Question

What Exactly Does Being “Creative” and “Effective” Mean?

An argument can be made that “effective” or successful advertising is usually being creative with a purpose. Certainly, the notion of effective advertising can vary from culture to culture. In the United Kingdom, a premium may be placed on being different, humorous, or out-of-the ordinary in differentiating campaigns from the mass of mediocre advertising.

In the United States, creative advertising is viewed more often as being “effective” in that the creativity has a purpose. That is, upon determining the specific tasks, or objectives that an advertising campaign must accomplish, it is the challenge of the advertising team—the advertising agency along with the client—to develop advertising executions that connect with the target audience, cut through the clutter, and position the brand optimally in view of the brand’s strengths relative to competitive brands. Importantly, the focus is on the original objectives for the campaign (e.g., ROI).

Certainly, it is easier to give examples of creative advertising than to offer a universal definition. Consider the following three examples of unique and creative messaging: (1) the E*TRADE baby campaign showing that online investment trading with E*TRADE is so easy, a baby could do it; (2) the Kia Soul’s dancing hamsters’ campaign (“Share Some Soul”); and (3) Nike’s “Back 4 The Future” shoe campaign, featuring actors from the original Back to the Future movies. (The first campaign was run on Super Bowls from 2008 to 2011, whereas the last two examples were some of the top viral ads for 2011.)5

Jazz musician Charlie Mingus described creativity about as well as it can be described: “Creativity is more than just being different. Anybody can play weird, that’s easy. What’s hard is to be simple as Bach. Making the simple complicated is commonplace, making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”6 The following section discusses several elements found in “creative” ads.7

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Creativity: The CAN Elements

Although identifying advertising creativity is challenging, there is some agreement that “creative” ads share three common features: connectedness, appropriateness, and novelty. These are the “CAN” elements.8

Connectedness

Connectedness addresses whether an advertisement reflects empathy, creates a bond, and is relevant with the target audience’s basic needs and wants as they relate to making a brand-choice decision in a product category. For example, if competitive price and speed of delivery are paramount to corporate purchasing agents, then ads that reflect these motivations are connected.

Appropriateness

Appropriateness means that an advertisement must provide information that is pertinent to the advertised brand relative to other brands in the product category. An advertisement is appropriate to the extent that the message is on target for delivering the brand’s positioning strategy and capturing the brand’s relative strengths and weaknesses vis-a-vis competitive brands. Appropriate ads also are coherent in the sense that all message elements work in concert to deliver a singular, unambiguous message.

Novelty

Novel ads are unique, fresh, and unexpected. They differ from consumers’ expectations of a typical ad for a brand in a particular product category. Novelty draws consumers’ attention to an ad so that they engage in more effortful information processing, such as attempting to comprehend the meaning of the advertised brand. Unoriginal advertising is unable to break through the competitive clutter and grab the consumer’s attention.

Advertising agencies sometimes develop ads that are unique, different, unexpected, and weird. Yet, novel advertisements can be considered creative only if they also are connected and appropriate. Such ads CAN be effective!

Getting Messages to “Stick”

Beyond being creative, advertisers want their advertising to “stick.” Sticky ads are ads for which the audience comprehends the advertiser’s intended message; they are remembered, and they change the target audience’s brand-related opinions or behavior.9 Such ads have lasting impact: they stick.

What are the features of sticky messages in general? We now describe six common features of messages that tend to stick—that is, have relatively lasting impact.10

Simplicity

Sticky advertisements are both simple and profound. An advertisement can be said to be simple when it represents the brand’s core idea or key positioning statement (i.e., the advertising execution is stripped to its critical essence and captures the key element that needs to be communicated). Simple advertisements are appropriate in the sense of the term’s CAN elements of creativity usage.

Unexpectedness

Sticky advertisements generate interest and curiosity when they deviate from audience members’ expectations. As the marketplace is cluttered with commercial messages, communicators must overcome consumers’ natural tendency to attend selectively only those messages that are relevant to their goals. Note the similarity of unexpectedness to the novelty element in the list of creative CAN features. Sticky messages also are creative. As depicted earlier, hamsters dancing to party music (in the Kia Soul campaign) is clearly unexpected by viewers.

Concreteness

Sticky ideas possess concrete images as compared to abstract representations. As discussed in further detail in Chapter 6, advertisers “concretize” their messages to facilitate both consumer learning and retrieval of brand information. Concretizing is based on the straightforward idea that it is easier for people to remember and retrieve concrete versus abstract information. Concretizing is accomplished by using tangible, substantive (i.e., concrete) words and demonstrations. For example, a marketer of pickup trucks demonstrates concreteness when visually showing the truck lugging a huge load versus an abstract claim of just being “tough.”

Credibility

Sticky advertisements are believable. They have a sense of authority and provide reasons why they should be accepted as fact. For example, the American Dental Association seal of approval for cavity prevention was advertised in Crest campaigns in the 1960s, which aided Crest’s market leadership position for years. Chapter 11 discusses in greater detail the nature and importance of credibility when describing the role of celebrity endorsers.

Emotionality

People care about ideas that generate emotions and tap into feelings. For example, fun and upbeat commercials (e.g., E*TRADE baby, Kia Soul dancing hamsters) may generate positive feelings and affect in the form of happiness, joy, cheerfulness, amusement, and other favorable emotions. In general, advertisers can get people to care about their brands by appealing to emotions that are relevant to the product category in which the advertised brand competes.

Storytelling

The sixth element of sticky messages is telling stories. By definition, stories have plots, characters, and settings—all features of which are contained in the long-running ad campaign for Subway restaurants based on the real-life character named Jared.11 Subway’s advertising agency has used Jared’s story as the basis for its campaign touting that Subway sandwiches can promote weight loss. At one point in his life, Jared weighed in excess of 400 pounds and had a 60-inch waist. Following a hospital visit after experiencing chest pains, his physician father warned him that he might not live past 35 unless he undertook a dramatic weight loss regimen. This got Jared’s attention, and he proceeded to develop his own, all-Subway diet consisting of eating a foot-long veggie sub for lunch and a six-inch turkey sub for dinner. This diet, along with increased exercise, resulted in Jared’s losing nearly 250 pounds. To make a long story short, the Subway chain eventually learned of Jared’s personal diet and built an advertising campaign around his story. This story is inspiring, and it obviously has stuck with thousands of consumers who now believe that Subway sandwiches are healthier than the fare at other fast-food restaurants.

To sum up, sticky messages are those that have lasting impact. The elements of sticky messages are Simplicity, Unexpectedness, Concreteness, Credibility, Emotionality, and Storytelling, or SUCCESs.12

Illustrations of Creative and Sticky Advertising Executions

In addition to the highly creative (and effective!) advertisement presented in the chapter opening Marcom Insight insert, the following examples illustrate individual advertisements and advertising campaigns that, in the authors’ opinion, register high marks on the CAN facets of creativity and the SUCCESs elements of stickiness.

Miss Clairol: “Does She … or Doesn’t She?”

Imagine yourself employed as a copywriter in a New York advertising agency in 1955. You have just been assigned creative responsibility for a product that heretofore (as of 1955) had not been nationally marketed or advertised. The product: hair coloring. The brand: Miss Clairol. Your task: devise a creative strategy that will convince millions of American women to purchase Miss Clairol hair coloring—at the time called Hair Color Bath. This challenge occurred, by the way, in a cultural context where it was considered patently inappropriate for respectable women to smoke in public, wear long pants, or color their hair.

The person actually assigned this task was Shirley Polykoff, a copywriter for the Foote, Cone & Belding agency. At the time of the Miss Clairol campaign, there was no hair-coloring business. Women were even ashamed to color their own hair due to social disapproval and because at-home hair color often turned out looking unnatural. A product that provided a natural look stood a strong chance of being accepted, but women would had to be convinced that an advertised hair-coloring product would, in fact, give them that highly desired natural look.

Shirley Polykoff explains the background of the famous advertising line that convinced women Miss Clairol would produce a natural look.

In 1933, just before I was married, my husband had taken me to meet the woman who would become my mother-in-law. When we got in the car after dinner, I asked him, “How’d I do? Did your mother like me?” and he told me his mother had said, “She paints her hair, doesn’t she?” He asked me, ““Well, do you?” It became a joke between my husband and me; anytime we saw someone who was stunning or attractive we’d say, “Does she, or doesn’t she?” Twenty years later [at the time she was working on the Miss Clairol account], I was walking down Park Avenue talking out loud to myself, because I have to hear what I write. The phrase came into my mind again. Suddenly, I realized, “That’s it. That’s the campaign.” I knew that [a competitive advertising agency] couldn’t find anything better. I knew that immediately. When you’re young, you’re very sure about everything.13

The advertising line “Does she … or doesn’t she?” actually was followed with the tagline “Hair color so natural only her hairdresser knows for sure!” The headline attracted the reader’s attention, whereas the tagline promised a conclusive benefit: The product works so well that only an expert would recognize that her hair color was not her actual color. This brilliant advertising persuaded millions of American women to become product users and led to dramatically increased sales of Miss Clairol.14 In terms of the six stickiness elements, this campaign performs extremely well with respect to at least five of these features: simplicity, concreteness, credibility, emotionality, and storytelling.

Unit 5 Discussion Topic 1

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Sound advertising practices include the “CAN elements” of connectedness, appropriateness and novelty that are important for a creative advertisement. This means that the audience can relate to the advertisement on some level; the ad provides information and is appropriate; and the ad is fresh and unexpected. However, the advertisement novelty should not overwhelm the message. We have all seen advertisements which were very novel or creative, but when they were finished, we could not remember the product or service they were attempting to sell.

Topic 1: CAN Advertising Elements

Using the CAN elements as covered on page 262 of the textbook:

Discuss an advertisement that you have seen on the Internet and how it meets or does not meet these CAN requirements.

Make sure to provide the URL link to the advertisement. Then respond to your classmates’ postings.

page 262

Answer 1

Kia cars used a highly controversial ad to promote the dual-zone climate control feature. This ad can really be an example of creativity gone badly wrong. The ad had subtle hints of promoting pedophilia.

URL: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/23/award-winning-ad-promotes-pedophilia_n_883023.html

Indeed the use of school girl in the given ad as sexual objects is quite demeaning and objectifying. The reputed companies have some moral responsibility for what they are portraying in public. Kia has been a reputed automobile company . Companies need to keep their intentions clear while designing the advertising and marketing strategies of their products. It has been seen that advertisers try to play psychologically with the mindset of consumers by over-exaggerating a product’s benefits. This exaggeration leads to advertising persuasiveness in the minds of the consumers and they decide to buy the product based on the false claims. This is unethical and misleading advertisement strategy. The ethical issues, which need to be kept in mind while designing any advertising or marketing strategy, are exploitation of women and children, discrimination of any kind, subliminal perception as well as the social issues prevalent during the telecast time. The given advertisement of Kia cars is a clear example of exploitation of women and young girls and objectifying their image. This is highly unethical and companies must take care that this kind of representation in company ads must never be repeated.