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.

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.

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.

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.

ABSTRACT There has been a surprising dearth of research that investigates the effects of structural elements on creative outputs in an advertising agency context. This article explores how structural elements may be applied to achieve different flavors of creativity via their effects on originality and strategy. The study examined 554 campaigns in a field study of Australia- and New Zealand-based advertising-agency professionals from Sydney, Melbourne, and Auckland. Findings suggest that agencies can deploy their service-level resources flexibly, but not all structural configurations lead to the best outputs, depending on the client context. Managerial implications, limitations, and directions for future research are discussed.

This article replicates the role clients play in their agency's advertising development process, as investigated by Koslow, Sasser, and Riordan (2006), but with data from Australia and New Zealand agencies. The role of client willingness to explore ideas is again found to be a critical reason why some clients receive more creative campaigns that others. Although some of the complex interactions found by Koslow, Sasser, and Riordan (2006) were not replicated, additional analyses suggest other patterns in the data. Some marketer-related factors, such as client sophistication and the use of consumer research, improve how strategic campaigns are, but they do so at the cost of originality. The net effect on the total creativity of a campaign may be minimal, but the creative character may change dramatically. Again, marketers seeking accountability for their campaigns' creativity need look no further than themselves.

Creativity awards have been used by agencies, clients, and academics as exemplary creative work and if the campaign is a winner, everyone has a hand in the co-creation process. However, there is surprisingly little research as to what co-creation elements they actually represent and the agencies functions needed to make this happen. Key agency executives were selected to assess their own campaigns in terms of originality and strategy, and were also queried about whether those campaigns would win creativity, and effectiveness, awards. Findings show that the campaigns deemed worthy of wining creativity award recognition are usually highly original. Yet most valued award winning work is rarely regarded as being highly strategic. These results are then used to better understand how co-creation elements within agencies can be managed to achieve different creative outcomes.

Social media (e.g. Twitter and Facebook) present a nascent channel of communication that is real-time, high volume and socially interactive and may provide timely feedback on performance of brand advertising. While advertisers continuously seek better monitoring of their return on investment, they face immense challenges in measuring social media initiatives owing to a paucity of research in the area of social media analytics. The present study implemented a social media analytics (SMA) methodological framework in the context of brand TV advertising. We examined social media word-ofmouth (WOM) surrounding 2014 Super Bowl TV advertisements (ads) in relation to performance as measured by the USA Today Ad Meter ad likeability ratings. Over 660,000 Twitter messages for fifty-one ads pertaining to forty-two brands were downloaded via automated scripts and then processed and analyzed. We tested the framework by providing evidence that social media measures of Twitter message volume and sentiment pertaining to Super Bowl ads positively correlated with ad likeability ratings. Thus our framework fills the research gap in offering a nascent approach for monitoring ad performance for improved decision making in the context of brand TV advertising.

Purpose – Social media is an engaging area of research that is rapidly evolving. The purpose of this paper is to focus on how corporations should effectively utilize this new media as a marketing channel. The key to any successful communication strategy is matching the message to the target audience and achieving customer engagement. Two important target audience variables were identified as crucial when determining an organization’s social media communications strategy: the level of brand relationship, and the level of category involvement. Design/methodology/approach – Depth interviews were initially employed, followed by questionnaires, and then computer assisted content analysis was performed on 723 online media articles relating to social media marketing to identify semantic and conceptual relationships. Findings – Research from both a customer and corporate perspective led to insights into how organizations can develop their social media strategies in order to transform their brand message from being perceived as a commercial source of information to a social source – the social media transformation process. Research limitations/implications – This research suggests a finer level of segmentation of social media users that will lead to content strategies adapted to fit the current levels of brand and category involvement. This could be used by organization to develop a model of best practice to achieve their social media objectives. Practical implications – It is crucial for organizations to understand how different groups of users influence, receive, curate, and interact via social media. The greater the depth of this knowledge, the greater the effectiveness of content marketing strategies developed by the corporation. Organizations that utilize social media marketing must carefully analyse the large amount of consumer information available to them, listen to consumer conversations, and determine the needs and segments that will be most receptive to different approaches. They must also accept that in a social media environment user generated content and interactive communication processes should be at the heart of successful strategy. Originality/value – To date, there has been limited analysis of how relationship and involvement factors drive social media content (Cho et al., 2014; Malthouse et al., 2013). More research is needed to understand how key user characteristics lead to content that fully utilizes the social interaction and message diffusion potential of this media. This paper introduces a hierarchy of content marketing based upon the type of relationship between the user and the organization, as well as their level of product category involvement.

Creativity in advertising is a balancing act. Marketers say they want greater creativity, yet their agencies feel that these clients reject cutting-edge work and fail to adopt risky campaigns. So, when is highly creative advertising really needed, and when is it most appropriate? Why are clients "risk averse" as they avoid taking chances when times are good and should "breakthrough" advertising air during good and bad times? Copy testing and the impact of organizational politics on creative campaigns are key factors. The client's openness to new ideas was examined as a conditional variable across 1,125 advertising campaigns reported by 408 advertising agency subjects.

Given the creativity inherent in advertising, one useful measure of creativity may be the advertising creativity award. Although creativity awards have been used by academics, agencies, and clients as indicators of exemplary creative work, there is surprisingly little research as to what creative elements they actually represent. Senior agency executives were selected to assess their own campaigns in terms of originality and strategy, and were also queried about whether those campaigns would win creativity, and effectiveness, awards. Findings show that the campaigns deemed worthy of creativity award recognition are usually highly original. Yet, most award-winning work is rarely regarded as being highly strategic. The results indicate that this originality bias contained in award-winning advertisements may limit their usefulness as proxy measures of creativity. Although the originality aspect of creativity is reflected, strategy and appropriateness are not adequately, nor proportionately considered. Implications for the use of creativity awards by researchers, as well as managerial issues, are discussed.

Creativity is a trait that is treasured by both advertising agencies and clients. How is greater creativity nurtured and cultivated in such an intense environment? Passion (in the form of intrinsic motivation) as well as industry expertise and knowledge are highly desirable ingredients for driving creativity in an advertising agency (Young 2003). This research proposes a dynamic framework for greater creativity that includes passion (individual intrinsic motivation) as one of the most important factors in predicting creativity, along with industry expertise and knowledge. As a stimulus, management support for creativity serves to enhance passion's influence on creativity in this model, while the influence of expertise is suppressed by organizational politics. The study uses a sample of 1,188 advertising campaigns from major U.S. agencies, reported by 413 respondents, to offer an insightful framework for advertising creativity.