Sheila L. Sasser

What is Creative to Whom and Why

ABSTRACT The authors apply recent advances in creativity theory to discover perceptual differences in the factors of strategy, originality, and artistry among creatives and noncreatives. It was found that current advertising position influences subjective perceptions of what constitutes creative advertising. Creatives tend to perceive advertisements as more appropriate if they are artistic, but account executives tend to perceive advertisements as more appropriate if they are strategic. The study also indicates that creatives have a distinctive preference for a strong originality component to strategy. To be original within the confines of a tight strategy is perceived as the most creative by advertising creatives. Account executives are so focused on strategy, they will often accept artistic advertisements as a substitute for truly original work. The authors consider future research implications of the study and its limitations.

Creative and interactive media use by agencies : engaging an IMC media palette for implementing advertising campaigns

ABSTRACT This study examines IMC media use by advertising agencies from a perspective of how creative and media implementation effects impact the scope of media selected for campaigns. The study was based upon a quantitative analysis of 872 advertising campaigns from 309 respondents from the largest advertising agencies in New York and Detroit. Overall, campaigns contain more integrated media when there is solid consumer research, formal advertising testing, diverse media experience, agency industry specialization, and high agency motivation. Creativity is positively correlated with wider IMC media use, showing that integrated interactive media campaigns using a broader media palette can be highly creative. However, neither the presence of strategy in the clients brief nor the perception of the campaign being “on strategy” has any effect on the scope or number of media used.

Creating passion to engage versus enrage consumer co‐creators with agency co‐conspirators: unleashing creativity

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide a perspective on how new interactive media trends affect the creative process in agencies and engage consumers as co‐creators, based on recently published research and observation.Design/methodology/approach – Interviews, participant observation, and secondary analysis of recently published qualitative and quantitative research (1996‐2008) by the author and leading scholars in the field is used in this offering. A review of emerging trends and conceptual thinking in this area prompts the suggested perspective along with an empirical longitudinal global study on what drives creativity in advertising ADCRISP©.Findings – This contribution illustrates examples of how a passionate approach drives creativity and change for an iconic brand. Ethnographic methods are suggested for reconnecting with changing consumers and environments. This viewpoint recognizes the potential of engaging the consumer and unleashing creativity while pointing out potential pitfalls of ...

Creativity awards: Great expectations?

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.

Passion, Expertise, Politics, and Support

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 passions 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.

When Bad is Good: The Creative Conundrum of Agency- Client Relationships

Some advertising agencies and their marketing clients have traditionally invested in long term relationships that were greatly valued. Recent economic imperatives have prompted many clients to break such long term bonds and re-define relationships. For example, in the auto industry, some client-agency relationships forged over one hundred years ago have recently been terminated during the search for new agency partners and creativity. Consumer packaged goods marketers like Proctor and Gamble and Unilever also tend to remain with their full service agency of record partners, even when switching account teams and resources globally.

Assessing the Quality of Self-reported Measures and the Reliability of Empirical Findings: Exploring Creativity Differences across Worldwide Agency Creatives and Managers

Research often emphasizes that creativity is the most critical element for advertising effectiveness in the marketplace (Ang et al., 2007; West et al., 2008; El-Murad and West, 2004; Smith et al., 2007). Given its importance it is not surprising that there has been an exponential growth in creativity research (Sasser and Koslow, 2008a). This research includes influences on audience members’ processing (Goldenberg and Mazursky, 2008; Ang et al., 2007; Smith et al., 2007; Pieters et al., 1999), creative template techniques (Goldenberg et al., Solomon, 1999), remote conveying (Rossiter, 2008) or other approaches (West et al., 2008; Kover, 1995). Social environment impacts on advertising creativity (Li et al., 2008), and client organizational influences on creativity (Sasser and Koslow, 2008a; Koslow et al., 2006) have also been studied.

How to Achieve a Social Media Transformation

In the consumer decision making process there are four sources of information consumers use to assist in determining which brands they will consider for purchase; commercial, social, experiential, and public sources. Organisations have the most control over the commercial sources, but this information is usually viewed as the least credible from a consumer perspective. In contrast, experiential sources are usually the most reliable type of information, except in situations where a social source, such as a friend, is also an expert in that product category, in which case this social source may be perceived as more reliable. This chapter looks at how well planned content creation can blur the lines between commercial and social sources of information in this new social media environment.

Drivers of Creativity Within Advertising Agencies: How Structural Configuration Can Affect And Improve Creative Development

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.

Discovering Twitter Metrics for Creative Super Bowl Campaigns

While Twitter’s use in IMC for branding, buzz marketing, and CRM is well documented, the interaction between Twitter and a brand’s television broadcast advertising is not apparent (Jansen, Zhang, Sobel, & Chowdhury, 2009). With measurement firms such as Nielsen now tracking data on the amount of Twitter buzz and usage for certain television programs, it is becoming necessary to actually quantify the impact of Twitter on brand advertising. Current research shows that increased Twitter activity with movie box office releases is quantifiably related to opening-weekend box office gross revenue, and the use of Twitter resulted in increased interaction (Oh, 2013). In addition, mass-scale brand sentiment via the Twitter platform has been correlated to a level of 86.7% with the stock prices of the corresponding brand (Bollen, Mao & Zeng, 2011).