Go interesting or go home

By Nick Kendall

Welcome to our newsletter…

Two weeks ago, I spent the day at the IPA Effectiveness Conference 2025.

Or rather, I spent the day in Starbucks and watched from afar. The day was well worth it - lots of little learnings, and I think three highlights. 

First, a call to “Go Big or Go Home” by Les Binet and MediaLab’s Will Davis. The speech was a reminder of the difference between effectiveness and efficiency, a watch-out on the danger of ROIs as a primary measure, and an exhortation to argue for (bigger) budgets.

Second, a call from Tom Roach of Jellyfish  continuing his exploration of the ‘lots of littles’ principle, this time expanding on how lots of small things can create something big. 

Third, an IPA-commissioned meta-analysis of influencer effectiveness presented by Jane Christian. This heralded the coming of age of influencers (or is it creators?) as a brand building channel, giving evidence of their long term business effect and indicating the channel as having the highest long-term ROI (caveat: Les’s point above re ROIs).

All brilliant and links are shared below. But when I tried to triangulate them to share one big learning, I must admit I was left a little kerfuffled. 

Should I go big? Or should I go small? Should I go TV or creator-led? 

I couldn’t get to one big thing.

Luckily, I also listened to Jennifer Shaw-Sweet, the EMEA lead for LinkedIn’s B2B Institute. Talking about experimentation, she presented my chart of the day: 

We all know we are at a point of flux in marketing. 

The media landscape has flourished but fragmented. The creation of content has bloomed and created more stuff - maybe too much stuff! 

AI will drive both these market truths exponentially.

So we find ourselves in a new era of learning about‘how to grow: back at the bottom of Jennifer’s pyramid and at the beginning of the process of collecting case evidence.

And I would suggest we should recognise that. And focus more on collecting those case histories. And avoid at this stage too many ‘silver bullets’.

Some of those case histories will develop into case series, then best practice and, over time, may become the hard evidence that suggest they are fundamental principles.

If you follow up the three sessions above please pay attention to the case studies that partnered them 

In ‘Go Big or Go Home’, Will presented a Laithwaites case. 

Laithwaites, a direct-to-market wine business, is looking to go to the next stage of growth via adding brand comms alongside performance.

The lesson here was  ‘how to do a best practice test’: start in test areas (ideally two not one), have matching control areas to compare, and ensure full transparency of data.

And then regionalise to double check. And then nationalise.  

In other words, don’t think of a test as a one-off but as a journey over time, and go big step by step. 

In ‘Lots of Littles’, Nathalia Amadeu presented the Verified Vaseline case . 

Vaseline is a global brand with lots of ‘small uses’ that are celebrated by users online. 

The case describes Vaseline’s recognition that their brand role is to ‘acknowledge, enable and amplify’ those hacks.  As Nathalia says ‘we didn't build a world, we joined theirs’. 

So, a real life lesson in going big by building your brand as community, not just mental availability. 

The IPA influencer analysis was paired with Vaselias Kourikas (L’Oreal’s Head of Global Effectiveness) talking about their approach overall, for example with True Match, their 33 shades of  foundation brand and their influencer approach ’Your Skin, Your Story’. 

So, a case of  a business driving brand growth via driving penetration across diverse users and skin colours, using the diversity of influencers.  An early example in this new era of “personalising at scale’ to go big. 

All three were great cases.

So: a new era of how to use creativity and media for growth. Maybe we should pay particular attention to individual cases like these, versus trying to create immediate silver bullets.

Let’s start now, collecting the cases of the new era: Alexis Bittar’s episodic video content; Duolingo killing, then reviving, its owl brand mascot to boost user engagement; Burberry’s stories celebrating love, life … and the rain. I will add Vaseline to that list for sure.

My current obsession is Gucci Tiger: the relaunch of Gucci not as a catwalk show, but as a 30-minute film. This idea is a hot topic with the editors, designers, stylists and fashionistas that are critical to Gucci’s success.

Will it work? I don't know. But one thing for sure I know.

It’s a one off; it’s distinctive; it's a first. Above all it’s INTERESTING 

If you watch each of the IPA speakers to the end, all finish with a call for bravery, for creative courage, for doing something zag.

 And, in a world of Cory Doctorov’s enshittification, in an attention economy fighting for that precious moment of engagement, maybe this is the overriding principle:

Go interesting or go home.

Perhaps the IPA Effectiveness Awards convenor, Charlie Ebdy, should phone Gucci up and ask them to submit a paper?

I for one would love to read that.