The catalytic effect of effectiveness accreditation

Our effectiveness journey at Drummond Central started in earnest in 2019 when we made a promise – and a plan – to ensure that everyone shared the same effectiveness vision across the agency and among our clients.

By rallying everyone around our principles it meant that everyone from the creatives to the client service team, agreed what makes great work and how to make great work that’s entertaining, memorable, salient and impactful. And it gives us the tools to measure whether or not it’s doing what it needs to do, taking the guesswork out.

Here are some lessons from our own path towards effectiveness, brought into even sharper focus through the accreditation process.

Share the principles and the results

Getting everyone on board is crucial. Effectiveness shouldn’t just sit with one team or only the senior leadership. It’s about getting creatives, client services, finance teams and planners to sing from the same hymn sheet.

We host regular lunchtime sessions attended across the agency to ensure that everyone is fluent in effectiveness principles. And our resident ‘EffClub’ (the team leading the charge on the agency’s ‘effectiveness roadmap’) is a merry band of people from across disciplines.

Share what works. Share what doesn’t work too. It’s tempting to plough onto the next shiny thing when you’re a busy agency. But one of the most important parts of effectiveness is taking the time to share results with people in the team (and of course, clients) and plan how to optimise for next time.

Make time for learning and document all you do

People are one of your biggest assets when it comes to establishing and growing a coherent culture of effectiveness. Learning is really important at Drummond Central and we make sure we give people the opportunity to develop their effectiveness chops. We have an agency target for 100% of our people to hold the IPA Effectiveness Certificate.

Don’t underestimate the significance of small changes. Sometimes the small indicators of culture can be the most powerful. There’s probably a lot that you’re doing that you don’t realise. Time to catalogue it.

The difference being accredited makes

Fast forward to 2024 and we are a year into our accreditation. Here’s how it’s helped us at DC so far.

• We wear our accreditation as a badge of honour and clients have recognised the efforts and meaning behind it. We don’t believe it’s down to luck that we’ve started working with new clients including Dreams, Fage and Fentimans in the last 12 months.
• We've introduced 12 new roles to the business in the last 12 months including two new Junior Planning positions and our accreditation is always part of the conversation during recruitment.
• As an independent agency, we work with clients that range in category and size, so there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to effectiveness. What we all share in common though is ambition. Developing individual roadmaps means that we can diagnose and address how we can help realise each of these ambitions in a bespoke way.
• A reinforced culture of effectiveness. The accreditation was a galvanising effort that reminded everyone of how seriously we are taking effectiveness and how rewarding it could be.

Gaining IPA Effectiveness Accreditation was a cherry on top of lots of hard work and determination, marking another important milestone on our agency journey.

It has given us a framework that enabled us to systemise what we were already doing and think about what we could be doing more of. We’re consistently producing some of our best work yet and growing as an agency, owed in part to the catalytic effect of accreditation and the pursuit of effectiveness.

Emma Chaplin is a Senior Planner at Drummond Central.

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.