If you have ever wondered what the IPA is for and why it exists, read this
Reason Magazine interview with Paul Romer, the Stanford Economist and proponent of New Growth Theory. Advertising people will find this a refreshing read, since it argues for their instinctive belief that economic growth arises not so much from the deployment of capital and labour but through the origination of ideas.
In this piece Romer also makes a valuable distinction between what he calls Institutions of Science and Institutions of the Market. Both have separate functions - the first aims to generate ideas which can be given away, the second wishes to create value which can be owned and controlled. But both institutions (and the interplay between them) contribute to economic advancement.
If there is one thing the IPA can do it is to restore the "Institution of Science" to the advertising world, a business whose R&D function has atrophied over the years. After all, if you are going to call yourself something daft like an "Institute", the least you can do is to act like one.
So while agencies compete to produce better advertisements than each other, the job of the IPA is to generate thinking which makes advertising better overall. And there is no more important area for this collaborative action to take place than in the area of social media. At a time when the population of Facebook is now greater than all but three countries in the world, and when BT is delivering customer service via twitter, this is an area which forces us to question many of our ingrained assumptions about advertising, brands and intangible value. To what extent is the role of advertising in providing reassurance and comparison now usurped by peer-to-peer information exchange? How can we add value to brands by giving them social currency? Are our models and our metrics in advertising far too individualistic? Can social media (as our recent speaker Geoffrey Miller has suggested) diminish the role of brands as a means of social signalling?
It is these kind of questions IPA Social will ask and, with luck, answer. Most vitally (and this is what makes an Institution of Science vital) all the findings will be shared with everyone in the membership.