The Eff Test
Lucas Brown, joint MD at Total Media Limited, explains why and how the IPA’s Value of Advertising group wants to “create a culture of effectiveness”…
Marketing budgets are easily scrutinised, as they tend to be a large number in an advertisers’ company accounts. Often a short-term reduction in marketing can lead to a short-term, albeit shortsighted, increase in profits. This is because consumers don’t usually stop buying when the advertising stops. So, unless you can prove that the advertising has a measurable and profitable payback, marketing budgets will always be at risk of being reduced in order to massage the company’s short-term profits. So, providing agency personnel with the knowledge and confidence to go about defending their clients budgets, using sensible business arguments, is very much at the heart of why the IPA has created the Eff Test.
Many agencies historically have been poor at measuring advertising effectiveness, and often pay lip service to campaign effectiveness. Although the liberal use of the words like ROI and modeling are fairly common place now, they are often misused and misunderstood. Unless we are seen to take measurement and effectiveness seriously, the industry will struggle to be taken seriously by the boards of companies and their investors.
The IPA’s Value of Advertising Group wants to create a culture of effectiveness amongst agencies and build the word effectiveness into the everyday language of client and agencies conversations. So where better place to begin this than with those people who are at the foundations of their careers and the future of our business?
As data becomes more accessible, the opportunity to prove that advertising is having a positive return on marketing investment has to increase. We want people to consider the variables for evaluation and to understand and feel confident about embracing them. I think it is important to remember that you can often get as much, or even more, information from a campaign that hasn’t performed as to one which has. The important thing is to understand why it has happened.
The course has been designed to provide grounding in measurement, so people can begin to understanding how to go about measuring effectiveness across a range of hard and soft measures and across different marketing channels. The course covers the planning phase, establishing the client objectives, developing the effectiveness plan and selecting relevant and persuasive measures. It also covers the campaign implementation phase and how to capture the effectiveness data, before exploring the post campaign phase, understanding all the contributing factors, explaining econometrics and how to calculate ROMI. On completion of the course the students should be able to proactively contribute to evaluation debates with more experienced colleagues, partner agencies and their clients.
When I was invited to get involved in this project I jumped at the chance because I could immediately see the benefits in such a course, in fact I only wish it was around when I was two or three years into the business. My hopes and ambitions would be that we create curiosity amongst the students and a desire to get closer to their clients’ data, in order to draw positive conclusions.
Ultimately, we must not forget that for most clients they are in the business of “cash generation”, and the more we can financially prove that that advertising is the life blood of their business growth, the stronger our relationships will be and the more confidence we will have in our solutions.
The Eff Test is an entirely online qualification, including the examination. It goes live on 18th September, and agencies interested in finding out more and in signing up can visit: http://www.ipa.co.uk/Cpd/OnlineLearningDetails.aspx?QualificationId=3
The content was written by Les Binet, DDB, Lucas Brown, Total Media, Lorna Hawtin, TBWA Manchester and Peter Field, with contributions from Rachel Lawlan, AKQA, Chris Bestley, IPM, Matthew Taylor, Kevin Traverse-Healy, COI and Kevin Alavy, Futures Sport. Thanks must also go to WARC as official publishers of the IPA Effectiveness Awards papers.and to Willow DNA who have produced it.