Gathering Effectiveness Knowledge the Whole World Can Use

Like all great planners, Harjot Singh is in love with creativity. “Creativity is about the abstract, about reimagining what's possible,” he says. “There is a lot of working with concepts.” That’s why the global chief strategy officer for McCann and McCann Worldgroup is also so in love with the support that effectiveness metrics provide for creativity. “To be able to have some level of clarity and certainty that you can lend to the abstract is very potent. As an industry, it's our oxygen. Because at a fundamental level, it's about proving the business case of creativity.” 

Having been a member of the IPA’s Effectiveness Leadership Group (ELG) since 2018, Harjot has also been involved with the IPA Effectiveness Awards for many years, and was a convenor for the past two juries. So he’s put a lot of work into ensuring the global effectiveness infrastructure is strong enough to support the best in creativity today. “These awards are about proving and claiming, beyond reasonable doubt, the value of the work that we make. They're also about asserting the value that we deliver for and add to brands as an industry,” he says.

When you walk into McCann you see three words on the wall: ‘Truth Well Told’. And that’s a mission that Harjot is convinced can only be achieved with a strong effectiveness infrastructure backing it up. “How do you know if something has been ‘well told’?” he asks. “You could be shouting into oblivion. It doesn’t say ‘Truth Well Shouted’. The ability to prove and directly connect the impact to the work that we make is essential for us to deliver the mission.”

Harjot has been part of McCann for 12 years, but of course he’s worked for other agencies with different missions. “Look at Grey. When I worked there, their ideology was to be ‘Famously Effective’. You can't be famously effective if you can't prove that. If you unpack the ideology of every agency, it does connect to effectiveness in ways that one may underappreciate. But if you really focus on it, it's the goods to back up the attitude. That's why I think it's so important. And that's why we're so invested in these bodies of effectiveness being credible and influential, which is where the IPA comes in.”

Naturally, being immersed in effectiveness conversations has fed into how he works as a CSO. He talks with glee about spending time with these groups. “Working with and talking to some of the brightest brains in the industry – people who are passionate about effectiveness, have the expertise and the empathy in equal measure to be able to make an impact in this space. You will always leave these meetings richer than you walked in, because you're exposed to so many brilliant minds.” 

Plus, there’s so much range. The diversity of the ELG straddles multiple categories, organisations, and disciplines. “All in one room, talking about one issue – proving the impact of what we do,” says Harjot. “And in 100 different ways. Making sure that we're understanding all the levers, emerging and existing. That's obviously been useful, because it broadens your set of references. You have more to draw from. And in the business of creativity, that's invaluable.” 

While this community has helped his day job, his global strategy leadership role with McCann Worldgroup has also helped Harjot to be a better awards convener and a contributor in ELG meetings, he says. “I come in there with a set of references that are different. I represent a global network. I show up there with the experience of having worked in multiple markets and continents, as someone who has a proven track record in doing well in all those places. And you can't do well if your clients don't trust you. And if you don't earn the trust, you don't deliver impact. So I come with receipts. I feel like I've been able to contribute more confidently. I don't think I would have been able to do that 10 years ago, because I wouldn't have had the same number of receipts.”

The global nature of Harjot’s role makes him an ideal figure to play a part in the IPA’s effectiveness work, because despite its British origins and membership, the Institute leads a worldwide agenda on this subject. “There are trade bodies in every market, but there isn't one that's as influential as the IPA,” says Harjot. “This is why we deserve to be global. We have the right to play in that field, we have the brightest minds, we have the richest dataset, we have the history of having navigated extremely sophisticated marketing challenges, classical marketing problems that don't show up in classical ways, and our ability to tackle them with fresh and captivating creativity. And being able to prove, over and over again, why that works. We have an abundance of brilliance in this country. And I believe that that is a strength of ours that we don't have to be coy about. We should be leading the world.”

When he took on the awards convenorship a few years ago, Harjot took the goals of the IPA to heart. “If it is to be the most influential body of learning and effectiveness for the industry globally, then we're going to deliver on that mission. It's not about being most influential on an island of 67 million people. We are making some of the most globally influential work, from the UK for the world. We are educating people in the UK that lead the whole world. This is a centre of excellence that deserves to play on the global stage. And you can't do that if you don't understand how the world's changed.”

Harjot has lived and worked in six countries across three continents in his career so far – and the British trade body that he’s now so invested in was always something he relied on. “The IPA is always something that you look at as the real deal. It doesn't get more rigorous, more prestigious. It's always had that cachet because it has curated a conversation that has shaped the discourse, never followed.”

For example, he was in Canada when he read an IPA Effectiveness case from UK supermarket Sainsbury's, demonstrating how the 'Try Something New Today' idea encouraged each shopper to spend an extra £1.14 every time they shopped. By giving its customers simple meal ideas, Sainsbury’s encouraged them to try new things and spend more on their shopping. The success of this campaign generated £550 million in sales over two years. Harjot was thrilled to read about it. “Intuitively, you feel it's a clever idea. But when you see the analysis, you see the way it's been presented, it educates you all over the world. That's best-in-class thinking.” And it applies all over the world. “The idea of a hyper competitive, hyper saturated, hyper transactional category of retail – that's not a British problem. That is a classical marketing category issue, which manifests very much in every part of the world.”

He remembers a time when the industry was having a global debate on how to prove the impact of not-for-profit work and the IPA once again took the lead: “It was very progressive when the IPA elevated the thinking around the British Heart Foundation – every life saved has a commercial impact. It can be evaluated what the financial impact to the UK would be for every life saved. It had never been done before. At the time, that was very illuminating.”

Throughout Harjot’s time as awards convenor, ensuring that he protected the IPA’s mission of global leadership was important to him. “If you're here to be the most credible, influential, progressive body of learning for marketing – in an industry that operates globally – you have an obligation and a responsibility to curate the best stuff in the world, for the world. You've got to be connected, plugged in, and you have to deliver value at that scale. You can't just look inward.”

He’s proud of what he did in his convenorship, making sure that the IPA jury was the most globally diverse to date, with judges from over a dozen countries, entries from more countries than ever before and with more categories introduced. “As a convener, you're not just there to break dishes and make changes (which is of course lots of fun, knowing me), also you have to help cast a jury. I was saying you can't do all of this and then have a 100% British jury. And when people got involved with us, they would realise it's amazing the kind of learning that we've got, the kind of rigour that we invest, the kind of diligence we give to the papers and the precision and depth of the discussions. People's minds are blown. And then they become advocates for you. I feel like we've made massive progress in that direction. And I'm very confident that this will continue to expand because under the current leadership of Jo.”

That’s Jo Arden, the new IPA Effectiveness Awards convenor of judges. Harjot asked the chief strategy officer at Ogilvy UK to take over, having served as his deputy before. “I personally don't think I could have asked anyone better than her. She's absolutely brilliant,” he says. And he’s excited to see her continue building that resource for the world’s industry. “We've created these spaces for learning to happen and get catalogued. We need to continue to make progress.”

Harjot knows what evolutions he’d like to see under Jo’s convenorship. “One is for us to continue to make progress in the direction that we have laid out. The second thing is, as we make progress, to be very clear about what that looks like. It doesn't just mean more, it also means different - to have more diversity of learning embedded in those spaces. We want to be more inclusive. And I really do believe the only way to be more extensive is to be more inclusive.”