Founding Partner of The Effectiveness Partnership & The House of Creative Impact, Gurdeep Puri, explains how writing an IPA Effectiveness Awards paper helps agencies become organisationally stronger and signals marketing leadership in clients.
Some of the most recognised creative and media agencies and their clients are now full steam ahead on their entries for the 2026 IPA Effectiveness Awards: the most prestigious creative impact award in the world.
The level of proof demanded is why the IPA Effectiveness Awards have become the closest thing Marketing has to a record of real value creation. The IPA’s databank now contains 1,600+ cases, a monument to the vision and tenacity of the late Dr Simon Broadbent, the Godfather of Effectiveness, who invented the awards scheme in 1980; a scheme based on going beyond just “nice stories” to requiring entrants to show the highest form of rigorous proof of outcomes, and to empirically rebut or take account of alternative explanations of the commercial value created.
This year, there is the introduction of a new prize, with the current IPA President, Karen Martin, CEO of BBH London, introducing the President’s Prize for Creative Effectiveness that celebrates Great work that works.
The IPA Effectiveness Awards stand as the pinnacle of achievement within our industry, honouring the transformative power of advertising to drive real, measurable success. With the introduction of the President’s Prize for Creative Effectiveness, we are reaffirming our commitment not just to celebrating creativity, but to reconnecting the work with the effectiveness that proves its value. By focusing on what works - and, crucially, why it works - we aim to inspire our industry to keep pushing the boundaries of creativity, ensuring it delivers meaningful impact.
I remember my first month in the industry was about reading IPA papers from the likes of JWT, BBH, BMP and my own agency at the time, Leo Burnett. It was the best learning one could have to understand this amazing industry. And it’s much more than a historic archive; it’s a moving window on what’s working in ‘the now’.
Agencies and their clients who enter the IPA Effectiveness Awards, do so, because the act of building a strong IPA Effectiveness case forces a level of organisational discipline that most of the industry talks about, but few can actually achieve...
Over the years, both participating agencies and clients have learned that this rigour isn’t an add on or extra. It’s a competitive advantage.
Turning first to the benefits to agencies…
Agencies that win become organisationally stronger
Let’s be blunt: most agencies can produce strategy decks, creative work, and campaign reporting. Far fewer can run an end-to-end effectiveness process that stands up to scrutiny—over time, across stakeholders, and with credible causality.
Entering IPA awards is the ultimate builder of organisational capability and stress test of agency maturity. Here’s what it demands.
1) You can operate in the real world of messy data
To write a credible IPA case you need the ability to pull together: commercial outcomes, brand effects, behavioural data, econometrics, market context, and competitor activity—then tell a coherent story that connects them. Crucially, a good IPA case study will manage to make the link between commercial, behavioural and perceptual data, something which sadly seems to have fallen to the wayside in the age of digital, and ‘performance’ marketing.
The agencies that can do this have built the machinery: analytics partners, measurement frameworks, evidence standards, and the internal project management to run it.
Those that can’t tend to default to “metrics theatre”: dashboards, vanity metrics (brand love, campaign “buzz”), basic diagnostics masquerading as performance KPIs and overall retrospective rationalisation.
2) You can collaborate with clients at a senior level
An IPA case is never an “agency thing.” It requires proper client data access, legal clearance, and hard commercial numbers. Those agencies that have managed to craft a submission have no doubt earned trust and know how to work in partnership with clients to create shared value, demonstrable to the C Suite.
In practice, that’s a marker of senior client relationships and strong governance: stakeholder alignment, approvals, and the ability to move across internal silos (brand, finance, sales, product, procurement, etc).
3) You have a learning culture, not just a delivery culture
A well-run IPA entry does something that’s rare in agency life: it creates a structured “after-action review” with evidence—what worked, crucially - what didn’t, why, and what it means for future decisions.
That’s organisational superiority: the ability to turn work into reusable knowledge, not just outputs.
Harjot Singh, Global CSO McCann and the former Convenor of the IPA Effectiveness Awards, reinforces this point.
The IPA Effectiveness Awards at their best demonstrate how value is truly created in our business. The discipline they demand forces agencies and clients to connect imagination with impact, and to build cultures where evidence does not kill creativity but gives it the confidence to be bolder. For me, that is the real power of effectiveness: it doesn’t just reward great work, it raises the ambition of what brands and marketing can do next
4) You can connect brand and performance over time
One of the quiet strengths of the IPA ecosystem is how much it has shaped the industry’s understanding of long- and short-term effectiveness. Binet and Field’s analysis is grounded in the IPA’s databank of effectiveness award submissions and has highlighted the risks of over-optimising for short-term metrics and under-investing in long-term brand building.
Agencies capable of entering the IPA Effectiveness Awards credibly tend to be structurally better at navigating this tension—because their measurement and planning are built to evaluate effects over a longer period of time, not just in-week.
5) You can sell effectiveness as a product, not just creativity as a craft
A final, under-discussed point: agencies that can repeatedly produce IPA-quality cases tend to have stronger commercial positionings. They can sell “certainty”, “proof”, and “growth outcomes”—and those are premium commodities in a market that increasingly scrutinises marketing spend. Anna Vogt, Global CSO of Edelman, makes the case for this.
What sets IPA Effectiveness Awards entries apart is that commercial impact isn’t a happy coincidence at the end of the awards paper, it’s a planned-for outcome that has steered the strategy, creative and media choice. Understanding the contribution that each channel makes is crucial in an age where peer-to-peer and influencer marketing impacts customers’ choices above traditional channels. Putting a value on this trust and earned influence is critical so that we can continue to build our influence with clients.
In other words: agencies that can do this are not just more effective, they are harder to replace.
Now let’s flip the lens and turn to the benefits to clients.
Clients that win are signalling marketing leadership
For clients, entering the IPA Effectiveness Awards is a signal of leadership because it goes against three common organisational behaviours: short-termism, risk aversion, and internal politics.
Treating marketing as an investment, not a cost
IPA-aligned effectiveness demands you connect activity to business outcomes in a way a CFO can engage with. That’s true leadership: choosing accountability over ambiguity.
You’re proving impact in a world of declining effectiveness
There’s a widely discussed sense that marketing effectiveness has become harder to achieve and prove—more channels, more complexity, more noise. Entering IPA is a way of countering that drift with discipline: hypotheses, evidence, and results.
The IPA continues to publish evidence-led reports drawn from large numbers of databank case studies—e.g. a 2025 report citing evidence from 1,482 IPA database case studies in support of investment in advertising.
That kind of evidence base becomes a leadership asset: it helps you defend spend decisions and shape the organisation’s understanding of growth.
Building a culture of clarity and accountability
Marketing leadership isn’t just “big vision.” It’s creating clarity that reduces waste: fewer re-briefs, fewer pet projects, better decisions, better alignment between marketing, sales, product, and finance.
In other words: entering the IPA is an organisational intervention. You’re forcing the business to agree what success looks like, how it’s measured, and what caused it.
Setting a higher standard for partners
Clients who enter IPA tend to demand more from agencies: better learning agendas, better measurement, better strategic craft, and better commercial outcomes. That raises the overall standard of the relationship—and it makes it easier to retain high-performing partners because the value is documented and proven, not assumed.
Contributing to the industry, not just consuming it
The real reason that IPA submissions matter isn’t the trophy. It’s the organisational capability you have to build to even compete; Evidence standards, Measurement discipline, Cross-functional collaboration, Long-and-short thinking, Credible storytelling and Repeatable learning…
Agencies that can do this are operationally and commercially superior. Clients that do this are demonstrating leadership—because they’re willing to stand behind marketing as a growth lever with proof.
I have always tried to make the case that Effectiveness and Creativity work hand-in-glove, so let’s hear what an industry renowned, multi award-winning Creative, Emma De La Fosse, Co-Founder, The House of Creative Impact and former Group CCO of Ogilvy, CCO Digitas and Edelman has to say about the IPA Awards.
Something that’s rarely discussed is how proven effectiveness, and by extension an IPA Effectiveness Award, helps sell better creative ideas. Clients are, generally, a risk averse bunch. More so now than ever before, as they are restructured out of their positions more frequently than Chelsea managers. To buy bold, brave work demands a trusted relationship between agency and client. There is no better way of earning trust than delivering real business results that will make them look great in front of their CEO.
And in a world where trust is fragile and budgets are scrutinised; proof isn’t a nice-to-have. In a rapidly changing marketing environment high on promise but often low on proof, it’s a no-nonsense, essential strategy.
The 2026 IPA Effectiveness Awards are open for entries until Thursday 16 April. Explore our resources to help you write your paper.
Gurdeep Puri is Chair of the IPA Effectiveness Awards Mentorship Scheme and Founding Partner of The Effectiveness Partnership & The House of Creative Impact.
The opinions expressed here are those of the authors and were submitted in accordance with the IPA terms and conditions regarding the uploading and contribution of content to the IPA newsletters, IPA website, or other IPA media, and should not be interpreted as representing the opinion of the IPA.
Last updated 12 March 2026