Take effectiveness insights from the conference stage to the boardroom

Running through this year’s IPA Effectiveness Conference was a very longstanding theme – money. But it was presented in a very modern way; it was not just about budgets or how we turn evidence into decisions that generate more money – but more about how we get that evidence to the boardroom and how important the CFO is in all of this.

Below are my three top takeaways and then three new things I want to see you bringing back to the conference next year.

First, look at where the money is going

Last year, Les Binet and Medialab challenged us to think harder about advertising budgets. This year, with Dom Boyd, he gave us somewhere else to look: promotions. Their analysis showed how easily businesses become hooked on an immediate sales uplift, even when promotional discounts subsidise purchases that would have happened anyway, or bring future sales forward.

Repeated without proper evaluation, promotions can undermine margins and pricing power while drawing investment away from brand building.

I’ll definitely be sharing this around the agency. It gives us a practical opening for conversations with clients about whether money could work harder elsewhere.

Widen the evidence base

The sessions on 'emerging' media – creators, retail media and sports sponsorship – brought welcome rigour to areas still relatively new to the effectiveness conversation. That evidence gives us a stronger basis for discussing investment with finance, helping us explain the contribution these channels can make to growth and how we should judge their returns.

Meanwhile, a preview of research by WPP Media, Thinkbox, Ebiquity, Gain Theory and YouGov, into the continuing importance of awareness as a brand metric, reinforced that people need to know they’ve seen our advertising. This session’s evidence linking ad awareness to consideration was a useful reminder to keep sight of what communication needs to achieve, however it reaches people.

This session’s evidence linking ad awareness to consideration was a useful reminder to keep sight of what communication needs to achieve, however it reaches people.

Get the right people into the conversation earlier

As the two morning sessions discussing how to win boardroom support for investing in creativity highlighted, effectiveness starts well before the brief, in conversations about budget allocation, profit and the timescales over which we expect investment to deliver. Agencies need to be useful in those conversations, with evidence and language that help clients make better commercial decisions.

Three things I’d like to see brought back in future

First, show us what changed. I’d love to hear from teams who used this year’s evidence to make a different decision: reassessing a promotion, reallocating investment or agreeing a longer evaluation period. What did they do, and what happened?

Second, make effectiveness a shared responsibility. This belongs across agency and client cultures, with finance actively involved. Marketers must make a stronger commercial case, and CFOs must help create budget-setting processes that give long-term value proper weight alongside immediate returns. Next year, let’s hear how those partnerships have changed the decisions businesses make.

Third, keep challenging assumptions while backing what works. We should interrogate new opportunities without abandoning established principles and keep combining creativity with effectiveness in the work we champion.

The interview with the authors of the Currys IPA Effectiveness Awards 2026 Grand Prix-winning paper brought that to life beautifully. Alongside the campaigns's commercial achievement, you could see how much they loved the work and working on it together. There was joy in it.

Effectiveness should give us the confidence to make brilliant work, support it properly and enjoy making it. I hope next year brings more examples of businesses creating the conditions for exactly that.

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.