Is creativity all it’s cracked up to be?
By James Hurman,
Imagine I told you that I’d had ten girlfriends. Ten women who were, each in their different way, fantastic girlfriends, but all of whom had the same shortcoming: driving. They were terrible at it generally, and found parallel parking particularly challenging. Then imagine I told you that because of this utterly conclusive experience my belief about all women was that they were dreadful drivers.
Depending on your gender, you’d probably either be unconvinced or enraged by my conclusion. And you’d be right. To take a miniscule set of experiences and extrapolate it out to form a universal belief is precarious to say the least. Our chances of being wrong are extremely high.
And yet this is exactly how we form our beliefs about advertising effectiveness.
Every marketer has a set of personal advertising experiences. For some, the more creative advertising has tended to be the more effective. For others, it’s the opposite, and in fact the less creative work has driven the best results.
Some of us are highly experienced, having worked on dozens of campaigns over our careers. But even in those cases, our entire life’s work represents only the most microscopic percentage of all advertising.
But it’s those tiny sets of personal experience that we use to form our belief about what works and what doesn’t. We never ladder up and study what the truth really is. If our girlfriends were bad drivers, then all women are bad drivers.
In my first years in advertising I worked with both advocates and sceptics of creativity. “Creativity works and we should be creatively driven,” said some. “Creativity is folly and we shouldn’t be distracted by it,” said others.
Those leaders all had decades of success stories. And they were equally passionate and convincing in their rhetoric. But they were all calling only on subjective beliefs formed by their own small sets of personal experience.
Four years ago, in an attempt to understand for myself who was right, I looked for ways to see beyond the anecdotal examples. As it turned out, enough people had collected enough data to compare large sets of creative and uncreative campaigns and agencies. It soon became clear I’d be able to find out for sure whether or not more creative advertising was more effective advertising.
Three years later I’d published two major studies of my own, and found a further 13: three were from industry people like me, and the remaining ten were from universities where professional academics had studied the effects of creativity. The studies came from the UK, the US, Europe, Asia and Australasia, offering pretty significant coverage of the advertising globe. And what gave me the greatest confidence in the findings was that every single study reached the same conclusion. To this day I’ve found no broad-based data sets or academic research that supports the view that a less creative approach is a more effective one.
Oh, and by the way, all of my partners have been excellent drivers. Especially you, dear.
James Hurman is planning director at Colenso BBDO
Comments
Anonymous_Author©
As well as lack of support for a view that less creative is more effective, do the same studies conclude more creative is more effective, or is the continuum upon which creative effectiveness sits rather open ended?
What do the less creative yet highly effective results indicate? What about the subjectivity of 'creative' and its inherent 'degree of' for both creator and audience. Isn't the level of creativeness an arbitrary and indistinct abstraction; therefore, using the logic that says in even the least creative application, some creativity is always involved, the conclusion defaults to: more of said creative is needed? If creativity can be truly measured in terms of outputs, it has likely moved further along a (non-asemic) continuum towards being 'less creative' but 'as effective', I think.
Vincent Heeringa
Eh? Asymmetric wha?
The measure of creativity is award-winning, in itself a collection of subjective judgements but collectively as close to an objective measurement as you can get on such things.
And yes, on James' argument the more creative (that is award winning) the greater the impact on sales volumes and brand values.
Which is exactly what you find with brands such as VW, which has been doing award winning ads for as long as it has been a successful company.
But what do the studies say James - the more creative the more the success?
James Hurman
Yes - the data shows that as campaigns increase in effectiveness (according to hard commercial measures) they also increase in creativity, measured by the amount of Gunn Report points won. The continuum is actually pretty clear, and remarkably predictable. For the purposes of these studies creativity tends to be judged according to creative award wins, and Gunn Report points (the industry standard for measuring creativity). And although we can argue about whether creative award wins are a true measure of creativity, the point of the book is to uncover whether or not “creatively awarded advertising” is more effective, rather than attempt to resolve a definition of “creativity”.
Vincent Heeringa
I wonder if anyone has made a similar connection between innovation and financial success?
The measure of innovation would relatively easy to establish - it would be a combo of the rate of new product development, the growth in formal IP protections (patents, trademarks etc), the investment in R&D and the number and seniority of staff with innovation responsibilities.
My hunch is that innovative companies are also successful financially for the same reasons as the book argues: creative and innovative people care more and pay attention to the details which in turn creates better performance all around.
Does such research exist?
TroyMcClure
The book doesn't say that, Vincent. It simply argues that there is a link. It doesn't discuss why.
As for innovation, it's clearly all the rage but its impact is overstated. As Andrew Lewis recently wrote in this website, innovations in the bacon business have not grown the category, simply created a bewildering array of choice. Same with grocery in general:
“Years of line extensions, packaging developments and new brand launches have created amazingly complicated environments. In 1970, a typical supermarket in North America had about 7,800 items. By 1993, the figure had more than doubled to 17,000 and hit 45,000 in 2006.
“We innovate to find growth, but the byproduct of this advancement is a shopping environment most don’t have the capacity—or desire—to navigate.”
Innovation is also the cause of the financial crisis; it's thanks to complicated financial derivatives that we are in mess we are.
Innovation is not a panacea - it's possibly a nightmare.
Hazel Phillips
Now Mr Hurman I have to confess I haven't read the book (yet) but how can the creativity/effectiveness link account for the (rumoured) success of the likes of the Harvey Norman ads?
Does the industry need an honesty check regarding the creative weighting in the Effie awards?
Surely if the Effies are about effectiveness only, the creative weighting should be thrown out? Or would that potentially reveal an ugly underbelly of shouty-shouty retail ads that - shockhorrorfilthprobe! - really do work? As I understand it, that's the reason for the creative weighting to have been introduced in the first place.
Andy Blackburn
I love your aguement that 'innovation caused the financial crisis' - I guess you can draw a very long bow and claim that the packaging up of sub-prime mortgages was a financial sector innovation, and yes, one of the major culprits in GFC One. More probably however, lack of any workable financial sector regulation in USA markets is the root cause.
People are inherently innovative. New stuff happens. If you ban new stuff probably more of it will happen. More and more the innovation industry or national innovation ecosystem is focusing on the commercialisation of ideas and IP from our universities and research institutes as well as from smart inventors, designers and entreprenuers.
I guess you are correct that there are hundreds of varities of pasta sauce for example etc now…but I guess this is FMCG sustaining innovation, or product line extension.
The innovation that makes us in the innovation eco system salivate with anticipation is the disruptive category of innovation, the industry creating kind; Cleantech, Biotech, Communications etc.
So I guess to end; on behalf of innovation professionals around the world, fair Cop! I sincerely apologise for any part in causing GFC One and I for one will definitely try not to cause GFC Two. We really will stick to the ethical and job creation stuff from now on in I promise :-)
Louise Webster
To add to Andy's comments….a common myth is that innovation is just about products and services - wrong.
Innovation is about applying creative thinking to everything that we do: to the way we develop systems and processes, approach problems and day to day raodblocks, manage our projects, our people and teams, develop buisness models and change and adapt to the growing demands of our customers.
Innovation is not something you can buy - it is a philospohy and a way of working. Its about taking time to understand the real systemic issues in order to develop solutions that drive the very best results for your business / industry or group and ultimately your customers.
To me innovation is all about change that adds long term sustainable value (to businesses and to people). Under this definition you may argue that many of the 'innovations' that we see today just don't measure up, and maybe so. But this doesn't mean innovation isn't a valuable persuit for those of us that get it right!
Happy Innovating!
TroyMcClure
Financial innovations have been the cause of many financial traumas: the invention of futures led to Tulipmania and South Sea Bubble, professional equity speculation (a new type of industry at the time) caused the Depression.
Innovation undoubtedly has it benefits (cheese toasty makers!) but its dangers are unacknowledged by its boosters. Think of the negative impact of nuclear innovations for example or the deaths resulting from invention of gun powder.
Next time some idiot knocks you off your bike with her Remuera tractor think about how much you love the invention of the SUV.
Johnny
Too many idiots inappropriately being lent too much money they had no hope of paying back because the US's Community Reinvestment Act said so, was the cause of the GFC. Innovation was as much to blame for that as the Pope was for the Holocaust.
TroyMcClure
My point exactly. It was Bill Clinton's untested innovations in financial deregulation that caused so many people to be given sub-prime loans. It was the innovations in derivatives that mixed up the bad loans with the good amongst bank-debt traders and it was the innovations in the hedge funds that allowed people to trade equities based on the total deck of cards.
All these innovations in the financial sector are the result of poor and untested deregulation of the money system. Like I said, innovation is dangerous.
Martin Grant
James, something off topic but really on topic.
This is from a piece of research by Fournaise out of the USA: “75% of all CEOs believe marketers lack credibility and 67% think that unlike CFOs and Sales, marketers don’t think enough like businesspeople: they focus too much on the creative, “arty” and “fluffy” side of marketing and not enough on its business science, and rely too much on their ad agencies to come up with the next big idea.”
So, the pressure to be “creative” (often termed as arty and fluffy - their words not mine) is probalby harming the client's personal reputation and career prospects within the organisation.
Sorry, but “creative or not” is actually a completely spurious topic of conversation dreamt up by the lure of highly alluring creative awards.
It is time that the ad industry grew up, moved on and started thinking about somebody other than itself.
PS I appreciate your predicament as I was a planner and a suit.
James Hurman
Hazel! There you are. And yes quite right - we have adjusted the Effies this year to have less of a focus on the creativity of the idea and more of a focus on how well the work translates and executes the strategy. However, even in years past, the work that's won has often been of the less creative variety, for example the Farmers Red Dot Sale stuff, our Whiska's work from last year etc - showing that the creative elements of the judging have always played second fiddle to the results.
As for the shouty retail ads - yes, it's true, that if you want to (a) drop your pants, slash your margins and offer what you're selling as cheaply as possible and then (b) spend heavily on expensive TV media to tell consumers, then, yeah, you'll see a sales uplift without much creativity. The reason you don't see much of that in effectiveness awards is that the return on investment of that strategy tends to be rather poor. The point of creativity is being able to charge more and advertise less - a recipe for proper profitability.
And Martin - I think it was the same research study that found that the reason CEO's thought marketers were sketchy was that they were always asking for more money, but, unlike other disciplines, could never quantify the return they'd see from the extra spend.
It was that very complaint that prompted my research and book - which is all about being able to quantify the return on marketing investment, which happens to be higher for more creative work.
Ultimately, as 'spurious' as many of us like to believe creativity and creative awards are, the fact remains that every single time anyone in the world has run the numbers on statistically meaningful groups of more and less creative campaigns, the data always show that the creatively awarded ones have been vastly more effective. And with absolutely no known evidence to the contrary, don't you agree it's difficult not to see the rhetoric against creativity as spurious?
Boris
There is only one kind of creativity that counts in the real worl of business & that's the kind that gets sales results. Everything else is nothing more than attempting to gain the recognition of self interested peers on the look out for their next creative job. Without sales there is no advertsing industry end of story. Brand awareness & creativity as measures of success are over rated. That's not to say creativity isn't important. It's just not the most meaningful measure.
Vincent Heeringa
What about brand building? Coke's balance sheet is not just retained profits from sales, it also includes a huge (the majority) chunk of goodwill, which entirely associated with brand.
If marketers want to be taken seriously they need to balance sheets as much as the P&L.
Lawrence
Hmm, so the latest Telecom campaign, very creative? Thus more effective? Possibly effective in respect of getting people talking, but as to engendering respect for their brand, or the ABs for that matter? No. So, creative? Maybe. Effective? I'd suggest not. And how again do we define creativity?
Carl
Surely using creative awards as the yardstick undermines the credibility of these studies. I mean, so many awards are stacked with entries that never get broadcast, or if they do they are only broadcast as favours to mates in agency land.
James I reckon you need a better measure of creativity. Or actually find a better theme that joins financial performance and advertising/marketing execution.
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