And so to another set of industry gongs, this time the IPA Effectiveness Awards that were handed out at the Hurlingham Club in south-west London last night.
Regular readers will already know of my fondness for our own Media Week Awards, which were presented last week (don’t worry, I’m not going to bang on about them any more), but the IPA awards are a very different animal.
They are rightly regarded as one of the more rigorous sets of awards, with the judging process and entry requirements really stretching entrants and testing their powers of writing, persuasion and presentation. I won’t dwell too much on the winners, suffice to say that creative agencies BBH, RKCR/Y&R and Miles Calcraft Briginshaw Duffy all did exceptionally well.
On the media side, UKTV’s Dave followed up its Media Brand of the Year at the Media Week Awards with a Gold IPA Effectiveness award. Mindshare won a Silver for its work on Dove. MediaCom also won Silver, for Lucozade Sport. Mediaedge:cia was involved in the Bronze award for Cabwise. But that was pretty much it from the media point of view.
Talking to some of the judges at the event, it seemed many of the media entries suffered from poor presentation. There was some good media work entered, but the standard of writing and paper submitted simply weren’t up to scratch. Apparently, some of the successful media awards may have done even better if they had been presented more effectively. Whether this is due to lack of time, lack of expertise or lack of will is a moot point.
Media leads creative in many areas of marketing communications, but this is one area where the creative shops are definitely ahead of the game. The IPA Effectiveness Awards represent the gold standard of awards and until media agencies crack the presentation conundrum they will struggle to compete with their creative counterparts at that much-discussed "top table".
