Summary The present study aimed to examine the influence of advertising creativity on the effectiveness of commercial and noncommercial advertisements in a situation involving attention competitions. Consequently, a dual‐task paradigm in which an additional task of time production was completed while viewing advertisements that were creative or common was used. Both memory performance and self‐rated purchase intent were assessed. The results showed that advertising creativity has an impact on recognition and purchase intent, with greater accuracy and more favorable purchase intent for creative advertisements, and that the interaction between the advertisement type and creativity categories is significant, with the standard, noncommercial advertisements triggering the lowest purchase intent. These findings provide further evidence suggesting that creative advertising is a useful strategy for improving advertising effectiveness. This study also presents a novel finding resembling anchoring effects with regard to the potential difference in perceived effectiveness between commercial and noncommercial advertisements across two levels of advertising creativity.