IPA Effectiveness Accreditation - December19
December19 are excited to have been endorsed with our IPA Effectiveness Accreditation.
The IPA Effectiveness Accreditation is an endorsement that your agency culture is dedicated to business effectiveness. It can turn what you already do into a competitive advantage for attracting clients and talent, as well as providing an incentive to maintain existing high standards.
The Effectiveness Accreditation was launched in 2021 as a biennial programme with the goal of delivering distinction to agencies that “understand that marketing is an investment which needs a return, and not purely a cost”.
Submissions had to demonstrate to a panel, chaired by NatWest CMO Margaret Jobling, of leading brand owners, academics, authors, and effectiveness specialists that their culture is dedicated to effectiveness.
Entries were judged against weighted criteria, including Focus (10%), People (30%), Process (30%), and Data, Tools and Measurement (30%).
“Client-agency relationships are the cornerstone of our industry, and it is incredibly important to know that you share common goals and standards of excellence in creativity and effectiveness,” said Jobling.
She added: “I’ve been extremely impressed to see so many agencies of all disciplines and sizes across the country demonstrate how they put effectiveness culture at the core of their business.”
From Setback to Success - The Road to Winning our IPA Effectiveness Award
When the agency reluctantly decided not to submit a paper to the 2022 IPA Effectiveness Awards, it was the first time I had withdrawn from writing an awards entry. Two years later, we won with our first completed paper. Here's what we learned from the experience.
Four years in the making, our journey to winning an IPA Effectiveness Award in 2024 with our paper for accounting software brand Xero wouldn’t be complete without revisiting our experience in 2022. The path to victory is not always linear.
”An awards entry is one of the most valuable exercises for contextualising why we do what we do, what impact it has on advertisers and how it benefits winning agencies. You need to embrace the journey, not just the destination.”
In early 2022, we had entered the awards, invested three months of work, and then received some tough feedback. Ever conscious of the sunk cost fallacy (the human tendency to stick with something we’ve already put time/effort/money into, even when it would be more beneficial to stop) we ultimately decided to pull out and abandon what we had done so far.
That decision was tough, but it provided some of the most useful guidance we can now pass on to first-time authors. I took the knocks, so you don’t have to.