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Nerd Alert: When Creative Advertising Actually Works
00:11:09
Welcome to Nerd Alert, a series of special episodes bridging the gap between marketing academia and practitioners. We're breaking down highly involved, complex research into plain language and takeaways any marketer can use. In this episode, Elena...
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- [00:00]
A
Nerd Alert. Learning is important, right?
- [00:02]
B
Yes, exactly. What a bunch of nerds.
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A
Nerd alert, Right?
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B
Marketing Architects. Hello and welcome to the Marketing Architects, a research first podcast dedicated to answering your toughest marketing questions. I'm Alana Jasper. I'm on the marketing team here at Marketing Architects, and I'm joined by my co host. Rob Demar is the chief product architect of misfits and machines.
- [00:23]
A
Hello, Elena.
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B
Hello. We're back with your weekly Nerd Alert. Every week, I'll take a deep dive into academic marketing research and translate its complex ideas into simple, understandable language for Rob and of course, for all of you. Are you ready to nerd out, Rob?
- [00:36]
A
I just color coded my color coding system, so the meta nerd has achieved sentience. Let's do this.
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B
All right. This will be a fun one this week because we are talking about advertising creativity. But, Rob, before we jump into the research, if someone told you, they say they watch one of your advertisements and they say, wow, that was very creative, would you feel like that's a compliment or potentially a warning sign?
- [01:01]
A
It's such a loaded word, right? Even just the way you said that, oh, that was really creative. Right? It's, oh, you don't want to hurt the creative's feelings. Or like, oh, that was so creative. And you're like, high five. So it's such a loaded word. It brings so much baggage with it. I'd rather someone was like, wow, that really surprised me. Or maybe feel something about the brand. Or I love the the Burnback quote. Would you hang a person upside down in an ad? And he's like, well, I would if it showed how it kept change from falling out of its pockets. I'm like, okay, yeah, creativity with a purpose that really delivers on the brand and the brand value that I'm a fan of. But yeah, it's a word that brings a lot of baggage with it.
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B
Yeah, definitely. Well, the research today is going to shed some light on, like, how much creativity and when and how you use it. When does it actually work? So this paper is a meta analysis. It's titled A Meta Analysis of When and How Advertising Creativity Works. This is by Sarah Rosengren, Martin Isend, Scott Koslow and Michael Dolan, and it was published in the Journal of marketing in 2020.
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A
I went to college with Michael Dolan.
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B
Are you sure?
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A
No, I didn't.
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B
I was going to say he works at the Stockholm School of Economics. So I don't know if you've ever been in Stockholm before, but I haven't. Maybe he went to the U of M. And then he moved. So Mark Ritson went to the U of M as a professor.
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A
That's true, yes.
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B
The researchers, what they did was they looked at 67 papers. These papers covered 93 separate data sets and they produced 878 individual effect sizes. Their goal was to figure out when advertising creativity works, how much it helps, and what's driving the effect. Now, before we get to the findings, one thing I thought was interesting is the researchers point out that marketers are actually getting more skeptical of creativity, not less. We've talked about this before on the show. Investment in creative work has been declining, and yet the study makes the case that creativity is one of the most undervalued tools that a marketer can have. But first, some ground rules on how they define creativity. They define it as advertising. Creativity is two things working together, originality and appropriateness, which I feel like you covered that well, Rob, in your opener. Originality is the. Oh, I haven't seen that before. Quality and appropriateness means the ad is actually relevant or so it connects to your brand strategy and it solves a real problem for the consumer. Rob, when you think about some of your all time favorite advertisements, do you think it was creative because they were weird and unexpected, or do you think it was because they actually said something meaningful about the brand?
- [03:32]
A
Yeah, I'm going to go with my political answer of both. Think of the old classic dollar shave club launch commercial that they did. The ad was so weird, right? And the guy's walking through the warehouse and there's a bear, he's cursing, there's a kid with a machete. Super weird. But every single weird thing in the ad was also telling you something about the brand. That they're cheap, they're irreverent, they're not taking themselves too seriously. After all, we're talking about buying razors here. So I think that the truly excellent work does both.
- [04:04]
B
You would be right. That's what the study is going to find. So when they measured ads just on originality, the effect on a brand attitude is just 0.164. However, when it was original and appropriate, the number more than doubles. So you need both, just like you said. So let's look into the study a little bit more. It breaks consumer response into two buckets. Immediate reactions like emotion, attention and what signals the ad sends about the brand and then lasting outcomes like ad attitude, brand attitude and memory. Creativity move the needle on almost everything, but it did it unevenly. The strongest effect was on the attitude towards the ad. So that had a correlation of 0.491 attitude towards the brand was 0.317, both statistically significant and meaningful. But this is surprising. Memory effects were weaker. So ad recall was 0.311. Brand recall was just 0.129, and brand recognition barely registered at 0.052. What this tells us about creativity is there's this belief that if it cuts through the clutter, it makes the ad memorable. Like creativity does that. Yes, but it's incomplete. What this study found was that creativity's real superpower is changing how people feel about your ad and your brand, not just whether they remember it. The study also tested two contextual moderators, high involvement and low involvement products. So, Rob, do you think creative ads are more impactful for high involvement or low involvement products and services?
- [05:33]
A
I'm going to go with low involvement. I feel like low involvement products usually have a lot of competition on the shelf, and so you need those stronger signals to cut through versus high involvement. You need to spend more time and it's both the creativity and going through the benefits and the features of the product.
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B
You're wrong.
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A
Ah, dang nabbit.
- [05:55]
B
That's okay. So they showed that high involvement products, these would be things like financial services, cars, health decisions. They showed a creativity effect of 0.653 on ad attitude. Low involvement products was 0.340. So creative almost doubled in power when the audience was engaged more with the category.
- [06:12]
A
Do you think it's because high involvement categories might be perceived as a lot of work and confusing, so they need to give it some kind of fun creative wrapping in order for someone to like it?
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B
I don't know. The study seemed to think that it was because audiences tend to be more engaged with high involvement categories. Like you think through those purchases more. But I think your explanation could also be right. One other thing that the study covers is brand familiarity. So unfamiliar brands got marginally stronger effects on ad attitude than familiar ones. So that kind of makes sense. If you don't have a previous history with a brand, a great ad can do more heavy lifting for you. Now, they also looked at different theories of why creativity works, which I think was fun. Theory one is effect transfer, which is basically a creative ad feels good to watch and that good feeling rubs off on the brand. Theory 2 was processing creative ads get you to pay attention longer and think more carefully. And theory three is signaling. So creative ad sends a signal that the company behind it put real effort into it, which makes the brand feel more credible and trustworthy the researchers found that all three mechanisms are real. All three matter, and together they explain more than any single theory alone. However, I wanted to ask you, Rob, if you had to pick the strongest single driver of ad response of all of these three.
- [07:36]
A
I don't even care what the study says. I'll tell you what I think, Alina, and that's processing. Because the other two don't matter if someone didn't pay attention.
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B
Yeah, you're wrong.
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A
However, I'm right. I'm right on that one. Okay, give me the nerd data.
- [07:52]
B
Yeah, because they said signaling explained 34%, but it's. That's not all of it.
- [07:57]
A
Yeah, but it doesn't matter if you signaled if no one paid attention.
- [08:02]
B
Yeah, you're right. You should call up your friend Michael. I just like it.
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A
It's just, I think they're all super important, but I'm just like, look at it. If you're not. If you're not paying attention, the other two don't matter.
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B
Agreed. And again, I think they're pretty. They're pretty equal.
- [08:16]
A
They're probably saying which one has the most overall weight. Assuming you've consumed all of it.
- [08:22]
B
Yeah. The study also looked at whether consumer judge creativity versus expert judge creativity versus award winning ads produce different outcomes, which we always love a stat like this. I always find it so funny. Consumer judges led to a 0.373 effect on brand outcomes. Experts came in at 0.300 award shows. Drumroll. 0.193. So if you want to know whether an ad worked, ask your customers. Which we would agree with. Not a panel of industry judges. Couple takeaways here. Don't equate creativity with originality alone. Invest more highly in creative for high involvement categories. Test your creative with consumers, not just internal teams or award show frameworks. And don't chase memorability as a primary goal, because attitude shifts is really where creativity shines. Quick, Rob, think of your ad like a job application. Originality is having a beautifully designed resume that catches the hiring manager's eye. But if the resume doesn't match the job description, you don't get the interview. The best candidates nail both. They stand out and they show they're exactly right for the role. The study is saying most marketers are sending in gorgeous resumes for the wrong job. And the ones who can do both, they're the ones getting hired. Rob, what do you think of that one?
- [09:33]
A
I want to hear what you think, Elena, because you always ask me what I think. But I want to hear what you think, Elena?
- [09:38]
B
I think it's interesting. There's a lot of good stuff there. But I'm trying to think of how a marketer would take this practically and apply it. And for me I think the biggest takeaway is that originality does matter, but your ad also needs to be relevant for the audience. So you want both. Sometimes I think marketers don't place as much emphasis on originality actually in their advertising. So I think it's good to remember you don't just need that, you need it to be relevant. But I think that originality is important as well.
- [10:05]
A
You know, we're researching a platform right now where it shows where your brain lights up when you watch TV commercial. And Jonathan's making a lot of assumptions on how brains are lighting up based on a data set of ads that supposedly work. And you had mentioned in here to like all these award shows, like they didn't actually work. And I'm like, I need a challenge that data set because I don't know what the data set he's looking at
- [10:32]
B
is because you should use a data set of like consumer pre testing models or something like that.
- [10:37]
A
Best I can think of is the. Oh, what's the award show that measures based on sales Effies. Thank you. I gotta tell them that.
- [10:45]
B
I'm glad this was useful for you. Rob.
- [10:47]
A
That was very good.
- [10:48]
B
Awesome. That's it for this episode of the Marketing Architects. We'd like to thank Taylor De Los Reyes for producing the show. You can connect with us on LinkedIn and and if you like the podcast, please leave us a review. Now go forth and build great marketing.