Advertising Creativity

What it is

Creativity is widely treated as central to advertising success, yet the research on it is spread across many papers that measure different things in different ways. Sara Rosengren, Martin Eisend, Scott Koslow and Micael Dahlén set out to bring that work together. Their meta-analysis in the Journal of Marketing in 2020 pooled 93 data sets from 67 papers, covering 878 effect sizes, and asked when and how advertising creativity works.

The two terms that carry the finding are originality and appropriateness. The authors stress that both matter. An advertisement can be unusual without suiting its category or task, and it can suit its category without being unusual. The reported effects belong to work that has both qualities.

Brand teams meet the idea in the identity and campaign stages of a branding engagement. A route that is fresh, and also fits the product, the buyer and the setting in which it will be seen, meets the two conditions the paper describes.

In effect

The authors report robust positive effects of advertising creativity. The effects were stronger for high-involvement products, meaning purchases that buyers think about carefully. Reactions to the advertisement, though not reactions to the brand, were marginally stronger for unfamiliar brands.

The paper also offers an account of why creative advertising works. Three mechanisms together explain the effects: affect transfer, processing and signaling. Originality works mainly through affect transfer, which is the carrying of a good feeling about the advertisement over to the brand. Appropriateness works mainly through signaling. The pairing is useful in practice, because it names a different job for each quality and lets a team ask of a piece of work which of the two it is doing.

Repetition is a related question. A 2013 study by Kevin Lehnert and colleagues placed creative and control commercials in a television programme and reported better recall for the creative ones, a reduction of that advantage with repetition, and a lower tendency to wearout. That study is described on the Advertising Wear-Out page and concerns individual commercials, not whole brands.

What it does not say

The reading behind this page is the published abstract and bibliographic record. It supports the findings above and no further detail, so the size of the effects, the product categories and the individual studies are not described here.

The authors themselves call for future research that links creativity to sales and that studies it in digital contexts. The evidence therefore concerns how people react to creative work, in terms of attitudes and responses, and does not yet give a sales figure for a given piece of work. It also does not rank creative styles or recommend a degree of novelty. The finding that originality and appropriateness both matter is a statement about conditions, not a formula.

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