More effective as an industry if we’re prepared to share learnings

Congratulations to all the IPA Effectiveness Awards 2022 shortlisted entrants.

The IPA Effectiveness Awards 2022 Shortlist is a demonstration of how advertising both for businesses and not-for-profit organisations can make us smarter, more skilled, and more effective as an industry if we’re prepared to share learnings from it across all types of evidence and voices.

If anyone ever asks you what our industry is good at, you could do worse than show them the IPA Effectiveness Awards 2022 shortlist.

True, it has some cases they might expect to find, in which marketing communications turned round a struggling brand, like Boursin cheese or Schmacko’s dog treats. And it contains proof that those winning strategies can be kept fresh and engaging year after year, as Aldi, Tesco, and Baileys have shown in their cases. But our industry also knows how to prompt people to donate money, change their behaviour or lobby for a cause.

We entertain audiences into doing things they would rather put off – like ITV & VegPower’s ingenious solution to get kids to eat more vegetables or Hargreaves Lansdown’s successful campaign to persuade people to make their savings work harder.

At times, we influence the wider culture. Whether the topic is teenage selfie culture (see Dove case) or gun crime in schools (Sandy Hook Promise), our work met its objectives by changing conversations across the media and in people’s lives.

The point is that our industry is good at doing many different things, as this shortlist demonstrates.

This diversity of work both for businesses and not-for-profit organisations can make us smarter, more skilled, and more effective as an industry if we’re prepared to share learnings from it across all types of evidence and voices.

For this iteration of the Awards, which run every two years, entrants had another unique challenge. They had to account for any distorting impact from the COVID pandemic, and to ensure that COVID did not prevent them from being able to submit a case at all.

That itself is a reminder of another quality our industry displays at its best – flexibility in a crisis.

Congratulations to all the shortlisted entrants, and I hope you enjoy reading about them.

See the IPA Effectiveness Awards 2022 Shortlist

Harjot Singh is Convenor of Judges for the IPA Effectiveness Awards 2022 and Global Chief Strategy Officer at McCann.