Effectiveness Is an Agency Operating System and Our Secret Sauce

Effectiveness, I have learned, is a charged word.

A simple definition of ‘magnetic North’ for our industry, you might have thought. Forget inputs and outputs: what outcomes do we drive, and how?

But no.

‘Effectiveness’, it seems, has many constituencies, many meanings…and even the odd naysayer, especially when misunderstood as mere measurement. On the one hand: the highest form of achievement for any agency or advertiser. On the other: a ragbag comprising proxy metrics, the odd snake oil salesman and the whiff of ‘averaging’.

Proof of our endeavours, perhaps, but somehow a drag on them also.

It’s a baggy word, it turns out, but one which the IPA steadfastly defines as profitable contribution from marketing investment, the red thread running across 45 years of our Effectiveness Awards.

As taught and celebrated at the IPA, effectiveness is not ‘the strategist’s job’. It is not ‘the bit at the end’. And it is not, ironically, ‘the awards entry’.

Effectiveness, as practiced at its fullest and best, is much more than that. It’s an agency operating system.

It’s why we now populate our calendar with an Awards scheme for individual case studies in even years, and an accreditation scheme for agency-wide effectiveness culture in the odd years, including this one.

Management guru Peter Drucker is credited with the observation that “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. Humans can get in the way of the best laid plans. On the flip side, a common understanding of “how we do things around here” can outdo prescriptive policy. And there aren’t very many messier places than advertising agencies - where much of that messiness is good - to test that proposition.

The IPA’s Effectiveness Accreditation scheme, which closed last week with a record 63 entries from right across the agency spectrum, was born in Drucker’s spirit. A tacit acknowledgment that agencies might ‘get lucky’ with a breakout campaign but that - over time - an unfair share of success goes to those that embed effectiveness as a way of working. Those agencies, perhaps, that share golfer Gary Player’s famous belief that “the harder I practice, the luckier I get”.

This year’s accreditation wannabes are each attempting to persuade our panel - chaired by Alessandra Bellini, outgoing President of the Advertising Association - that an effectiveness mindset is genuinely ingrained in their business, and pulls through in the form of superior outcomes for their clients.

Some agencies stress their tools and techniques, others their people and processes: there is no ‘right answer’. But the fact that we are seeing record entries into both our Effectiveness Awards (which hit a thirty-year high last year) and our Effectiveness Accreditation scheme suggests one of two things: that there is either a renewed focus on outcomes as a competitive advantage for agencies, or more widespread competence.

Or, of course, both.

It’s possible also that there is a growing collective realisation that demonstrating our ‘value add’ has never been more critical in an era of, first, in-housing and secondly (and much more profoundly) automation.

That we may have spent too much time arguing the value of advertising (to the benefit of all players in the market) and not enough arguing the value of agencies.

In a world in which advertising is growing but agencies’ share of the cake is not, this looks like the next frontier: encouraging brands of all sizes to swap out relatively small investments in agency fees for superior returns on their spend.

This will be a more marginal call for pure activation briefs: the business of matching buyers and sellers to harvest current demand, previously known as ‘classified advertising’ and where AI is being most confidently put to work right now.

But despite our industry’s prevailing rhetoric, most businesses trying to build future demand - and chasing the lifeblood of profit, rather than just sales - will still benefit from an agency partner’s objectivity; from their understanding of brands and audiences; from their ideas.

In an era when the agency competitive set was other agencies, it’s possible we took our strategic and creative hand for granted, splitting the differences between one another instead. In the age of automation, we now must make the base case also: for the commercial upside that springs from the imaginative collaboration of humans, however much we might choose to augment this with machines and machine learning.

Effectiveness - true effectiveness, that is, in the form of an unrelenting focus on outcomes, and a belief that humans do it better - may just turn out to be the agency sector’s life-raft.

Laurence Green is director of effectiveness at the IPA.