System1, The Creative Effectiveness Platform, unveils the ads of the month for April. 

System1’s Test Your Ad platform measures consumers’ emotional responses to ads to predict their commercial potential. Creative is assigned a score of 1.0 to 5.9 Stars based on long-term brand-building potential. Ads that make people feel intense, positive emotions like happiness and surprise score high on the scale. Usually, just 1% of ads secure a 5-Star score.

Keeping it Real – Nivea |  Jung von Matt

Protection is Human (UK) 4.0 Star Rating Test Your Ad Report

Going live on Nivea’s social channels, this is a lovely example of visual storytelling doing the heavy lifting. It reminds us that the best advertising rarely sells the product itself; it sells the human meaning wrapped around it. Sunscreen isn’t just about avoiding the lobster-red fate of Brits abroad. It’s protection. Care. The quiet instinct parents have to shield their children from harm.

And crucially, the ad understands that emotion travels faster than information. There are no statistics about skin damage, no rational bullet points about SPF performance, no functional chest-beating. Just a single, instantly legible image: a child, a smile, a sense of place, and the unspoken reassurance that protecting your children is one of the most deeply human behaviours there is.

It’s packed with what Orlando Wood would call ‘showmanship’ cues: expressive faces, warmth, implicit communication, emotional fluency. The kind of creative devices that work not because audiences consciously process them, but because they feel them. Which is precisely why the image has such broad appeal beyond the parental demographic it’s clearly aimed at.

My only criticism is that the branding feels overly timid. Yes, this ran on Nivea-owned channels, but in a feed environment, distinctive brand assets need to work harder than this. The logo and product placement are so understated that attribution risks evaporating the moment the post is shared beyond its original context.

The lesson for Nivea? Protect your brand as carefully as your customers protect their children. When the creative idea is this emotionally effective, your distinctive assets shouldn’t be hiding in the shadows. 

A Whopper Winner – Burger King | BBH

Whopper of a Finish (US) 4.3 Star Rating Test Your Ad Report

Burger King’s latest out-of-home campaign lands because it understands something many fitness brands forget: people are human before they are athletes.

Timed around the London Marathon, ‘Finished’ shows exhausted runners rewarding themselves with burgers at the end of the race. No chiselled abs. No performance clichés. No sermon about optimisation. Just the emotional truth of what most marathon runners are actually thinking about after months of training: “I’ve earned this.”

Importantly, the campaign builds naturally on Burger King’s now-famous ‘Bundles of Joy’ platform. Like that work, ‘Finished’ taps into a culturally recognisable human moment and frames Burger King as part of real life, rather than an idealised version of it. The brand understands that emotional resonance beats aspiration when it comes to broad commercial effectiveness.

There will inevitably be criticism from people uncomfortable with fast food appearing alongside fitness culture, but that rather misses the point. Most people are not living on green juice and protein shakes. They are balancing discipline with reward. Effort with indulgence. Burger King recognises that tension and reflects it back with warmth, humour, and relatability.

Compared to the category’s usual fitness advertising, which often feels performative, inaccessible, and trapped in stereotypes, ‘Finished’ feels refreshingly human. And in advertising, humanity is still one of the strongest growth strategies a brand can have.

Cut-Through on the Court – Lacoste | BETC 

Life is a Beautiful Sport (FR) 3.4 Star Rating Test Your Ad Report

Fashion is one of advertising’s most stubbornly repetitive categories. Scroll through most campaigns and you’ll find the same formula repeated endlessly: expressionless models, flat backdrops, catalogue-style framing, and a kind of polished lifelessness masquerading as sophistication.

Yes, that approach showcases the clothing. And yes, it feels commercially safe because so many brands are doing it. But safety is not the same thing as distinctiveness. In fact, fashion advertising’s biggest problem is that so much of it has become visually interchangeable.

Add sport into the equation and the challenge becomes even harder. The reality is that most people simply do not care about sporting culture with the same intensity that fans do. Which means brands trying to merge fashion and sport often end up alienating broad audiences while disappearing into category clichés at the same time.

That’s what makes Lacoste’s French Open campaign so refreshing.

The first thing the ad understands is brand identity. Lacoste has genuine authority in tennis. The association is baked into the brand’s history, so the campaign feels natural rather than opportunistic. But crucially, the film doesn’t fall into the trap of making tennis itself the main event.

Instead, the emotional centre of the story is a ball girl desperately trying to return a lost ball to Novak Djokovic, racing through the backstreets, cafés, restaurants and gardens of Paris. The city becomes part of the storytelling. There’s momentum, progression, jeopardy, humour, and eventually a genuinely charming payoff.

Those are all devices fashion advertising rarely uses, which is precisely why this campaign stands out. It feels alive. It gives audiences a narrative to follow rather than simply a product to observe.

And that matters because people remember stories far more readily than they remember styling shots. Especially in categories drowning in visual sameness, entertainment becomes a commercial advantage.

Lacoste hasn’t just made a fashion ad around tennis. It’s made something human, playful, and emotionally engaging. In a category full of brands trying to look beautiful, that is often the more effective strategy.