After the Slides: Reflections on the 2025 IPA Effectiveness Conference
There’s a hum that fills every conference room before the first slide clicks on.
Coffee cups, murmured greetings, a low thrum of anticipation that someone, somewhere, might redefine everything we thought we knew.
This year, that hum sounded different.
It was my first time at the IPA Effectiveness Conference, as both speaker and attendee, and for all the talk of models and metrics, the air felt lighter, less self-justifying, more self-aware.
For once, we weren’t pleading our case to the CFO like overcaffeinated undergraduates. We spoke with confidence, not desperation. After years of simplifying our discipline into charts and funnels, the mood had shifted. There was a collective acceptance that marketing is complicated, and that’s fine. Effectiveness has never been about tidying the chaos, but about navigating it with courage.
Still, old instincts die hard. Les Binet, ever the provocateur, reminded us that advertising has become more efficient and less effective. He is right about the dangers of small thinking, but his comparison of influencer marketing to “adding ITV3 to your TV mix” jarred. Media is moving, and measurement should not anchor us to the past. Effectiveness has always been about adapting to what is real.
The sessions that followed painted a picture of an industry coming to terms with that reality. Reach now needs to be coherent across a thousand touchpoints. Brands are built through the choreography of many small moments rather than a single big story. Tom Roach’s idea of brands as “systems of ideas” captured that perfectly. Consistency now means recognisability. Vaseline’s creative team proved it, showing that sometimes the best way to lead culture is to stop trying to control it.
Roscoe Williamson’s work on music pushed the idea further. In a digital world full of synthetic noise, sonic branding can be connective tissue, though for me, those associations don’t always come naturally. That difference is revealing…
One of the great unexplored frontiers in our industry is understanding how different people process media and advertising. Representation in casting is improving, slowly, but diversity in cognition, how neurodivergent, disabled or physically diverse audiences pay attention and build memory, is still missing from our models. Just because the data is hard to gather does not mean the opportunity is not there. Progress can start now.
That is what coherence without control really demands: empathy for how differently people experience the same thing. Until we grasp that, our idea of reach will always be narrower than we think.
The cross-agency IPA research on influencers, of which we are proud to have contributed towards, offered a glimpse of what human-first marketing can achieve.
Influencer campaigns have the potential to rival TV across both the short and long term, but it is early days. The variance is wide, and the rules are still to be properly discovered. It is reassuring to see that people still trust people. Amid the sludge of bad AI filler and engagement bait, authenticity has become a rare advantage. The influencers who endure sound like humans, not broadcasters.
As the Financial Times recently reported, global time spent on social media has begun to decline for the first time in over a decade. Feeds are clogged with what it called “ultra-processed content,” dopamine-dense, nutritionally void and increasingly inhuman. Against that backdrop, the rise of creator-led marketing feels less like a tactic and more like a sign of recovery. Human signals cut through synthetic noise. The only part of the social ecosystem still delivering real returns is, tellingly, the one that still relies on human connection.
A similar theme ran through the day. Jennifer Shaw-Sweet’s work on experimentation showed that the best organisations do not avoid uncertainty; they structure it. “Room to be wrong” drew more nods than any ROI slide. Karen Owen’s story of Kraft Heinz echoed the same principle: creativity is not a department, it is infrastructure. Build systems that make good work inevitable and creativity compounds like interest.
Across it all was a quiet but profound shift. The spreadsheets are beginning to catch up with reality, capturing cultural impact alongside attributed performance. The ability to invest properly, learn continuously and sustain coherence depends less on data quality and more on mindset. Whether you are Kraft Heinz or a small business, effectiveness is becoming a behaviour rather than a buzzword.
Perhaps that is why the conference resonated beyond marketing. Like social media itself, we are realising that the dopamine economy has run its course. Users are curating smaller, calmer spaces, and marketers are rediscovering the value of patience. The endless chase for optimisation dulled our edge. The next era of effectiveness may be defined by balance rather than speed.
Emotion, once treated as fluff, is finding its way back onto the balance sheet. This is where marketing and advertising firmly belong. The influencer databank proved it with data; ITV’s entertainment case proved it with feeling. The most rational thing a brand can do is make people feel something real. Attention can be bought; affection must be earned.
By the end, the room felt grounded, a collective exhale. Effectiveness has entered a new phase – less about proving it and more about improving it. The question is not whether advertising works, but whether we have built the systems, cultures and patience to let it.
As the final applause faded and the coffee cups began to clatter, it struck me that this conference did not need a new framework or theory. It reminded us what marketing is for: to connect, to earn trust, to build things that last. In a world overrun by synthetic engagement, that might just be the most radical idea of all.