Rafeeq L.

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, Ogilvy & Mather Germany’s chief creative officer: “Nothing is more efficient than creative advertising. Creative advertising is more memorable, longer lasting, 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 catalogue 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 messages influence 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 psychology, we have developed a consumer survey approach 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, detergent, facial care, shampoo, shavers, and yogurt—are highly competitive and invest heavily in advertising. Our findings confirm the conventional wisdom that creativity matters: Overall, more-creative campaigns were more effective—considerably so. We also found that certain dimensions of creativity are more effective than others in influencing purchasing behavior—and that many companies focus on the wrong dimensions in their campaigns. Moreover, we believe that by tailoring the survey model to reflect 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.