A new era of marketing effectiveness

I would like to start this evening with big thank you. Thank you to all the entrants for the time, effort and simple brilliance they have poured into every word of every paper. All were amazing. But I would also like to thank the IPA for inviting me to chair the client judges this year. It was an honour. In fact, it was more than that, it was an inspiration.

Working on a single brand day-in-day-out can quickly leave marketers like me a bit myopic. We know our category inside out but don’t look beyond it often enough.  And yet here I was, surrounded by some of the best marketing minds on the planet, discussing brands in many other categories and across different countries and cultures that all challenged my thinking about what I do in my job every day.

The world’s leading databank of marketing learning

Quite simply, the IPA Effectiveness Awards continue to be the world’s leading databank of marketing learning, and this year I know we will be adding to that significantly. I therefore urge everyone to read the winning papers, because you will be stunned at what you learn. I know I was.

But I would also compel you to dive in because they are a joy to read. They are fascinating, funny, provocative, creative and compelling. It would be totally wrong to think of them as ‘prescribed’ reading, like some sort of medicine, but rather as set of peer-reviewed masterpieces you simply won’t be able put down.

These are bestsellers all about marketing’s best sellers. And they tell the stories of some of the most familiar, admired, long-lasting and creative campaigns over recent years. Together they chart a notable sea change from the emotional post-Diana outpourings of the past decades to a more optimistic, humorous and confident approach. All of life is here, represented by big brands and committed advertisers, and these awards are all the better for it.

But let’s not get too rosy about this world we are operating in, because since the first Advertising Works compendium was published in 1981, an awful lot has changed, and put bluntly, advertising today doesn’t work quite as well as it did then.

Value of top brands down by 20%

Real effectiveness is in long-term decline as marketing is delivering ever lower ROIs, whilst media fragmentation and addressable buying is leading to brand awareness falling in many categories and geographies. Sadly, we appear to be getting less good at doing what we are meant to be doing, and that’s building the strong brands that drive outsized commercial returns.

And this is having a fundamental impact on the worth of brands overall. Indeed, the value of the top 100 brands according to Kantar was down 20% in 2023 versus the previous year. That’s a big drop. A multi-trillion dollar drop in fact.

And yet attend most other marketing awards events and you wouldn’t know it. Because against this backdrop, our industry is happily celebrating all the reposts and the likes and PR coverage it generates, and passing them off as symbols of modern-day effectiveness. Sadly, in a world where 90% of clicks to most forms of mobile display advertising are accidental, everyone here knows the reality is very different.

And in part, that’s why tonight is so important, because together we will be celebrating real effectiveness, proven in real ways, driven by real testing, research and data science. We will be untangling the signal from the noise and the correlation from the causation. And in a marketing landscape consumed with AI we will even see the power of old-fashioned AB testing. Quite simply, no one can argue with the proof being put forward this evening.

Solving old problems in a myriad of new ways

But that’s not so say these awards are stuck in the past. In fact, quite the opposite. If there’s a single big takeaway from the winners tonight, it’s how they have all successfully solved old problems in a myriad of new ways.

I believe that the mission of marketing remains the same as it was a hundred years ago. To create recognisable and liked brands, that are kept top of mind and deliver sustainable net value.

But how this enduring mission is achieved today is unrecognisable to anyone looking in from 1924. In fact, its unrecognisable to anyone who attended these awards in 2004.

We have entered a new era of marketing effectiveness, but still much of our thinking has been honed from the age of ‘air power’, that saw carpet bombing and surgical strikes managed from a central command post, powered by enormous targeting and machine learning in media buying.

But this is going in reverse now. The growing weakness of TV as a mass reach and mass event medium is well documented. Whilst data privacy laws mean the huge machine learning data opportunities now sit in walled gardens controlled by Google, Meta and others.

And so, we are increasingly entering in a world of brands being built on the ground, by armies of influencers, by brand partnerships and collaborations, and by in-feed and in-game activations. Hand-to-hand marketing is replacing fire-and-forget. And that means we are all learning new lessons every day in so many ways.

And there’s no way any of us can keep up unless we work together. And that’s precisely where shared industry events like the IPA Effectiveness Awards will continue to prove their unparalleled worth.

Swimming against the changing tides of effectiveness

Effectiveness understanding today simply has to be open source, and there is no better source than the papers being celebrated tonight. We are all swimming against the changing tides of effectiveness, but these awards will help everyone develop much bigger flippers.

But if all this talk of change is a little disconcerting on a nice night out together, I was also warmly encouraged to see many of the long-standing truths of great marketing communications are still on show in the winners here tonight.

The power of a big and simple idea, with emotionally engaging creativity, executed consistently over time, with brand purpose and product innovation working together, are proven again and again.

The game is ultimately the same, even if the rules are changing all the time.

And it’s a game we should all be proud to be players of. The way the people in this room have created value, changed behaviours and saved lives is astounding. I struggle to think of many awards ceremonies that combine such positive commercial and societal impact and on such scale as these do.

So, let’s begin. And together let’s applaud, then read, then share, then debate, and then build on the winner papers tonight…the absolute bestsellers of best sellers.