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Ask a professional in the business organization what the key to success is in advertising, and yous'll most likely get an respond that echoes the mantra of Stephan Vogel, Ogilvy & Mather Germany's chief creative officer: "Nothing is more efficient than creative ad. Creative advertising is more memorable, longer lasting, works with less media spending, and builds a fan customs…faster."

Merely are creative ads more than constructive in inspiring people to purchase products than ads that simply catalogue product attributes or benefits? Numerous laboratory experiments have found that creative messages go more than attending and pb to positive attitudes about the products being marketed, but there'due south no house evidence that shows how those messages influence purchase beliefs. Similarly, in that location 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, artistic advertising has been a crapshoot.

Drawing on inquiry in communications psychology, we have developed a consumer survey approach for measuring perceived inventiveness along v dimensions. We applied this approach in a study of 437 Television advertising campaigns for 90 fast-moving consumer goods brands in Frg from January 2005 to October 2010. Nosotros asked a panel of trained consumer raters to assess the creativity of the ads, and we examined the relationships betwixt their perceptions and sales figures for the products. All the product categories we studied—body lotion, chewing mucilage, java, 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 than constructive—considerably so. We too found that sure dimensions of inventiveness are more constructive than others in influencing purchasing beliefs—and that many companies focus on the wrong dimensions in their campaigns. Moreover, nosotros believe that by tailoring the survey model to reflect the cultural preferences and triggers of consumers in different geographic markets, companies the world over tin dramatically better their ability to predict the probable effectiveness of their creative ads and thus make smarter investments.

What Is Creativity?

In coming upwardly with dimensions along which to measure out creativity, we drew on social and educational psychology literature that defines creativity as divergent thinking—namely, the ability to notice unusual and nonobvious solutions to a problem. One of the pioneers in the field was Ellis Paul Torrance, an American psychologist, who developed the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking (TTCT), a battery of measures used to assess individuals' capacity for divergent thinking in the business organisation world and in education. Torrance scored responses to examination questions forth v dimensions: fluency, originality, and elaboration (borrowed from the work of Joy Paul Guilford, some other American psychologist) as well as abstractness and what he called resistance to premature closure.

Fluency refers to the number of relevant ideas proposed in response to a given question (such as "listing equally many uses as you can for a newspaper clip"), and originality measures how uncommon or unique the responses are. Elaboration refers to the amount of item given in a response, and abstractness measures the caste to which a slogan or a discussion moves beyond beingness a characterization for something physical. Resistance to premature closure measures the ability to consider a variety of factors when processing information.

In the early 2000s Torrance's measures were adapted for advertising past the Indiana University communications researcher Robert Smith and his colleagues. They adjusted the definition of creativity to refer to "the extent to which an advertizement contains brand or executional elements that are different, novel, unusual, original, unique, etc." Their goal was to mensurate creativity using simply those factors near relevant to an advertising context. They came up with five dimensions of advertising creativity, which form the footing for our survey.

To assess the creativity of your ad entrada, ask consumer respondents to score the ads on each dimension, on a scale of ane to 7, past considering the questions listed beneath. (These questions, based on communications researcher Robert Smith's construct for measuring advertizing inventiveness, are meant to be somewhat overlapping.)

Your campaign's overall inventiveness rating is the boilerplate of the scores of each dimension. By comparing the scores of different campaigns, and analyzing the upkeep and sales effectiveness for each, y'all can better your ability to predict the likely effectiveness of your artistic ads and make smarter investments.

Originality
  • Is the ad "out of the ordinary"?
  • Does it depart from stereotypical thinking?
  • Is it unique?

Coca-Cola "Happiness Factory"

Flexibility
  • Does the advert incorporate ideas that move from i bailiwick to some other?
  • Does it incorporate dissimilar ideas?
  • Does it shift from one idea to another?

Jacobs Krönung "Time for Chatting"

Elaboration
  • Does the advertising contain numerous details?
  • Does it extend bones ideas and make them more than intricate?
  • Does it contain more details than expected?

Ehrmann Yogurt "Strawberry Tongue"

Synthesis
  • Does the ad connect objects that are usually unrelated?
  • Does it contain unusual connections?
  • Does information technology bring unusual items together?

Wrigley's Juicy Fruit Squish "Juicy Fruit Ranch"

Artistic Value
  • Is the advertising visually or verbally distinctive?
  • Does it make ideas come to life graphically or verbally?
  • Is it artistic in its product?

Danone Fantasia "Flavor Trip"

Originality.

An original ad comprises elements that are rare or surprising, or that motion away from the obvious and commonplace. The focus is on the uniqueness of the ideas or features contained in the ad. An ad can diverge from norms or experiences by applying unique visual or verbal solutions, for instance. Many advertising campaigns are anything simply original. The prototypical detergent spot shows a homemaker satisfied with an fifty-fifty whiter wash; perfumes feature film-perfect models; and cars cruise through beautiful landscapes free of traffic. One campaign nosotros studied that excelled in the originality dimension was the surprising visualization of the within of a vending motorcar in the Coca-Cola commercial "Happiness Manufacturing plant."

Flexibility.

An ad scoring high on flexibility smoothly links the product to a range of different uses or ideas. For example, a commercial for the Kraft Foods coffee brand Jacobs Krönung, which aired in Germany in 2011 and 2012, showed a homo facing various domestic challenges (washing dishes, sewing a push button on a jacket, dicing an onion, and making a bed) while a grouping of women enjoyed a loving cup of coffee together.

Elaboration.

Many ads incorporate unexpected details or extend simple ideas so that they become more than intricate and complicated. One good instance is an advert for Ehrmann fruit yogurt—ane of the leading brands in Germany—in which a woman eating yogurt licks her lips to reveal that her tongue looks just like a strawberry (Ehrmann fabricated different versions of the spot for dissimilar flavors), considerably deepening the idea of fruitiness in yogurt. In some other example, an ad for Wrigley's 5 gum, a man is submerged in tiny metal balls that bounciness off his skin to represent the tingle one feels while chewing the gum.

Synthesis.

This dimension of creativity is about blending or connecting normally unrelated objects or ideas. For instance, Wrigley aired a commercial that featured rabbits corralled like cattle and fed bananas, berries, and melon, making their buckteeth abound in as Juicy Fruit Squish chewing gum. The commercial combines unrelated objects (rabbits and chewing gum) to create a divergent story line.

Creative value.

Ads with a high level of artistic creativity contain aesthetically appealing verbal, visual, or sound elements. Their production quality is high, their dialogue is clever, their colour palette is original, or their music is memorable. As a result, consumers often view the ads equally almost a piece of art rather than a blatant sales pitch. Ane ad we studied, which scored amidst the highest in artistic value, was an animated commercial for Danone's Fantasia yogurt that aired at the finish of 2009. It showed a woman floating on a blossom petal through a sea of Fantasia yogurt, surrounded past flowers laden with fruits.

In our study, we asked a panel of trained consumer raters to score the German language TV ad campaigns on each of these dimensions, on a scale of i to vii; the campaign's overall creativity rating was the average of its scores. We and then looked for relationships betwixt each campaign's score, its advert upkeep, and the campaign'due south relative sales effectiveness. (For a brief give-and-take of the statistical methods we used in our study, meet the sidebar "Choosing the Right Model.")

In analyzing the relationship betwixt creativity and advertising effectiveness, companies typically utilise sales response models that are based on conventional regression analyses. We have found, nonetheless, that such regression is problematic because it assumes that the input variables (creativity and advert upkeep, say) are contained of ane another in their outcome. In the existent world, the longer a artistic advert is aired, the more affect the creativity has on sales.

That'southward why nosotros use a hierarchical sales response model. Hierarchical models become effectually the trouble by nesting one regression model within another. This allows usa to see both the direct impact of inventiveness on sales and the amplifying effect of the upkeep, and thus go far at a more than accurate overall estimate of the effect of creativity on sales.

What We Found

Our report revealed dramatic variation in overall creativity scores beyond the campaigns. The average score for overall creativity was 2.98 (again, on a calibration of i to 7). The lowest score was 1.0, and the highest vi.2. Only xi of the 437 campaigns received an overall score in a higher place 5 (five of them were cola campaigns). At the other end of the spectrum, 10 campaigns had an overall score below 1.5. The scores mattered a lot, nosotros establish. A euro invested in a highly creative advertisement entrada had, on boilerplate, nearly double the sales impact of a euro spent on a noncreative entrada. The touch on of creativity was initially relatively small but typically gathered momentum as the entrada rolled out.

A euro invested in a highly creative ad entrada had nearly double the sales impact of a euro spent on a noncreative campaign.

We uncovered two interesting insights about how creativity enhances sales numbers.

The dimensions take varying levels of influence on sales.

Companies have enough of room for improvement in the creativity of ad campaigns. For instance, the types of creativity that agencies currently emphasize are oft not the most effective ones at driving sales. In our research, we quantified the bear upon that each dimension has on sales. Although all of them had a positive impact, elaboration had by far the most powerful 1 (1.32 when indexed relative to the overall boilerplate creativity of ane.0), followed by creative value (one.19). Trailing backside were originality (1.06) and flexibility (ane.03), with synthesis a distant fifth (0.45). However the study shows that advert agencies utilise originality and artistic value more than than they apply elaboration. Possibly, companies think primarily of originality when trying to be artistic.

We likewise looked at campaigns that scored above the median on at least ii dimensions and found that the variation in sales impact among the combinations was even greater than the variation between individual dimensions. Out of x possible pairs, we found that the most-used combination—flexibility and elaboration, bookkeeping for about 12% of all combinations—is one of the lowest-performing: 0.41 indexed relative to the boilerplate of all pairs of 1.0. In sharp dissimilarity, combining elaboration with originality (bookkeeping for nearly 10% of all combos identified) had near double the average impact on sales (1.96), closely followed by the combination of artistic value and originality (ane.89, accounting for about eleven% of all combos).

When used in combination, creativity dimensions had widely varying effects. Relative effectiveness here shows the sales uplift a detail pairing enjoyed relative to average effectiveness. Despite the disparities, however, companies in our study used the 10 combinations in roughly equal proportion (shown here every bit a percentage of total usage), suggesting that many firms are non getting the most out of their advertising investments.

The nigh-used pairing, flexibility plus elaboration, is ane of the to the lowest degree effective. The well-nigh effective pairing, originality plus elaboration, had almost double the touch. Flexibility is one of the least effective dimensions, whether used lonely or in combination. Although originality has little impact on sales on its own, it appears to play an important enabling office, appearing in three of the 4 well-nigh effective pairings.

Interestingly, originality is ofttimes office of the most constructive combinations, suggesting that this type of creativity plays an important enabling role. In essence, beingness original is not enough—originality boosts sales only in the presence of additional creative dimensions. Indeed, originality's power to enable may be another reason that so many companies use it in advertizing campaigns, despite its mediocre individual effectiveness.

Use of creativity differs past category.

Levels of creativity vary significantly beyond product categories, with the overall scores ranging from 2.62 for shampoo to 3.60 for cola. In categories such equally cola and coffee, advertisers and customers tend to favor higher levels of creativity, whereas in categories such as shampoo, torso care, and facial care, campaigns focus on showing the bodily apply of the product, albeit in an idealized environment. One reason could exist that it is still important in certain categories to deliver factual proof points of performance features. When products are functional and oriented toward clear consumer goals (cleaning garments with detergents, protecting pare with body lotion), unorthodox approaches are less preferred. In dissimilarity, when products are hands understood, similar, and tied to personal preferences (quenching thirst with a soda, for instance, or enjoying a loving cup of coffee), an out-of-the-ordinary approach tin can exist more than effective in stimulating sales.

We too looked at whether investing in additional inventiveness pays off and institute that it depends entirely on the category. As the exhibit "Is More than Inventiveness Better?" shows, in traditionally low-inventiveness categories, adding inventiveness can pay off; according to our report, a one-bespeak increase in inventiveness scores for shampoo and detergent advertisement campaigns boosted sales affect by 4%. Withal, the torso lotion and face care categories, which also tend to characteristic depression levels of creativity, were harmed past boosted creativity: Sales impact fell by well-nigh two%. We see variation across categories with high levels of creativity. Investing in additional creativity has a well-nigh 8% impact on sales in shavers and java but boosts impact past less than ane% for colas and yogurts. So brand sure you empathize your category's sensitivity to creativity before you commission that high-priced category-redefining campaign.

If creative ads can inspire consumers to buy, does amping up the creativity level drive even more than purchases? Not necessarily. According to our report of High german ads, the relative effectiveness of adding inventiveness to a campaign can vary significantly.

Categories usually associated with highly creative ads—such as java or cola—practice non always get a big boost when more creativity is added to campaigns…

…and among categories associated with low inventiveness—such as detergents and torso lotions—getting creative is not e'er a bad idea.

Measuring Campaign Effectiveness

Our enquiry has big implications for advertising agencies and the companies that engage them. Advertising professionals can use methods similar ours to identify where to straight their creative energies to best effect. Companies tin utilize the models to estimate the financial impact their creative investments will produce.

In many—indeed, virtually—cases, companies will detect that they are underinvesting in creativity. Our inquiry clearly shows that the conservative approaches adopted in many product categories are leaving money on the table. Increased investment will unremarkably pay for itself: More-constructive creative ads will allow other parts of the advertizing budget to be significantly reduced.

The bourgeois approaches adopted in many product categories are leaving coin on the table.

For instance, suppose a company plans to air two TV campaigns: Campaign A has a creativity index rating of 3, and it has allocated a Tv set budget of €500,000 per week. Campaign B has a rating of 3.5, but considering it costs more to create the campaign, information technology plans to spend just €400,000 per week for airtime. (The company establishes creativity ratings by request consumer panels to evaluate campaign drafts and storyboards forth the five dimensions.)

Later feeding the scores and budgets into a hierarchical sales response model (for this hypothetical example, nosotros used data from our study), the company estimates that the sales bear upon for Campaign B will be 1.07% higher in the first week of airing than that of Entrada A. In the subsequent weeks, the gap increases to one.93% (week 2), 2.63% (calendar week 3), and 3.nineteen% (week 4), thanks to carryover and buildup of consumer knowledge and goodwill. That means that diverting money from the airtime budget to creative will in this case result in a more effective advertisement. In fact, the model shows that the company could cutting airtime spending to €330,000 before the negative bear on of reduced airtime outweighed the positive effect of creativity.

Companies can also use a survey arroyo to estimate the touch on of particular creative choices. Let's say that your product category is java, and you have to choose between ii artistic pitches that both scored 4.0, each with a €400,000 weekly airtime budget. Campaign C emphasizes elaboration and originality, and Campaign D emphasizes artistic value and synthesis. Our findings suggest that Entrada C would exist the better bet, since that combination of creativity dimensions produces a positive issue on sales nearly three times as smashing as that of the philharmonic used in Entrada D.Creativity isn't easily engineered—and it is nonetheless largely measurable simply subsequently the fact. What's more, a focus-group assessment of an unaired campaign's creativity levels may well be off the mark. Nonetheless, companies can utilize a model similar ours, coupled with audio baseline data, to better ground the process of creating ad ideas and assessing their value. And in so doing, they can put to good use quite a bit more than the famous half of their ad budgets.

A version of this article appeared in the June 2013 result of Harvard Business Review.