Werner Reinartz is a professor and Peter Saffert is a research associate at the University of Cologne in Germany.

Creativity in Advertising when It Works and When It Doesn’t by Werner Reinartz and Peter Saffert

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ASK A PROFESSIONAL in the business what the key to success is in advertising, and you’ll most likely get an answer that echoes the mantra of Stephan Vogel, Ogiivy & Mather Germany’s chief creative officer:

“Nothing is more efficient than creative advertising. Creative advertising is more memorable, longer last- ing, works with less media spending, and builds a fan community.. .faster.”

But are creative ads more effective in inspiring people to buy products than ads that simply cata- logue product attributes or benefits? Numerous laboratory experiments have found that creative messages get more attention and lead to positive attitudes about the products being marketed, but there’s no firm evidence that shows how those mes- sages infiuence purchase behavior. Similarly, there is remarkably little empirical research that ties creative messaging to actual sales revenues. Because product

and brand managers—and the agencies pitching to them—have lacked a systematic way to assess the effectiveness of their ads, creative advertising has been a crapshoot.

Drawing on research in communications psy- chology, we have developed a consumer survey ap- proach for measuring perceived creativity along five dimensions. We applied this approach in a study of 437 TV advertising campaigns for 90 fast-moving consumer goods brands in Germany from January 2005 to October 2010. We asked a panel of trained consumer raters to assess the creativity of the ads, and we examined the relationships between their perceptions and sales figures for the products. All the product categories we studied—body lotion, chewing gum, coffee, cola and lemonade, deter- gent, facial care, shampoo, shavers, and yogurt—are highly competitive and invest heavily in advertising.

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CREATIViTY iN ADVERTISING

Our findings confirm the conventional wisdom that creativity matters: Overall, more-creative cam- paigns were more effective—considerably so. We also found that certain dimensions of creativity are more effective than others in infiuencing purchasing behavior—and that many companies focus on the wrong dimensions in their campaigns. Moreover, we believe that by tailoring the survey model to refiect the cultural preferences and triggers of consumers in different geographic markets, companies the world over can dramatically improve their ability to predict the likely effectiveness of their creative ads and thus make smarter investments.

What Is Creativity? In coming up with dimensions along which to mea- sure creativity, we drew on social and educational psychology literature that defines creativity as di- vergent thinking—namely, the ability to find un- usual and nonobvious solutions to a problem. One of the pioneers in the field was Ellis Paul Torrance, an American psychologist, who developed the Tor- rance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT), a battery of measures used to assess individuals’ capacity for divergent thinking in the business world and in education. Torrance scored responses to test ques- tions along five dimensions: fiuency, originality, and

Choosing the Right Model I analyzing the relationship between creativity

and advertising effectiveness, companies typically

use sales response models that are based on

conventional regression analyses. We have found,

however, that such regression is problematic

because it assumes that the input variables (cre-

ativity and ad budget, say) are independent of

one another in their effect. In the real world, the

longer a creative ad is aired, tlie more impact

I the creativity has on sales.

That’s why we use a hierarchical sales

response model. Hierarchical models get

around the problem by nesting one regression

model within another. This allows us to see both

the direct impact of creativity on sales and the

amplifying effect of the budget, and thus arrive at

a more accurate overall estimate of the effect of

creativity on sales.

elaboration (borrowed from the work of Joy Paul Guilford, another American psychologist) as well as abstractness and what he called resistance to prema- ture closure.

Fluency refers to the number of relevant ideas proposed in response to a given question (such as

“list as many uses as you can for a paper chp”), and originality measures how uncommon or unique the responses are. Elaboration refers to the amount of de- tail given in a response, and abstractness measures the degree to which a slogan or a word moves beyond being a label for something concrete. Resistance to premature closure measures the ability to consider a variety of factors when processing information.please see the attached instructions file along with the attached article.
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