In 1980, the UK’s esteemed Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) launched the IPA Effectiveness Awards, whose purpose was to achieve:

• A better understanding of the crucial role advertising plays in marketing;
• Closer analysis of advertising effectiveness and improved methods of evaluation;
• A clear demonstration that advertising can be proven to work, against measurable criteria.

More than a quarter of a century later, the IPA has amassed a veritable goldmine of information, more than 1000 case studies of the UK’s most effective advertising over the last 25 years.

One could simply let that information accumulate in dusty cabinets, a legacy for future archaeologists to argue over. However the IPA has instead chosen to conduct a meta-analysis of the results, perhaps the largest of its kind ever undertaken.

The study – whose results are captured in the 128-page publication “Marketing In The Era Of Accountability” by Les Binet and Peter Field (World Advertising Research Center, Henley-on-Thames, 2007) – not only reveals some of the factors that make marketing profitable, but also exposes some common practices and beliefs that lead to waste and inefficiency.

The Executive Summary spells out many of the key findings:

• Contrary to received wisdom, focusing on a single campaign objective does not make marketing more effective. Objectives should be detailed and above all prioritized.
• Marketers pay too much attention to intermediate attitudinal measures and too little to business and behavioural outcomes.
• When marketers do focus on business measures, they focus on the wrong ones: sales rather than market share and volume rather than value.
• Marketers focus on the wrong behavioural outcomes too. Most campaigns aim to increase loyalty, but increasing penetration is far more effective and profitable.
• The drive for accountability leads marketers to focus on a narrow range of intermediate Key Performance Indicators (KPIs), particularly awareness and direct responses. However there is no single measure that reliably predicts effectiveness, and focusing on individual metrics actually reduces effectiveness.
• This raises questions about the reliability of pre-testing. The data suggests that pre-testing may even reduce effectiveness.
• The need for accountability often makes marketers focus on rational product messages. In fact, emotional campaigns are more powerful, even in “rational” categories.
• Marketers often focus on absolute levels of spend or advertising-to-sales ratios when setting budgets. In fact share of voice is a better KPI (and the report outlines a detailed method for setting budget based in this measure).
• There is little evidence to support the widespread assumption that TV is becoming less effective. In fact, TV effectiveness may be increasing.
• On the other hand, the fashion for “surround sound” in media may be less than ideal. Integration is good, but more channels is not always a better idea.
• Marketing needs to focus more on profit and less on Return On Investment (ROI). Much talk of ROI is confused and some of it leads to poor business decisions. The use of ROI as a ratio can be dangerous in the marketing context and so a better alternative is proposed in this publication.

Many of the problems noted in the report can be traced back to a tension between effectiveness (doing the right thing) and accountability (being seen to do the right thing). “Marketing In The Era Of Accountability” investigates this conflict and attempts to reconcile it by making specific recommendations for best practice in marketing.

For a comprehensive study of marketing effectiveness in action, supported by twenty-five years of real-world results, check out “Marketing In The Era Of Accountability”, available from the World Advertising Research Center at www.WARC.com.