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.