he Fundamental Templates of Quality Ads

Creative ideation is a highly complex process, which is difficult to formalize and control. Evidently, even in a complex thinking context certain patterns of creativity may emerge. Relying on such observed patterns may help in "organizing" the creative process by promoting routes that have been proven to lead to productive ideas and avoiding those that do not. The present research suggests that successful advertisements share and are characterized by such abstract patterns termed creativity templates. The theoretical rationale for the emergence of such templates and the empirical studies that detect the key creativity templates underlying quality ads indicate that the templates are identifiable, objectively verifiable, and generalizable across multiple categories. Studies 1 and 2 were designed to identify and describe the templates. Six major creativity templates were derived by inference from a sample of 200 highly evaluated print ads drawn from award-winning ad contests such as The One Show (Study 1). Judges found that 89% of the ads could be explained by the six creativity templates. Following a formal description of the templates and their versions, a study comparing 200 awardwinning and 200 nonwinning ads (Study 2) is reported. It was found that the two groups differed systematically in the number and distribution of creativity templates: 50% of the award-winning ads as opposed to only 2.5% of the nonwinning ads could be explained by the templates. Further validation of the template approach was obtained by manipulating presence or absence of templates in an experimental setting. In Study 3 groups of individuals were trained in template-based idea generation, an association technique, or not trained at all, prior to an ad-ideation task. Another group subsequently rated the ideas. Findings indicate that a priori knowledge of the templates was associated with the generation of higher quality ads in terms of creativity, brand attitude judgments, and recall (Study 4), with some variation in terms of feeling responses which included humor, emotion, and annoyance. The findings of the reported studies and several real-life applications conducted in leading ad agencies, indicate that the template taxonomy is a trainable, resource-saving, and effective tool. It simplifies and improves the decision-making process involved in designing advertising strategies. It can be applied either by hiring trained personnel employed by consulting firms, or by training the agency's own personnel to routinely evaluate past and current ads, and engage in creative activity. The template approach represents a step forward in defining a comprehensive model of the antecedents of outcome reactions to advertising stimuli. Improved understanding of the wide spectrum of reactions connecting the basic templates with end-user reactions is likely to be beneficial both for academicians and for practitioners. Such a framework can serve as a basis for a synthesis between the activity of creative professionals whose focal interest is the generation of ads, managers, whose main responsibility is strategy formulation, and academic activity, which focuses mainly on the consumer reaction-end of the advertising process. Hence, in addition to academicians, the relevant target audience is likely to include a wide array of communication-related personnel such as creative professionals and planners in advertising agencies, consultants, and brand managers. In addition, it is postulated that the template taxonomy provides the means to achieve "creativity expertise". Unlike the divergent thinking approaches, in which the required expertise is not necessarily related to the creativity process itself (e.g. individuals can be trained to be better moderators in brainstorming), the creativity template approach is trainable and has the capacity to measure and directly improve creativity outcomes. The template taxonomy facilitates the focused cognitive effort involved in generating new ideas, the capacity to access relevant information, and enables high memorability of the reduced set of information needed to perform the tasks. The fact that templates are less transient than the ideas produced does not mean that templates are permanent or that they are insensitive to changes over long term frameworks. Indeed, advertising reflects social norms and trends, and as such, long term social trends are expected to reshape the templates and provide conditions for the evolution of new templates. Nonetheless, the dynamics of template changes are expected to be much slower than the dynamics of changes in ad hoc idea generation. (Advertising Creativity; Advertising Strategy; Creativity in Marketing; Marketing Ideation Processes) 0732-2399/99/1803/0333/$05.00 MARKETING SCIENCE ? 1999 INFORMS 1526-548X electronic ISSN Vol. 18, No. 3, 1999, pp. 333-351 THE FUNDAMENTAL TEMPLATES OF QUALITY ADS Introduction Creativity in advertising frequently involves methods that encourage the generation of a large number of ad concepts (Batra, et al. 1996) on the assumption that the rewards of producing a large number of ideas will outweigh the costs (Winston 1990). The generation of new ideas in this manner tends to be highly unformalized and unsystematic. Often, such methods are based on the divergent hinking approach (e.g., focus groups, free association, and other projective techniques; see O'Guinn, et al. 1998) whereby judgment is suspended and ideas emerge by associative thinking in a "limitation free" environment. However, even in a divergent thinking context certain patterns of creativity may emerge. Creative teams often seek ways to become more productive as they progress from one creativity task to another. Common patterns relevant to different domains are sometimes identified (cf. Boden 1992; Dasgupta 1994; Weisberg 1992). These may then be applied on an ad hoc basis within a given advertising context, or even transported to other contexts. Such patterns will be more stable and less transient than the abundance of random ideas that emerge in the process of associative thinking. They may also help in "organizing" the creative process by promoting routes that have been proven to lead to productive ideas and avoiding those that do not. Nonetheless, even if they prove productive, such patterns tend to be idiosyncratic and they are often not verbally definable (Weisberg 1992). As such, they are likely to lack permanence and generality. In the present paper, it is posited that certain patterns are identifiable, objectively verifiable, and generalizable across categories. It is suggested that these patterns, termed creativity templates, underlie the generation of quality ads because they facilitate focused creativity, and lead to more effective outcomes. Let us portray these notions with an example. Figure la shows an ad for the 1989 French Open Tennis Championship sponsored by Penn (The One Show, 1989). The ad features a croissant-shaped tennis ball or, viewed differently, a croissant with a (Penn) tennisball surface. The pattern of this ad served in generating an ad featuring a hockey puck shaped tennis ball for the Canadian Open (Figure lb, The One Show, 1991) and a moisture ring of a tea cup for Penn's sponsorship Figure la Ad for the French Open Tennis Championship ~~~~~~~~~ S... ~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~............ .