Laurence Green: so are the IPA Awards really effective?

There was much hullabaloo in certain quarters of adland last week as the IPA announced its latest Effectiveness Awards winners. Unsurprisingly so: forty-four years on from its inauguration, the winning agencies and brand-owners remain a rarefied bunch. (I’m reliably informed more people have scaled Everest.)

This year’s Awards winners (including McCain, Yorkshire Tea, Guinness and Specsavers) have set industry hares running across everything from premium pricing as an objective to the value of long horizons and creative consistency.

But as More About Advertising inferred in its coverage last week, might this all be too little, too late in a world that has seemingly eschewed brand-building for performance and where AI is poised to feast on the creative carcass. Put another way, are the IPA Effectiveness Awards still effective in their own right?

My answer is an emphatic yes.

Firstly, because they remain true to the elusive objective set out by the Awards’ forefathers back in 1980, who set out to prove ‘once and for all’ that advertising worked (i.e. paid back).

They couldn’t have known that the barnacle on the advertising boat would cling on so stubbornly in the decades that followed: that the lazy notion that “I know half my advertising spend is wasted, the trouble is I don’t know which half” would in fact be given new life by self-interested tech platforms making overblown claims for precision and personalisation. And that this would drive a misplaced race to short and measurable rather than long and ‘immeasurable’.

At their core, the Awards remain a necessary corrective to this ‘rush to short’ as they continue to prove that the big business returns from advertising accrue to patient brand-building over time.

Secondly, because they shed new light – as well as old – on what good looks like each time our juries meet to deliberate. (And, boy, do they deliberate..)

It was the IPA Awards that first proved, rather than asserted, that emotion and fame are the advertisers’ friend and not just the blandishments of starry-eyed agency folk.

This year’s winners remind us that achieving premium pricing (rather than necessarily selling more) is a plausible and profitable objective to set, rather than just a happy outcome; and that long horizons and creative consistency also bear commercial fruit.

But the IPA Awards’ real value is, I think, in some ways more straightforward than all of the above. They bring clients and agencies together to prove the value of what we do to a C-suite that can still remain sceptical of adspend versus alternative allocations of capital.

They remind us, as well as others, of the power we have to change behaviour and move markets, a power that we will need to wield ever more responsibly in the future.

And they support but re-contextualise the case for ‘great creative’: as a means to an end, not just an end in itself.
Audiences, media owners and brand-owners all ‘win’ when the work is good. Take the IPA Effectiveness Awards, and the Databank it feeds, out of the mix and that claim is reduced to mere puff.

Laurence Green is the IPA’s Director of Effectiveness.