cases using a consistent data framework to identify patterns over time.
AI as a mirror, not a judge
The analysis also shows where AI-based testing has limits. In complex 360-degree campaigns such as HEMA’s “Made with Love,” the AI gave lower ratings to the distinctive voice-over and characteristic brand elements, while the jury responded strongly to the campaign’s emotional resonance and execution.
Made with Love
That difference is important. Social context, cultural timing and the strategic role of an idea can be difficult to capture from a single execution. The research does not position AI as a replacement for the jury. Van Wingerden sees it as a useful mirror: “It shows that data-driven personas recognize creative quality, and that a jury’s subjective judgment is less arbitrary than people often think.”
For advertisers, the lesson is less about choosing between human judgment and data than about using both well. Entertainment can help an ad earn attention, but effectiveness depends on what people remember about the brand and the message. The SAN and Toluna analysis gives marketers another way to understand that relationship.
About the series
This article is part of a new Adformatie series in which SAN and Toluna use the Case Base to explore advertising effectiveness. The archive was created 38 years ago to help marketers, agencies and students learn from past campaigns. Toluna’s recoding adds a common data framework, making it possible to examine those cases in new ways.
Human judgment, supported by data
AI is changing both how advertising is made and how it is evaluated. Toluna’s use of synthetic personas adds speed and another point of comparison, but both organizations are clear that interpretation remains a human task. The purpose of the series is to use data to challenge, support and deepen the industry’s understanding of creative effectiveness.
Human judgment, supported by data
Early findings suggest that likability alone does not explain effectiveness. SAN Accent winners do not always lead on entertainment, but they do perform more strongly on brand recall and impact. Future analyses will use the Case Base to look at more of these patterns.
The goal is practical: give marketers more evidence to work with when evaluating creative ideas, without reducing creativity to a single score. The Case Base provides the history; the data helps reveal what is worth learning from it.
This article originally appeared in Dutch on Adformatie as a part of Toluna and SAN’s analysis of creative marketing in The Netherlands.
Author: Kirsten van Wingerden
Managing Director of Toluna Netherlands & Nordics
Kirsten van Wingerden has been with Toluna for 16 years in commercial roles. She is joint Managing Director of Toluna Netherlands & Nordics
Author: Joost Vossen
Managing Director of Toluna Netherlands & Nordics
Joost Vossen is Vice President of Brand and Go-to-Market at Elsevier Netherlands.
