Anything is Possible’s Co-founder explains how the agency achieved Effectiveness Accreditation twice, won its first IPA Effectiveness Award in four short years – and reveals its future goals.
One of the more appealing aspects of the IPA’s focus on effectiveness since doubling down on it in 2020 by launching the Effectiveness Accreditation scheme is its understanding that developing effectiveness is a journey. The IPA has always been honest about where the industry is at – where it had run up a blind alley by chasing down short-term platform metrics, and where we needed to change to rediscover the founding function of advertising: removing our clients’ limits and helping them grow.
As a super-young agency formed with a view to making that real difference to our clients’ bottom lines, we knew we had to get involved. Having the Accreditation criteria as a framework and a set of goals and expectations to aim our internal processes at – a map for our journey – was really important.
The IPA has always been honest about where the industry is at – where it had run up a blind alley by chasing down short-term platform metrics, and where we needed to change to rediscover the founding function of advertising: removing our clients’ limits and helping them grow.
The processes for working through first Accreditation, then the Awards, gave us complementary frameworks for checking our progress and evolving the way we think about effectiveness, and how we apply it to our clients.
Agree milestones from the outset
Because we were starting out from (almost) nothing it was vital for us to set ourselves early on some milestone goals to measure our progress and the first of these was achieving our initial Effectiveness Accreditation in 2021.
We were the youngest and smallest agency in that initial Accredited intake. Our focus in the months leading up to it influenced everything we did – helping refine internal processes, develop robust briefing and measurement tools to bake effectiveness in from the start of each new campaign, and evolving the way we talked to clients about the purpose of our work.
Externally, it gave us something that new clients would notice, and credibility in conversations that would have otherwise been out of reach. Internally - first milestone achieved. Tick. Onto the next one: winning an IPA Effectiveness Award.
Keep the timeline flexible
We knew the timeline for attaining an Effectiveness Award would have to stay flexible and build on the continuing effectiveness processes we were putting into the agency itself, so there were overlap and shifting horizons to manage.
We also knew we had established clients with successful campaigns who we could start to build that long view with, making the case for long-term business transformation with marketing at the tip of the spear. These case studies formed the bedrock of our entry for the next round of Accreditation – we decided they would need to pass muster there before they were award-ready.
So as it turned out, our third milestone (reaccreditation in 2023) arrived before the second (winning an IPA Effectiveness Award). This was fortuitous in itself. The required standards for Effectiveness Accreditation 2023 (or EffAcc23 as we named the agency working group) had changed from the original as much as we had as an agency in the interim.
We also noted that the appetite for it around the industry had grown, and that some of the language we had developed in 2020-21 was appearing everywhere.
As it had the first time, reaccreditation stretched us and made us refine and enrich our processes, tools and entire effectiveness perspective. And it gave us the tools we needed to go back to that unfinished business we had with milestone two…
Clients can help the agency accelerate effectiveness
We had a secret weapon to help us there, and that was our client. Darren Milton, CMO at Boundless, a 100-year-old non-profit offering exclusive membership benefits and services to help public servants enjoy their free time, is as much an effectiveness evangelist as we are.
He had a brand-led vision for transforming and reinvigorating Boundless which would only work if the effects were clear, strong and far-reaching. He was as keen to demonstrate the importance of longer-term thinking and achievements in the category as we were. So we had that vital client relationship, transparency, access – and a collaborative view on bringing the entry together.
As a first-time entrant to the Awards, we were offered free mentorship from an expert effectiveness consultant to craft our entry, on which we were the sole agency author.
If there is one principle you learn through adopting an effectiveness-first mindset, it’s that you use every tool you have to achieve your objectives, get good and demonstrate difference. So we leapt at the chance.
Working with Gurdeep Puri, Founder of the Effectiveness Partnership, to iterate our story and dig into the real difference our work had made to the Boundless journey, backed up by clear logic and robust data, was another levelling up moment in itself.
It helped us turn the full scope of our far-reaching work, which had touched on Strategy, Creative, Transformation, Media Planning and much more, into a frame where the causal connections between marketing inputs and business goal outputs were clear, legible and undeniable.
Continually developing new standards, new tools and processes for managing new forms of data, new governance and benchmarks for our effectiveness approach, has through our engagement with the Effectiveness Accreditation and Awards become an integrated, everyday part of how we work.
Milestone two was sorted at the 2024 IPA Effectiveness Awards ceremony, where our work for Boundless was awarded. Showcasing our work alongside the very best in the industry. The seminal, agenda-setting keynote speech from Nationwide’s Chief Customer Officer Catherine Kehoe, who chaired the Awards. Happy clients, a true team, and a fun-packed taxi back to Brighton at two in the morning. The definition of an Anything is Possible moment.
Our next steps
Milestone 4 - reaccreditation in 2025 - is up next. The journey continues.
In every campaign we launch with a new client, the case for effectiveness becomes more important. Our effectiveness experience becomes more valuable and rewarding every day. But, it doesn't necessarily get any easier. Every client brief is different, with new needs and challenges, where the path to demonstrating the real business impact of our work only becomes longer and more complex.
And we wouldn’t have it any other way. Continually developing new standards, new tools and processes for managing new forms of data, new governance and benchmarks for our effectiveness approach, has through our engagement with the Effectiveness Accreditation and Awards become an integrated, everyday part of how we work.
Sam Fenton-Elstone MIPA is CEO and Co-founder of Anything is Possible
The next round of IPA Effectiveness Accreditation will open in March 2025. Find out more about the accreditation process.
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.
Last updated 06 March 2025