Some presume that advertising quality depends on the calibre of knowledge resources marketing clients and advertising agencies bring to the table: better information yields better creativity. Unfortunately, advertising development is not this straightforward. Although advertising agencies with access to knowledge resources can do great work, clients must also activate their agency's dynamic capability of creativity by building strong relationships and exploring with their agency. We show data on over two thousand campaigns across two studies demonstrating that advertising development is more than just information flows. Developing great advertising is often about the right motivation and not just the right information.

In advertising development, two common management practices are formal account reviews and remunerating the agency based on performance. Given the centrality of intrinsic motivation in creative processes, understanding the agency perspective of these practices is important. Indeed, the efficacy of these practices upon creative outcomes is being questioned by practitioners and remains under-researched. This article presents a mediation model of how the use of formal account reviews influences creativity. The authors also present a moderation model of how pay-for-performance only works when trust is low already. Clients willing to explore creative options and trust their agencies receive benefits beyond the economic contract.

To develop more creative advertising, scholars advocate ideation techniques and one of the most strongly supported is the Templates method. This research explores the efficacy of Templates, and evaluates its effectiveness compared to other creative ideation approaches. Two studies are presented. One directly asks professional advertising creatives to use specific Templates to develop advertisements. The other determines if the mere knowledge of the Templates method improves creative ideation. In both studies, industry-based judges assess the quality of respondents’ work. The Templates approach improves the originality of advertising, with no detrimental influence on strategy. Two alternative approaches to enhancing creativity were compared against Templates: 1) providing better domain knowledge through consumer insight and 2) improving the intrinsic motivation of creatives. The research shows these two alternatives both improve originality yet reduce how “on strategy” the advertising is—a trade-off effect. However, the Templates method does not suffer from this trade-off and performs well, by improving originality without any detriment on strategic focus.

The process of buying creative advertising is often as difficult for marketing clients as it is for advertising agencies. Clients are frequently risk averse in making decisions about creative work and may favor work that is less creative and effective because it is easier to accept. Advertising agencies can also display risk aversion. Fear of losing business may cause them to pander to clients, even toning down ideas that may be the most effective advertising solutions. The authors have coined the term clientelism to describe this phenomenon. Client risk aversion and agency clientelism ultimately suppress the quality of work clients adopt. We show these effects empirically by collecting data on 258 advertising campaigns produced by major London advertising agencies. Although working toward highly creative advertising is uncomfortable for clients—and this discomfort spreads to agencies—clients need to expect agencies to present their best creative work and agencies need to better assist clients in adopting these campaigns.

Although the overall effect of creativity in advertising appears positive, the moderating effect of brand familiarity is unknown. On the basis of psychological frameworks, the authors developed an eye-tracking experiment using an electronic magazine format. Creative and control advertisements were compared, and brand familiarity was manipulated. The results demonstrate how brand familiarity moderates the effects of creativity. Creative advertising enhanced visual attention for advertisements, advertisement affect, and advertisement recognition in most situations. Highly creative advertising, however, led to less brand affect and brand recognition for familiar brands but more brand affect and brand recognition for unfamiliar brands.

This article explores mechanisms that influence the absorption of external information within the creative advertising development process. Consumer information, in the form of consumer research or evaluations of consumer responses, is presumed to be the building block of consumer insights for agencies seeking more effective communication with consumers. Successful agencies are presumed to have the capacity to absorb consumer insights and utilize them to develop effective advertising strategies. But consumer insights do not always translate seamlessly into a strategy dialogue. Absorbing and using external knowledge has costs beyond those of acquisition or simply employing “creative” people. Agencies, through their sociocognitive processes, have to actively identify useful information, make it accessible to the organization, and then exploit it to develop creative ideas. A study is presented on how group dynamics influence knowledge absorption, which then shapes the emergence of creative ideas. Group cohesion and interpersonal friction are examined. Subjects include 184 advertising practitioners reporting on 548 campaigns. Results show that in some group settings effective absorption of external information occurs, which improves the creative quality of promotional campaigns. However, in other situations the work changes in character, shifting from more original to more appropriate, rather than improving overall creativity.

Although the overall effect of creativity in advertising appears positive, the moderating effect of brand familiarity is unknown. On the basis of psychological frameworks, the authors developed an eye-tracking experiment using an electronic magazine format. Creative and control advertisements were compared, and brand familiarity was manipulated. The results demonstrate how brand familiarity moderates the effects of creativity. Creative advertising enhanced visual attention for advertisements, advertisement affect, and advertisement recognition in most situations. Highly creative advertising, however, led to less brand affect and brand recognition for familiar brands but more brand affect and brand recognition for unfamiliar brands.

To counter banner blindness, practitioners often use a media-based personalized advertising strategy to target consumers. Another approach, however, is suggested here, a creativity-based strategy. To compare the two strategies, the authors explored a psychology framework—executive functions—that explains why a creativity-based strategy may work better in some situations. Two key executive functions, inhibitory control and working memory, keep consumers focused on media content rather than on banner advertisements. Highly creative advertising, however, activates another executive function, cognitive flexibility, which counters inhibitory control, so advertisements sometimes get increased attention. The authors applied an eye-tracking experiment and took several measures of advertisement effectiveness. Contrary to expectations, personalized advertising was found to lead to better memory responses, moderately higher attention, and somewhat more positive brand attitudes when consumers are casually surfing. Highly creative advertising, however, still garnered more attention overall and also led to even more positive brand attitudes when consumers were using media in a goal-directed way. Although the authors argue that a creativity approach may work better in most situations, it is also possible that both strategies can be implemented at the same time.

This article offers a commentary on the state of advertising and media research. It suggests that the continuing evolution of media continues to disrupt advertising research and practice. The article concludes that there are some general questions about the relationships between advertising and media that are common to both tradition and digital media and that many issues that are often framed as unique to digital media, are manifestations of more general issues common to all media. Media and advertising practice will continue to evolve and is likely that advertising using traditional media in combination with consumer directed search will become the dominant form of advertising.

To counter banner blindness, practitioners often use a media-based personalized advertising strategy to target consumers. Another approach, however, is suggested here, a creativity-based strategy. To compare the two strategies, the authors explored a psychology framework-executive functions-that explains why a creativity-based strategy may work better in some situations. Two key executive functions, inhibitory control and working memory, keep consumers focused on media content rather than on banner advertisements. Highly creative advertising, however, activates another executive function, cognitive flexibility, which counters inhibitory control, so advertisements sometimes get increased attention. The authors applied an eye-tracking experiment and took several measures of advertisement effectiveness. Contrary to expectations, personalized advertising was found to lead to better memory responses, moderately higher attention, and somewhat more positive brand attitudes when consumers are casually surfing. Highly creative advertising, however, still garnered more attention overall and also led to even more positive brand attitudes when consumers were using media in a goal-directed way. Although the authors argue that a creativity approach may work better in most situations, it is also possible that both strategies can be implemented at the same time.

There is a widely believed tradition that good or high-quality agency-client relationships make for superior advertising campaigns, with many scholars highlighting the benefits agency professionals bring to the advertising creative development process. However, not all agree, and some scholars point to a "dark side" of apparently good relationships-an alternative tradition that is based on agency theory. This approach suggests agencies can take advantage of clients who are highly committed. Our research focuses on the agency perspective to this question and collects data on 518 campaigns from London and Amsterdam agencies. We show both traditions have merit in that the two processes operate simultaneously. When agencies perceive that the quality of their client relationship is low, the professionalism of agency personnel shines through developing original, strategic, and creative work. But when relationship quality is considered high, dark side problems emerge. However, there is a bright side to good relationships. Creativity theory suggests that a good relationship can increase the intrinsic motivation of agency staff such that their increased passion for the work offsets dark side problems-something for which we find empirical support.

Purpose This paper aims to explore professional product designers’ views on creative design and to compare their viewpoints with the related academic literature on product marketing. Design/methodology/approach To find the designers’ views on creative design, face-to-face in-depth interviews based on repertory grid analysis and semi-structured questions were conducted with 32 professional and award-wining product designers who mostly design for international producers. Findings Although marketing scholars often approach design as a noun – something that can be viewed and analysed as a bundle of attributes, dimensions or characteristics – professional designers view design differently. To them, design is a verb, a problem-solving process through which they meet the challenges consumers have with products. Comparing professional product designers’ views on design creativity with the main topics in the product marketing literature places scholars’ dispositionalism against designers’ situationalism; it also enables marketing scholars to improve their viewpoints on product design and to bring practical problem-solving and design thinking into their research. This also increases mutual understanding between marketers and designers. Research limitations/implications This research enhances the knowledge of marketing scholars, marketers and designers about each other’s perspectives on product design creativity, which will improve their mutual understanding and the business-to-business relationship between marketers and designers. Originality/value To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first study that has attempted to discover product designers’ opinions on the main topics in the related academic literature.

Collaborative co-creation of advertising campaigns by agencies and clients is widely perceived to result in greater creativity and higher-quality advertising outcomes. This research examines three levels of collaboration in client-agency relationships. Environmental-level effects were found in that clients often had difficulty ceding control and trusting an outside agency. Yet when agencies are viewed as experts, clients come to trust them and better creative work results. At the dyadic level, the depth of information sharing between the agency and client was helpful. In stable client-agency relationships, client involvement need not be as extensive because the agency already understands the strategy. Interorganizational effects were also explored, but a surprise finding was an unexpected inverted U-shaped relationship between agency competency and effectiveness. Only at a moderate level of agency competency is the most effective advertising observed, which is indicative of a "dark side" of client-agency relationships. This study was based on qualitative interviews with 20 marketing clients and agency professionals from Australia and New Zealand. Quantitative results were based on 162 campaigns from the same region reported on by 60 brand managers.

Although creativity is often considered a key success factor in advertising, the marketing literature lacks a systematic empirical account of when and how advertising creativity works. The authors use a meta-analysis to synthesize the literature on advertising creativity and test different theoretical explanations for its effects. The analysis covers 93 data sets taken from 67 papers that provide 878 effect sizes. The results show robust positive effects but also highlight the importance of considering both originality and appropriateness when investing in advertising creativity. Moderation analyses show that the effects of advertising creativity are stronger for high- (vs. low-) involvement products, and that the effects on ad (but not brand) reactions are marginally stronger for unfamiliar brands. An empirical test of theoretical mechanisms shows that affect transfer, processing, and signaling jointly explain these effects, and that originality mainly leads to affect transfer, whereas appropriateness leads to signaling. The authors also call for further research connecting advertising creativity with sales and studying its effects in digital contexts.

One of the most contentious issues in advertising is the evaluation and selection of creative ideas. This selection process is central to the success of agencies and clients, yet it appears difficult for external observers to see the merits of highly creative ideas. To understand this issue, the authors compared self-reports of creative ideas from industry professionals with those of external judges. Results suggest that the difficulty in the external evaluation of creative ideas is not recognizing originality but recognizing appropriateness when the idea is also highly original. Creative ideas do not speak for themselves; presentation is crucial.

ABSTRACT This article approaches the question of media neutrality by investigating whether ideation techniques such as templates produce the same quality of advertisements across media. Some 207 advertising professionals responded to a hypothetical brief with one print and one television advertisement. Self-reported results showed that ideas from two media-dependent techniques (unification and metaphor) worked well across media, whereas ideas from one message-dependent technique (extreme consequence) and the control condition did not. By their nature, however, media-dependent techniques make for less-consistent content across media, whereas message-dependent techniques have more consistent expressions across media. Campaign consistency and quality therefore trade off, limiting media neutrality.

This paper examines how ideation techniques like the Templates method (Goldenberg, Mazursky and Solomon 1999) can overcome the limitations of poor client quality and low intrinsic motivation so to produce highly creative outcomes. We present a 2 X 4 experiment manipulating client quality and ideation techniques respectively, involving 207 working creatives in major agencies in South Africa and Nigeria. Each creative was asked to develop two ads in response to a hypothetical brief. Creatives’ self-reports were analysed using ANOVA and showed not all ideation techniques work in all client situations. The Unification template overcomes motivational limitations in situations of a poor quality client. Alternatively, the Metaphor template works well on average, little known client. The Extreme consequences template does not work well in either situation.

Advertising professionals praise the role of consumer insight in solving advertising problems creatively. Marketing clients and account planners claim to use insight to inject the necessary strategy into a campaign, building a creative platform upon which a brand connects with consumers. Although insight is widely seen as an invaluable aid, another perspective is that insight can create mental set fixation, a cognitive bias that reinforces only limited perspectives on a problem, thus inhibiting creativity. This study examines whether strong, weak or no primed insight conditions help or hinder professional creatives to develop highly creative advertising ideas, testing across two media, print and television. Self-assessments of creatives show that they see insight as compensating for low domain knowledge. However, assessments by objective judges, who are also creatives, show insight works by compensating for low intrinsic motivation. Although we show consumer insight can improve the quality of creative ideas, it should be carefully managed to produce consistently high-quality creative work.

Based on a review of the literature, this article presents a framework for understanding advertising creativity and asks the question "What future direction should advertising creativity research take?" We divide creativity research into work focused on creative development (CD) and creative effectiveness (CE). In each stream, we provide an overview of the key areas of research interest and identify future research directions. The study argues that research should continue to explore how individual, group, and organizational structural elements influence creative development, as well as the effect of new media. Additional work is also needed to better understand the evaluation processes given the difficulty in judging creative advertisements, as well as a better understanding of expression issues. This study also calls for additional work dealing with the specific challenges facing each stream and a better integration of the two.