Tome to behold
John Fanning casts a critical eye over the latest campaigns collection relating the power of ads

The UK's IPA Effectiveness Awards competition is now almost 30 years old and has been widely praised and much imitated, including the IAPI AdFx. This year's publication of winners for 2007 is the 16th book of case histories and as usual provides essential reading for anyone connected with the marketing communications business.

The title of the publication is Advertising Works 16 which tells its own tale because although the word ‘advertising' has been dropped from the name of the awards since 2002, to reflect the changing media neutral landscape, it remains in the title of the book. This is entirely appropriate as advertising is by far the most important method of communication throughout these case histories.

One main benefit of these publications is that by showing the financial payback from investment in advertising and other marketing communications, they raise the status of marketing in general, especially in the eyes of senior management and financiers.

It is therefore unfortunate that one of this year's winning entries, Magners Irish Cider, ends with the brand still enjoying growth and the share price on the rise. It seems inconceivable that the problems the brand encountered last year and subsequent collapse of the share price were not known well before this publication went to press.

The volume again opens with essays on current marketing communications issues and this year there are seven contributions ranging from the genuinely insightful to the predictably banal. Top of the former category is a thought-provoking piece on the nature of creativity and the use and abuse of measurement by Merry Baskin.

In a measured attack on evaluation systems that purport to deliver the holy grail of a black box that tells you instantly whether or not you have a hit, Baskin invokes the philosophic methods of Karl Popper, who argued that there's no such thing as absolute proof, that you can't prove something is right only that something is wrong.

This leads into a discussion about the nature of market research whose purpose she argues is “to learn, to aid innovation, to inform judgement and not to ‘prove' anything”. On the ideal role of the planner, Baskin quotes an interesting discussion on the problems of payment by the hour; “requiring us to maintain the wholly inaccurate pretence that all creative activity is the product of a clearly-defined, self-contained linear process – it's bollocks of course but it seems to shut the procurement people up”.

An essay by Richard Storey raises some points about the mix of skills that may be required in an agency of the future and questions the rigid distinction between creative and account teams. At the banal end of the scale is a contribution from Will Collin which, in attempting heroically to demonstrate just how ‘integrated' this year's entries were, keeps going on about ‘distribution' as a communications channel.

Referring to Coco-Cola Zero, one of the winning entries, Collin notes that “the sheer ubiquity of the product on the shelf must have contributed to its rapid uptake”. Of course it did and anyone who had to sit in one of the dreaded Nielsen presentations in the 1960's or 70's will remember a certain Bill Rae repeatedly making the same point.

ODD PRAISE It was surprising to see Magners Irish Cider among the latest Advertising Works winners given the brand's spectacular drop in fortunes in the UK market last year.

The fact that Collin wasn't born at the time is no excuse to disregard the validity of the considerable body of professional expertise that has been built up over the years or as a recent article in Campaign puts it “a creeping barbarism in which past knowledge is dismissed as irrelevant by proponents of perpetual change”.

The case histories themselves are an eclectic mix of national and regional, public and private sector, large and often minuscule budgets. A slight problem for Irish readers is that because many of the winning entries are small scale and/or regional we won't have seen the creative work. Even though some of the main elements are reproduced in the papers, it's not the same as seeing the work in its proper environment.

Of the four gold winners the two that caught my eye were a public service campaign for organ donor recruitment and the latest Waitrose work. The former had to overcome the problem that becoming a donor means having to consider your own mortality which people are understandably reluctant to do. The solution was a combination of inspired strategic thinking and brilliant creative work.

The critical insight was to short circuit the thinking about the issue and provoke direct action by showing close up pictures of people and forcing the audience to make a choice; “Kill Jill”, “Spare Clare”, “Save Dave” with the words ‘Yes' and ‘No' under each headline and the final line-‘If you register as a donor you could save a life. If you don't you won't'. For the Waitrose campaign, the critical insight was found in the nature of the way the company operates and how its ethical approach to doing business could be used to deepen its relationship with its customers.

Although the latest winners represent a mixed bag, Advertising Works remains an indispensable source of ideas and inspiration for anyone in marketing communications.