Altered states: The effects of media and technology on the creative process in advertising agencies

The media environment has changed dramatically due to the explosion of new channels and technological innovations, which has had important ramifications not only for advertising, but also for advertising agencies and their creative processes. Using a series of interviews with agency creative directors and digital strategists, this study investigated how agencies have addressed these challenges and taken advantage of the opportunities. Its two key contributions are an updated model of the creative process and the identification of four alternative structures agencies use to create the core concept. The study also found a paradigm shift from framing technology in terms of its production value, to framing technology in terms of its strategic and creative value, as technology specialists have become involved in the strategic and creative stages of campaign development.     

Advertising industry evolution: agency creativity,fluid teams and diversity. An exploratory investigation

ABSTRACT

The advertising industry is in a state of flux, where the agency model is evolving alongside todays’ fast paced digital environment. This paper reviews the drivers of change in the industry and explores how creative advertising agencies are evolving and developing their team resources to improve the creative product using the resource based view (RBV) as a theoretical lens. The study adopted a qualitative approach using a key informant strategy with 16 interviews with Creative Directors, Chief Executive Officer’s and Heads of Planning and Account Directors. The findings suggest that agencies who embrace team functional diversity, include external stakeholders and develop team fluidity as a dynamic capability will enhance agency creativity.     

Measuring the organisational impact on creativity

A creative code of perceived qualities about acceptable creativity within advertising agencies has been shown to affect creative practitioners’ boundaries of creative expression. This multi stage, qualitative and quantitative study developed a tool to measure the intensity of this creative code. After development of a model based on qualitative research, expert evaluations and exploratory factor analysis, three dimensions - predictability, agency creative identity and social influence - were supported through confirmatory factor analysis. The ability to measure the intensity of the creative code offers researchers a way to study its effects on other variables in the creative process within advertising agencies.     

A tool for evaluating advertising concepts: Desirable characteristics as viewed by creative practitioners

Creativity is critical to advertising yet highly subjective. Testing to evaluate alternatives, if done, is often conducted at later stages that are expensive and wasteful. This study examined a set of characteristics about creativity from creative advertising practitioners. These characteristics were subjected to a three-part quantitative analysis that produced a model with four dimensions – novelty, utility, affect, and humor. Further testing showed that the model was useful in predicting the level of creativity in print advertisements, and the tool may be useful for the early evaluation of concepts.     

广告创意产业的差异化竞争策略

中国广告市场的逆向选择现象是广告公司同质化竞争的必然结果,也是影响广告创意产业竞争力提升的关键因素。本文运用信息经济学的逆向选择理论和企业竞争优势理论,对我国广告市场存在的逆向选择现象、危害及其成因进行深入分析,指出差异化代理是解决广告市场逆向选择问题的根本途径,并具体阐述了广告创意产业差异化竞争的四种策略。     

Is there gender bias when creative directors judge advertising? Name cue effect in ad evaluation

A lack of women in creative departments has been documented in previous research. These departments are seen as a male fraternity subculture in advertising agencies, where women experience many difficulties in their career progress. One of these drawbacks is gender bias in the selection of ideas' process. Male creative directors are believed to promote ideas created by men within a homosocial environment. This female perception emerged from previous qualitative research is studied experimentally for the first time. Almost 90 advertising creative directors and higher level positions assessed ads created by students in an advertising university course. In the current study, we explore the effects of ad gender authorship. Results revealed an absence of gender bias based on ad name cues, neither the gender of the ad creators nor the creatives affected the evaluations. The findings are discussed and future research is proposed.     

Market Research and Advertising Strategy in Portuguese Agencies: Perspectives of Professionals

SUMMARY

The advertising campaign development process is frequently described in manuals and textbooks. Nevertheless, the empirical perspective gives us a better understanding of the real world. In this study, we tried to understand, to systematize, and to describe the process of research and strategy in advertising agencies. To accomplish this objective we conducted 25 in-depth interviews with advertising agency professionals in Portugal. Cross-analysis of the statements allowed us to identify 5 themes: research done by the client before providing the brief to the agency, client's brief, information gathering done by the agency, brief's discussion inside the agency, and creative brief.     

Global Issues in Selecting Athlete Endorsers for National Markets: A Macroinvestigation

ABSTRACT

Little advertising research explores the role of culture in selecting celebrity endorsers. The purpose of this study is to explore how the selection process of athlete endorsers is shaped by national contexts. Based on interviews with advertising practitioners in 10 countries, the study reveals similarities in practitioners’ thinking across countries on a variety of matters related to athlete endorsement. It reveals the importance given by practitioners to the “cultural attractiveness” of national athlete endorsers when using them to connect with their national audience and shows that the selection process depends greatly on various cultural pressures linked to sporting traditions of each country. The study also shows how practitioners believe that athlete endorsers should be used mainly to generate brand and advertising awareness principally under pressure from clients’ emotional input.     

Client influence and advertising standardization: a survey of ad agencies

With increased globalization of markets, the standardization of products, services, and promotion activities has streamlined the work performed by advertising agencies. In this study, managing directors of Australian and US advertising agencies were questioned about the extent their clients influence agency functions and the degree of standardization used. It was found that copywriting was the main service offered and the clients usually have a major influence on their services. As for those that handle multi-country campaigns, older agencies tend to be more involved in international markets, and there was some degree of standardizing of campaigns and creative work.     

Seeing the market: performative sensemaking and the case of advertising agencies and their clients

ABSTRACT

How do market intermediaries help other market actors see the market and their opportunities for action within it? This article introduces a theoretical framework of performative sensemaking to explore this question using the case of advertising agencies and their clients. Drawing on 12 months of participant observation and 81 interviews conducted across four general market American advertising agencies, the article illustrates how advertising practitioners provide their clients with visions of what the market is and what opportunities for action lie within it, developing advertising campaigns to match that vision. These performed accounts of the market are dynamically negotiated and socially embedded, reflecting the identities of the clients, their target audiences, and the intermediaries themselves. Because intermediaries dramaturgically perform these interpretations of the market for their client in micro-level interactions, they must also deal with contestation and negotiation over their visions of the market.     

Korean Advertising Practitioners’ Perspectives on Celebrity Endorsement

Practitioners’ perspectives have been neglected to some extent. Research on practitioners’ perspectives is important because it will provide valuable information, especially on how theories have been reflected in practice. The study investigates Korean advertising practitioners’ perspectives on celebrity endorsement in advertising campaigns. By comparing the perspective between advertising practitioners and that from their counterparts on the client side, this study may provide insights into their respective roles in advertising campaigns. This study finding suggests that Korean advertising practitioners consider a celebrity's likeability as the most important criterion when selecting a celebrity endorser. The most important reason why they employ a celebrity endorser is that celebrity endorsement helps generate awareness of the brand. In addition, concerns over celebrity endorsement as well as limitations and suggestions for future research have been discussed.     

Ad agencies

This article highlights advertising agencies as marketplace icons. The role of ad agencies in creating iconic brands can sometimes be obscured, yet ad agencies are central to how the contemporary marketplace works. While ad agencies are no longer the hegemonic instance of consumer culture that they were from the 1950s to the 1990s, they have adapted to today's democratic advertisingscape by shepherding cultural content produced elsewhere to market. Ad agencies have remained the engine behind significant shifts in consumer culture, such as the warming of relations between music and advertising, by acting as the ‘midwife’ between art and commerce, facilitating new cultural practices in the process.     

MNE executive insights into international advertising programme standardisation

The standardisation/adaptation debate in international advertising has been a key topic of discussion among practitioners and academics for over 40 years (Agarwal 1995). The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors that influence executive decisions to standardise or adapt as determined by experienced international marketing executives working for large multinational enterprises (MNEs). The investigation initially provides a review of existing literature about the constructs under investigation and then, through in-depth qualitative interviews, it aims to develop an understanding of the factors executives consider important in the standardisation/adaptation decision in order to develop their international advertising strategies. This paper suggests that recognition of the impact of competition, culture, education, marketing institution and consumer related determinants have increased in importance over the years, affecting decisions of advertising theme, creative expression and media mix. Of these, advertising theme is the easiest and most appropriately standardised theme, whereas, creative expression and media mix are most susceptible to adaptation as per the requirement of the MNEs. The paper concludes by highlighting managerial and academic implications.     

Professionals' views of comparative advertising and the scholarly research literature: A review and synthesis

Comparative advertisements that contrast identifiable, competing products or services may be among advertising's most important tactical weapons. Despite nearly a century of use in the USA, growing use by advertisers in many other countries, and decades of scholarly research, some researchers continue to argue that the status of empirical knowledge regarding comparative advertising's effectiveness remains equivocal. This study addresses this equivocality with a review of the research literature and comparisons with the findings of a recent survey of US advertising creative executives. The findings reveal substantial agreement among the beliefs of academic researchers and advertising professionals in regard to when and how comparative advertising will likely be effective. In addition to offering confirming evidence that academic researchers and advertising professionals do sometimes arrive at the same destination in regard to their shared understandings of advertising effects, the findings also point the way toward important directions for future research on comparative advertising.     

公益广告设计——内容为王

以《泉州晚报》近年获奖公益广告作品为例,结合多年公益广告创作与教学实践,论证广告内容在公益广告创作中的重要性,探讨如何通过对广告内容的设计,来提高公益广告的创作质量。     

Stereotypical or just typical: how do US practitioners view the role and function of gender stereotypes in advertisements?

There is a long and diverse literature on gender stereotypes in advertising; however, US practitioners’ perspectives on the role and function of stereotypes in advertising remain unknown. Understanding professionals’ views on whether and how stereotypes communicate is important for anyone who believes it beneficial to reduce future stereotypical representations. Using qualitative interviews with 42 practitioners, this study detailed seven themes concerning professionals’ perceptions of the role and function of stereotypes in advertising, including beliefs that stereotypes are based in truth, are attractive to audiences, communicate quickly, simplify processing, prevent distraction, prevent thinking, and are the obvious solution. Practitioners felt stereotypes were used most appropriately when they were subverted or challenged in advertising messages. Stereotypes were most inappropriate when they reinforced negative perceptions. Four factors believed to drive the use of stereotypes in advertising are discussed.     

Agency practitioners’ meta-theories of advertising

Research on practitioner theories of advertising uncovered that agency practitioners not only have definite theoretical beliefs about how advertising works, they also have meta-theoretical beliefs, fundamental presuppositions about the nature and possibility of knowledge in advertising. The meta-theoretical belief in creativity and its dictum of ‘no rules’ was found to be more important than any other guiding principle in advertising work. The primacy of creativity denies the possibility of any other moderator-focused theories that would prescribe ‘rules’ for creative content. Practitioners believe that the ontological status of advertising (as a territory defined by creativity, art and tacit skill) places it mostly outside the reach of scientific modelling. While practitioners acknowledge that knowledge about advertising is ‘layered’ (i.e. certain aspects of it are more explainable by the legitimation system of science), they also insist that the creative ‘layer’ is much thicker than other layers. A further qualifying factor is practitioners’ epistemological scepticism, which questions the validity of both academic and commercial social research as applied to advertising, and suggests instead that knowledge about advertising is better understood as ‘common sense’. The study’s findings have fundamental consequences for the professional aspirations of the advertising industry as well as the academician–practitioner gap in advertising.     

Ethical limits to the intrusiveness of online advertising formats: A critical review of Better Ads Standards

ABSTRACT

This article argues that advertising ethics, traditionally focused on ad contents and vulnerable audiences, should be also applied to ad format intrusiveness. The increasing appearance of highly intrusive advertising formats resulted in an extraordinarily growth of ad blocking systems. To fight the economic costs of the ad blocker phenomenon, the most relevant agents of the industry have created a never seen Coalition for Better Ads including marketers, publishers, and agencies worldwide. This article analyses the experiments carried out by the Coalition to create Better Ads Standards establishing the limits of ad format intrusiveness to be implemented worldwide by means of self-regulation. Based on classical and current approaches to advertising ethics, this work explains that highly annoying ads should not only be banned for practical reasons but for overpassing ethical limits in terms of respect for the persuadee, equity of the persuasive appeal, and social responsibility for the common good. A basic exploratory replication study is presented to simulate further research on the ethical limits of intrusive advertising. Establishing which ad formats are allowed to continue and which ones should gradually disappear is such a relevant process for many stakeholders that it requires further discussion by consumers and scholars.     

Has Advertising Lost Its Meaning? Views of UK and US Millennials

The findings of a study of Millennials in USA and the UK—an increasingly important and digitally savvy segment of consumers—reveal that they see advertising as Companies promoting a product or service to people through media. Their perception is simple and all-encompassing with no evidence that they distinguish between different types of media or different types of communication. Some variation between the views of Millennials in the two countries is also identified, although this is less than expected. The findings contribute to an important and continuing debate among academics and marketing practitioners over how advertising should be defined in today’s multichannel environment. The findings are also compared with other recent definitions of advertising, and their implications are discussed.     

The Creative Search for an Insight in Account Planning: An Absorptive Capacity Approach

In advertising agencies, insight is frequently sought to solve advertising problems. However, the ideation process of the account planner is not well understood. Viewing account planning through a lens of absorptive capacity suggests that planning is about identifying and assimilating external information about consumers for use in the creative process. Account planners thus need to search deliberately for insight and work hard to express it to the creatives, who then exploit it to develop powerful creative ideas. The study adopts an in-depth grounded theory investigation of the insight phenomenon among 20 Sydney-based account planners. The findings reveal that identifying and applying insight is a highly creative process. The account planner uses research, personal knowledge domains, challenging conventions, borrowed sources, and central narrative extension to search for insights. However, because not all insights are equal, this study also uncovered what account planners consider quality insight. These include attributes of originality, relatability, usability, and vision. These findings provide guidelines for marketers and account planners who seek insight in framing an advertising message.