As long as I’ve been in the advertising business there has been a
very large question smoldering under the surface of my skin: Does
advertising that we deem to be more creative actually produce better
business results, or is that just a fond wish that “creatives” and our
supporters have invented to justify treating advertising as an art, and
not just a blunt instrument?
As a former copywriter and creative
director I am a strong believer in the power of creativity in
advertising. In fact, every neuron in my tiny little brain is committed
to this belief.
But there is another part of my brain (the part
that used to teach science) that tries to remind me about intellectual
honesty, and keeps saying to me, “How do you know this?”
I am not
a scholar on this subject. I have not gone through all the literature
and all the studies. But I have been exposed to some of the research on
the subject and it worries me.
The studies that I have seen and
read generally seem to take the following form. The researcher starts
with a group of ads that have been recognized as exceptionally creative
by experts or by respected awards organizations and compares their
real-world business effectiveness to advertising that has not been
recognized as such. The results are often convincing, and the “creative”
ads exhibit significantly superior effectiveness.
An argument one could make against this methodology (which I will not
make) is that it is dependent on two factors that ought not be taken at
face value. First, that the experts and award committees are actually
able to accurately discern levels of creativity. Creativity is a
notoriously difficult thing to define and the idea that the people who
have been tasked with defining it are particularly qualified to do so is
a difficult case to prove.
The second argument against this
methodology is about the business results that are used to measure
effectiveness. How do we know they are reliable? As someone who has
written more than his share of case histories, I am very sensitive to
the effect that imaginative writing can play in the description of
success.
If the people assessing creativity are not uniquely
qualified to do so, and if the measures of effectiveness are not wholly
reliable, then the conclusions cannot be taken seriously.
But I am
not going to criticize the methodology on this basis. For the sake of
argument, let’s assume that the experts and awards committees are fully
qualified to define and assess creativity and the metrics that are used
to define business success are fully accurate.
I still have a problem.
Creative
awards are usually presented in the year following the initiation of a
campaign. You can’t give awards for advertising created in 2020 until
the year is over. Consequently, awards committees and experts usually
don’t get together to make their determinations until “awards season” a
few months into the following year.
So there can be a lag time of
between 12 and 18 months between the time a campaign launches and the
determination of its level of “creativity” by the experts. In this lag
period there is every opportunity for the people who are going to be
charged with determining creativity at a later date to be exposed to
business results of campaigns. Trade publications, advertising insiders,
the business section of newspapers, and industry gossip are reporting
on winners and losers every day of the year.
It is highly likely
that the experts are reading and hearing reports of advertising
successes and failures throughout the year. By the time they are tasked
with determining levels of creativity, the experts and the awards
committees have a very good idea of what campaigns produced highly
effective advertising the previous year and what campaigns fell flat. Is
it realistic to expect these people to ignore what they know about
success and failure when they are assessing levels of creativity?
I
find that hard to believe. It seems to me only natural that an
individual will give higher grades for creativity to a campaign she
knows to have been effective than to one she knows to have bombed. It
seems highly unlikely that an awards judge will deem a campaign very
creative if he knows the campaign was a disaster, the agency was fired,
the marketing director replaced and the campaign pulled off the air.
I
am not implying that experts and awards committees are remiss in their
duties or unprincipled in their decision making. I am merely suggesting
that they are human. The likelihood that a human will take something he
knows to have been a massive failure and compare it favorably to
something he knows to have been a massive success is not high.
If
this is the case, then the process can be, to a worrying degree, a
tautology. Campaigns known to have been effective are presented as being
highly creative, and campaigns thusly deemed highly creative are
presented as proof of superior effectiveness.
It can be a very simple but obscure example of circular logic.
I
still firmly believe that creativity is the single most important
determination of advertising effectiveness. But I wish I had a more
substantial, scientific basis for that belief.
See Part 2 of this piece here.
