From Setback to Success - The Road to Winning our IPA Effectiveness Award
When the agency reluctantly decided not to submit a paper to the 2022 IPA Effectiveness Awards, it was the first time I had withdrawn from writing an awards entry. Two years later, we won with our first completed paper. Here's what we learned from the experience.
Four years in the making, our journey to winning an IPA Effectiveness Award in 2024 with our paper for accounting software brand Xero wouldn’t be complete without revisiting our experience in 2022. The path to victory is not always linear.
”An awards entry is one of the most valuable exercises for contextualising why we do what we do, what impact it has on advertisers and how it benefits winning agencies. You need to embrace the journey, not just the destination.”
In early 2022, we had entered the awards, invested three months of work, and then received some tough feedback. Ever conscious of the sunk cost fallacy (the human tendency to stick with something we’ve already put time/effort/money into, even when it would be more beneficial to stop) we ultimately decided to pull out and abandon what we had done so far.
That decision was tough, but it provided some of the most useful guidance we can now pass on to first-time authors. I took the knocks, so you don’t have to.
The 2022 roadblocks
Our initial challenges centred around three areas:
Data consistency
Creative timing
Resource management
We were working with two data sets that changed when swapping brand trackers, creating a narrative disconnect that would have required too much explanation. This left us with three options:
Try to explain why the numbers jumped around (which would have been a boring read).
Try to normalise and mesh the data sets (which still would have required an over-engineered explanation in the footnotes).
Wait two years and build up enough usable long-term data.
As well as the two different measurement approaches, the entry period was spanning two different creative routes. We thought we might have a compelling enough story from our consistent media strategy alone. (We didn’t).
The learning? Don’t go solo. It’s critical to join up creative and media as early as possible, the paper should be a collaborative effort.
On top of that, we left it late to request data from the clients and thought we could write the story while they were gathering everything required.
The learning? Get the data first, before you do anything. Even if you think there’s only a tiny ember of an award entry two years away, start prepping for data approvals and requests now. Be clear on:
What you’ll need
Why you’ll need it
What the benefits are
Who to ask
The earlier, the better. Have a good idea of the narrative you want to push and the data you need to support it. That said, I always think it’s worth gathering as much data as possible – you never know what other useful insights you may find.
The IPA Effectiveness Awards standard
I’ve never had to pull out of writing an award entry before, but this typifies what sets the IPA Effectiveness Awards apart.
There is an undoubted commitment to rigour.
Other awards might allow for looser correlations between campaigns and results, but that won’t fly here.
Confession time. Let’s be honest, we’ve all done it. An awards entry deadline is approaching, you need to finalise the results. Can you prove this huge jump in sales, revenue, profit, awareness [insert metric here] came from your campaign? No? Does it loosely fit? OK, fine, put the number in, hit send, and never speak of it again.
Not here. Everything needs to be watertight. You can’t prove every causation, but you need to give it your darndest.
This standard forced us to elevate our approach beyond conventional award entries, investing unprecedented time and effort into validation and verification.
The people make all the difference
Use your mentors (the IPA provides free mentors for first-time entrants and subsidised mentoring for other entrants). Having an external sounding board was invaluable.
Shout out to mentor Merry Baskin for telling us the hard truths in 2022.
And in 2024, Tony Regan was a guiding presence, helping us sharpen (and sharpen again!) the narrative.
Collaboration matters
One of the key pivots between Round 1 and Round 2 was working closely with the team at House337 that created the fantastically effective Xero “Healthy Business” assets.
Crucially, they brought excellent copywriting skills, strategic thinking and a clear lens through which to view our entry: how could we contribute to industry learning? We aligned on the importance of humour and applying B2C principles to B2B work – a narrative that (hopefully) came through in our entry and helped shape our decision-making.
They’re also funnier than me, which helped. Judges are reading many entries, and let’s face it – they’re probably not overly excited about reading 4,500 words on B2B marketing. It was important to make it as entertaining as possible.
Long-term thinking
In our very first presentation to Xero back in 2018, we had a slide outlining our ambition to win an IPA Effectiveness Award with the brand.
I’m not saying every client presentation now needs a slide stating this goal. But having a long-term ambition matters.
By January 2026, it will be too late to start thinking, “Shall we give this a go?”
The long and short of it: you need to have an entry in mind a long time in advance.
After 2022, we immediately thought: "OK, we’ll go again in 2024 – what do we need to have in place in two years’ time?”
Start gathering data, get organised, think about the effectiveness principles you’re adhering to, monitor your brand/activation split, course-correct when needed.
The value of an IPA entry
An awards entry is one of the most valuable exercises for contextualising why we do what we do, what impact it has on advertisers and how it benefits winning agencies.
You need to embrace the journey, not just the destination.