Integrated Marketing agency, ZEAL Creative, is on a mission to become the ‘World’s Most Recommended Marketing Agency,’ aiming to achieve this by building and inspiring a great team – achieved through constant training and personal development.

With this in mind ZEAL has announced a unique training partnership with the IPM to deliver their coveted IPM Diploma to 11 of their team in an exclusive intake.

The ZEAL IPM Diplomats 2019 are as follows: Colleen Rea, Gabi Sulek, David Gill, Sophia Huddlestone, Lisa Nyman, Chris Mitchell, Lexy Woolley, Callum Saunders, Lucy Cranshaw, Jen Grayson, Kenya Peters.

This is the first time that an agency has committed to such numbers in one intake and as a result the IPM have brought their IPM Diploma in-house to ZEAL.

IPM Managing Director Paul Cope, applauds ZEAL for taking the lead on training: “It’s great that so many of our members use the IPM Diploma to train their teams on brand activation, shopper marketing, and experiential.  ZEAL’s commitment to our programme this year is unprecedented and underlines their ongoing journey to create the very best work. I was last at ZEAL only last month to award them their European IMC Effectiveness Award and I’m sure that this latest step will only improve their ability to deliver industry leading work for their clients”

IPM Learning Manager, Anna Kinast, outlines the learning journey ahead:“For ZEAL we have brought the IPM Diploma to them, at a time which suits the agency best. The 11 candidates that ZEAL have put forward can look forward to an intense but hugely rewarding training experience combining face-to-face training days alongside online learning.”

MD of ZEAL Rachel McHale explains why the agency has made this commitment: “As myself, and ZEAL’s founders Rob and Stewart grew up in this business, the IPM Diploma was a big part of all our development journeys.  Over the years the IPM Diploma has successfully evolved to cover the wide world of brand activation and shopper marketing and as a result it is the best in class option for training our team in the skills of our industry.  By working closely with the IPM we have together created a programme that dovetails perfectly with the day-to-day demands of the agency.  I am excited to see how this investment will make an already brilliant team, even better.”

For more info on the IPM Diploma, visit the IPM website.

The IPM Diploma officially opens at ZEAL on 23^rd January with the first training days on 12^th and 13^th February.  The whole agency will be supporting their IPM Diploma candidates in their learning journey and wish them the very best of luck.

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The Institute of Promotional Marketing, the UK industry body for promotional marketing, has just celebrated the latest graduates on its key training courses, the IPM Foundation Certificate, the IPM Diploma and the IPM Incentive & Motivation Diploma.

Students on all three courses collected their certificates at a graduation ceremony at the House of Commons on Thursday 8th February 2018 from IPM President Lord Black and Chairman John Sylvester and in front of an audience of 120 people, including fellow students, family, friends and colleagues and course markers and mentors.

In his welcoming address, IPM Chairman John Sylvester congratulated all the graduating students on their achievements and also stressed the importance of a solid grounding in all aspects of the promotional marketing industry.

Sylvester said: “For marketers, expertise and professionalism have never been as important as they are today. Gaining one of our qualifications means you truly understand your subject and you have the right skills and grounding in the law, regulatory system and best practice to promote your clients and their brands effectively. It also means that you are qualified to invest their money in activities that should engage their target audiences and grow their brands.”

The IPM Diploma is seen as the best possible grounding for anyone responsible for running promotions within the UK and mainland Europe. The course involves a series of assignments and a set brief that has to be completed within a six-month period.

Candidates leave the course with a foundation knowledge of promotional marketing necessary to understand the discipline’s role within integrated communications campaigns, including planning, instigating and managing effective promotional marketing concepts with confidence.

The IPM Incentive & Motivation Diploma is a qualification specifically designed for the reward and recognition industry. It takes the form of a distance learning programme with a range of modules covering different specialisations and a set brief, all of which have to be completed over a five-month period.

It provides a thorough understanding of incentive and motivation techniques and is widely recognised within the industry as the benchmark for best practice, ensuring that candidates are able to confidently plan, instigate and manage Incentive & Motivation campaigns.

The IPM Foundation Certificate is an entry-level qualification which has been designed to give candidates as complete an introduction to and grounding in the Promotional Marketing industry as possible. It is aimed particularly at those at the beginning of their Promotional Marketing careers.

Full details of the IPM’s training and education programme can be found on the IPM website.

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Promotions are complex processes, and to get them right you must impose rigorous control on all elements of the activity, says Neil Barnes of Enable Promotional Marketing

All it takes is one promotion to go wrong to seriously damage a brand’s reputation – even today, there are UK consumers who remember the Hoover Free Flights fiasco from 1992.

Currently, Cadbury is feeling the pain on their “Hunt for the White Creme Egg” promotion that is being widely criticised, where consumers are urged to find a rare White Creme Egg to win. Sounds simple; however, it has been widely reported that consumers and retail staff have been spotted peeling back the foil wrapper, then putting the egg back. Some claim the white egg has different ingredients listed to the standard one, which could give the game away.

This isn’t anything like the scale of the Hoover disaster; but it is a major embarrassment for the brand, with the potential for the risk of product recall on tampering grounds.

Nobody compliments brands, agencies and all the other service providers who work on a brilliantly successful campaign; but all it takes is one poorly executed campaign to create a social media storm and damage the reputation of all of us who work in promotional marketing.

Consumers used to complain to the newspapers and television consumer TV programmes; not any more. Today, the customers drive the news agenda, sharing their complaints not just with their social network in the UK but around the world via Twitter, Facebook and other social platforms to highlight faults with a promotion.

The truth is, no well-run promotion should ever lead to the product being compromised or complaints that the activation is vulnerable to the unscrupulous.

To run successful promotions, the devil is in the detail; and that detail involves an integrated approach which incorporates compliance, security and logistic tasks with capability and knowledge in all areas of expertise from initial print and production, supply chain, legal and on into areas such as digital.

At Enable, we’ve developed a process which we call Operational Management – other people will call it something else, but what you call it doesn’t matter, so long as you include it in your promotions.

Promotions are complex and involve many different tasks; to manage them properly you must start with an expert team that sees and understands the complete picture. A promotion must be planned in its entirety, not piecemeal. You can’t just take a few services and cobble them together.

If things go wrong, it usually stems from a lack of understanding of the complexities of the subject and of the rigorous management controls and monitoring necessary to achieve a successful implementation.

Work out what should happen in any promotion, and then look at everything that could go wrong. Explore even scenarios which are highly unlikely – it’s only by being prepared for the worst, not hoping for the best, that we can ensure a smooth path to success.

All stakeholders should be involved in the planning from as early as possible. Partnership and collaborative working are vital to success. This is even more important when a promotion is being delivered or supported via a variety of media channels and technical disciplines, when a promotion is being run with different retail partners (particularly if some of them have tailored versions of the promotion) and when a promotion is being run in more than one country.

You must bring in experts on compliance, security and logistics to work alongside the marketing and creative teams. In an ideal world, everyone working on a promotion should be a member of the Institute of Promotional Marketing and fully up to speed on promotional best practice.

The total collaboration of Operational Management and creative should ensure that attention to detail combined with the creative artistry works cohesively for the perfect promotion. Without these two in partnership, no matter how beautiful something looks, or how clever it is, if it doesn’t work or if it backfires, the creativity will be overlooked by disappointed customers.

We’ve helped run promotions where some of the ingredients were changed to indicate a winning pack. We engaged packaging and specialist legal experts and involved them from the start, providing a solution where you simply just change the wording on all promotional packs to include the details for the special ingredient as well as for the normal product.

Thankfully, many brands are becoming more aware of the risk to their reputations from poorly-executed promotions, and are seeking support from operational experts in order to protect the integrity of the promotion or the product.

However, for every brand that understands the need for the highest levels of operational control, there are still far too many that ask what they need this level of attention to detail for. Often, it’s only when a catastrophic failure is detected and prevented by following the right operational procedures that these clients understand the harsh realities of the marketing world today.

The goal should be to ensure that every promotion is enjoyed fairly and honestly by consumers, while protecting brands from the detrimental harm of ‘operational blunders’ and inexperienced or unconsidered implementation of a project.

Whether you are the marketing director, the brand manager, or work for the creative agency or a service provider, your goal should always be the same: to protect and safeguard the reputation of the promotion, the brand, the company, and the marketing industry.

The reputational and financial risk of a poorly executed promotion can be enormous. In some cases, in the past these have made a brand toxic and devalued it in the eyes of consumers.

It is only by meticulous planning, attention to detail and asking the question “what if?” when you consider every single stage that you will end with a promotion that works for all.

Neil Barnes founded Enable in 1993, and the company is celebrating its 25^th anniversary in 2018. Enable is acknowledged in the industry as expert in ensuring promotional marketing campaigns meet best practice, are legal and compliant with UK marketing codes, free from fraud or theft and are logistically sound.

Enable works with FMCG companies, suppliers, digital solutions agencies, printers, insurance companies, and creative promotional marketing agencies alike, assisting in the smooth running of their promotional marketing campaigns and helping implement protective measures against fraudulent entry or other activity which could damage the integrity of a promotion.

Enable is a member of the IPM, and is an IPM Education and Training ‘Module Hero’, supporting the IPM Diploma in Promotional Marketing.

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The Institute of Promotional Marketing, the UK industry body for promotional marketing, has just celebrated the latest graduates on its key training courses, the IPM Certificate in Promotional Marketing, the IPM Diploma in Promotional Marketing and the IPM Incentive & Motivation Diploma.

Students on all three courses collected their certificates at a graduation ceremony at the House of Commons on Wednesday February 1^st 2017 from IPM President Lord Black of Brentwood and IPM Chairman John Sylvester in front of an audience of 120 people, including fellow students, family, friends and colleagues and course markers and mentors.

In her welcoming address, IPM Managing Director Carey Trevill stressed how important it is that marketers are fully grounded in all the skills, disciplines and mechanics that can be deployed in promotional campaigns.

Trevill said: “An IPM Diploma means expert. It means specialist. It means you understand your subject like no other and you have the right skills and grounding in the law, regulatory system and best practice to promote your clients and their brands effectively. It means that you are qualified to invest their money in activities that will grow their brands.”

In his speech, John Sylvester pointed out that the graduation was taking place on the same day as the historic vote in the House of Commons to trigger the Brexit process. “For marketers, expertise and professionalism have never been as important as they are in these historic times.”

The IPM Diploma is seen as the best possible grounding for anyone responsible for running promotions within the UK and mainland Europe. The course involves a series of assignments and a set brief that has to be completed within a six-month period.

Candidates leave the course with a foundation knowledge of promotional marketing necessary to understand the discipline’s role within integrated communications campaigns, including planning, instigating and managing effective promotional marketing concepts with confidence.

The IPM Incentive & Motivation Diploma is a qualification specifically designed for the reward and recognition industry. It takes the form of a distance learning programme with a range of modules covering different specialisations and a set brief, all of which have to be completed over a five-month period.

It provides a thorough understanding of incentive and motivation techniques and is widely recognised within the industry as the benchmark for best practice, ensuring that candidates are able to confidently plan, instigate and manage Incentive & Motivation campaigns.

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The IPM Diploma could be your passport to a glittering career in the promotional marketing industry, says Sophie Robertson of Spark & Fuse

Three weeks ago, I officially became an IPM Graduate.

The IPM – the Institute of Promotional Marketing – holds its graduation ceremonies at the House of Commons, where I found myself standing alongside 44 other graduates of the IPM Diploma 2015.  It was a wonderful experience – the celebration of six months hard work – made all the more so by having my Diploma presented to me by Lord Black of Brentwood, president of the IPM and executive director of the Telegraph Media Group.

My Experience?

Having recently returned from living in France for 12 years, switching language and educational approach was definitely a challenge – but one that I was more than happy to accept.  I definitely don’t regret it.

The IPM Diploma study notes and guidelines were instructive, and the tutors more than happy to help when I had any questions.  You also nominate a mentor in your workplace – usually a senior member of the organisation – and the notes they receive from the IPM coupled with your mentor’s expertise is invaluable to your studies.  Don’t ever hesitate to ask your mentor for help, as they will provide you with insights and possible solutions that you may not have thought of.

Working for Spark & Fuse in the prize promotions industry, the IPM Diploma has given me the ability to think differently and more thoroughly about the problems in front of me.  I feel more confident when it comes to devising successful promotional campaigns.  The IPM Diploma has given me the skills to know that when I’m ready, I can move into a different promotional sector.

I completed the Diploma in September 2015, receiving my results mid-December which made for a lovely Christmas break! I wasn’t the only one celebrating; the 2015 cohort produced the best results yet – nearly 60% achieved a Credit, and a further 9% a Distinction.

The Facts?

The IPM (which used to be known as the ISP –  Institute of Sales Promotion) has provided courses and qualifications for the last thirty years.

The IPM Diploma, introduced in 1984, is refreshed every year by industry experts so that what you learn is always relevant and timely.  It improves promotional marketing skills for current and future promotional marketers.  As a result, graduates have gone on to become leaders in every sector of the promotional industry.

You’ll learn about all marketing aspects, from understanding channels and audiences to strategic thinking and promotional techniques.  It’s easy to fit in around work and your personal life, as it takes the form of a six month e-learning course.

You’ll complete nine modules (six compulsory and three elective) and a Set Brief.  The Set Brief is the ultimate and most substantial part of the IPM Diploma as it’s worth a third of the marks.  A brand will provide you with a fictional brief and a budget.  This gives students the opportunity to develop and demonstrate their strategic skills, creativity and logic in their proposal.

Since 2015, the IPM have introduced three submission dates for assignments.  The first, after two months, is when you submit Modules 1&2 which you will receive feedback on a matter of weeks later.  This gives you an opportunity to understand where you need to improve, if at all.  The remaining modules are submitted five months in and you then have the last month to dedicate entirely to the Set Brief.

You’ll also be invited to an Immersion Day and a Tutorial Day – both of which are designed for candidates to meet and network with other candidates and tutors to discuss the various assignments and Set Brief.

The IPM, for 2016, have introduced the option to enrol on The IPM Diploma Supplements – a two day seminar filled opportunity to hear from industry experts in a face-to-face environment.

Considering The IPM Diploma?

The next intake for the IPM Diploma kicks off on the 14^th March – there’s still availability, so please do book here.  I have no doubt that you too will be celebrating your IPM Diploma success over the 2016 Christmas period!

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The IPM, the UK industry body for promotional marketing, has just celebrated a phenomenal 100% success rate for the 2015 intake for both its IPM Diploma and its IPM Incentive & Motivation Diploma.

IPM Diploma graduates received their certificates from IPM President Lord Black and Chairman Graham Temple. IPM Incentive & Motivation Diploma received theirs from Lord Black and John Sylvester, IPM Vice Chairman.

Both courses saw every student pass, with many achieving credits and distinctions. In the IPM Diploma, 60% of candidates were awarded a credit and 9% a distinction. In the IPM Incentive and Motivation Diploma, 40% of candidates achieved a credit or distinction in their final mark.

The IPM Diploma is seen as the best possible grounding for anyone responsible for running promotions within the UK and mainland Europe. The course involves a series of assignments and a set brief that has to be completed within a six-month period.

Candidates leave the course with a foundation knowledge of promotional marketing necessary to understand the discipline’s role within integrated communications campaigns, including planning, instigating and managing effective promotional marketing concepts with confidence.

The IPM Incentive & Motivation Diploma is a qualification specifically designed for the reward and recognition industry. It takes the form of a distance learning programme with seven modules and a set brief that are to be completed over a five-month period.

It provides a thorough understanding of Incentive & Motivation techniques and is widely recognised within the industry as the benchmark for best practice, ensuring that candidates are able to confidently plan, instigate and manage Incentive & Motivation campaigns.

Beth Pridham, Brand Manager at Odeon Cinemas, received a distinction in the IPM Diploma 2015. She says: “The depth of knowledge gained around keeping promotional activity legal, fair and air-tight was especially interesting and crucial to my day-to-day role. The insight modules also encouraged me to really think about how to engage with a particular audience to achieve our desired business-focussed objectives.”

Agencies, brands and service providers frequently highlight the wider business benefits of sending staff on IPM run Diplomas, courses and seminars. To put it simply, businesses that train their staff are more successful than those who don’t.

Jessica Mason, Account Director at Haygarth, mentored Maria Marti, another distinction candidate in the 2015 IPM Diploma intake. Mason said: “The IPM Diploma really benefits team members, especially giving them the confidence to advise our clients and manage demands and expectations. Recently, three of our Promotional and Shopper Marketing team members gained two merits and a distinction; we were thrilled to support them all through this.”

Pia Zeyss, Senior Account Manager at AYMTM, who took the IPM Incentive & Motivation Diploma, added: “Having not had much exposure to the strategic part of reward and recognition, the course provided a very good insight into the way we can currently reward and recognise as well as motivate and incentivise employees. I now feel far more confident in talking to my clients about the communications and reward strategy elements of a programme rather than only being able to comment on event logistics and the end reward. Being able to apply a solution to a brief was especially insightful in understanding this part of the industry we work in and linking the two sectors together.”

Carey Trevill, Managing Director at the IPM, commented: “Our training leads the world in terms of building promotional campaigns from the ground-up, giving candidates of any background and experience the confidence they need to run compliant and creative activities. We’re delighted that all the candidates passed, and that a high proportion did so with a credit or distinction.”

The IPM Diploma 2016 course starts in March, while the IPM Incentive & Motivation Diploma 2016 course kicks off in May. For more information on either, visit the Training section of the IPM’s website. 

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