Creativity in Advertising

Werner Reinartz and Peter Saffert in their article on „Creativity in Advertising: When It Works And When It Doesn't" which was published in Harvard Business Review in June 2013, demonstrate what the impact of creative advertising is on sales revenues, what the key dimensions of creativity are, and show their results of research on TV advertising campaigns in Germany from 2005 to 2010.

Authors of the article have done the research on creativity in advertising campaign in order to find the correlation between sales revenues and consumers reactions on ads of products.

Moreover, Werner Reinartz and Peter Saffert based their research mostly on Torrance's Test of Creative Thinking which is used to measure advertisements strengths and weaknesses by using five dimensions. The first dimension is originality, which concentrates on exclusive ideas and attributes and original advertisement compares things that are sometimes strange and unusual. The other aspect includes flexibility and it has the ability to show completely different usage of advertised product. The following one is elaboration which demonstrates how advertisers go one step forward to strengthen their products image using surprising ideas. The fourth one - synthesis combines different things and ideas to design outstanding story line. And finally ads are also measured by artistic value which means that advertisement becomes more like "a piece of art rather than blatant sales pitch. So by using these five dimensions writers of this article asked to evaluate advertisements on Germany TV on scale of 1 to 7. Then they compared this survey results with campaign's sales profitability and spending on advertising.

According to the article, the whole research shows that one euro invested in a right way can be very successful for product's sales. Also authors say that companies sometimes creativity understand as originality, but results showed that investment in this dimension is least efficient. On the other hand when companies try to combine different types of creativity, advertisement becomes more effective. The other insight of the article is that category of a product also means a lot for creativity application. In fact, more creative advertisements are more effective but on the other hand authors argue that companies sometimes concentrate on the wrong creativity dimension in their ads.