You can only win an IPA Effectiveness Award later this year if you have persuasively demonstrated profitable return from communications investment. And, as IPA Director of Effectiveness Laurence Green writes, at the core of nearly every paper will be the value of an idea.
It was pure serendipity, of course, but there was surely no better time for me to lead the ‘Value of Ideas’ module on the IPA’s new ‘Creative Essentials’ course than the week after the latest wave of IPA Effectiveness Awards entries.
Over the years, those Awards - still winnable only if you can persuasively demonstrate profitable return from your communications investment - have provided the source material for so much of our industry’s playbook: the power of threshold investment mixed long and short; the ‘growth hacks’ of emotion and fame; the compounding effect of creative consistency.
But at the core of nearly every paper is, essentially, just that: the value of an idea. Hard business value, that is, measured and reported at our Awards - and our Awards only - in pounds sterling or local equivalent.
Vanity metrics butter no parsnips at 44 Belgrave Square.
The idea in question might be a mere ‘campaign idea’ amplified by substantive and/or smart media investment. Often, it’s a true organising idea for the business. Sometimes, media is the idea, rather than just the carrier.
And on rarer occasions still, the idea is structural: a corporate re-imagining designed to more systematically drive value from brand investment. But an idea nonetheless!
Whatever the force multiplier, IPA Effectiveness Awards authors are typically disaggregating some kind of improved brand and business performance and arriving at a plausible evaluation of the commercial contribution made by a widely distributed idea.
The nature of that distribution may change, of course, and the IPA Awards remain resolutely media neutral. But in the end, whether you’re using influencers or ITV, marketing’s unique contribution to business success is often to be found - confoundingly for some – in no more and no less than the value of an idea.
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Last updated 21 May 2026