An Empirical Investigation of the Association between Creative Advertising and Advertising Effectiveness in Pakistan

Abstract

The importance of creativity in advertising as one of the primary factor for advertising effectiveness has been much advocated by advertising professionals and academicians particularly in a cluttered media. Industry experts argue that advertisements have to be more creative to break through the greater media clutter and develop an impression for the brand. This study examines the potential effectiveness of award winning television advertisements in Pakistan in both single and three advertising exposures. To ensure a real life advertising situation, both creative and control advertisements were embedded in a television program which were shown to two separate groups of research subjects with single and three advertising exposures respectively. Based on recall of the experimental advertisements in single and three exposures, subjects' tapped their responses about brand and advertisement attitude and lastly purchase intent. Contrary to expectations, the finding of this study in single exposure does not verify the superior performance of creative advertising in terms of recall, brand and advertisement attitude and purchase intent. However, in three exposures, creative advertisements developed significantly more favorable brand and advertisement attitude and greater unaided brand recall than control advertisements. Creative advertisements developed greater mean purchase intent for the advertised brands than control group of advertisements; however, it just slipped from attaining significance. Being an optimum and more mature response of research participants in three exposures as compared to single exposure, the results of this study in three exposures conclude that creative advertisements are really more effective than conventional advertisements and bestow value to the advertised brands.

Evaluating Advertising Effectiveness of Creative Television Advertisements for High Involvement Products

“…It was a seven point likert scale whose neutral figure was 4; while the measure of attitude toward the creative ad is close to 6 which shows highly favourable attitude. The result is in conformity with Ahmad & Mahmood (2011),Mackenzie & Yang et.al (2009 and Stuhlfaut & Yoo (2011).…”

“…Till and Baack (2005) showed the insignificant impact of creativity on purchase intention. The major part of their research was replicated by Ahmad and Mahmood (2011).They also mentioned mixed effect of creativity on Ad Recall, attitude toward the brand and purchase intention. …”

“…Pakistan is no different. It has a plethora of channels (Ahmad & Mahmood, 2011) covering news, entertainment, sports, health, fashion e.t.c. The companies in Pakistan are using traditional means of reaching mass audience by intense reach and frequency strategies, which result into Ad clutter.…”

The Effects of Guerilla Marketing on Gen Y’s Purchase Intention — A Study in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

“…The research overcame this problem because the ones who evaluated the effectiveness of creativity were consumers, using perceived creativity scales of [58]. Frequency of commercial exposure also needs considering when single exposure may not be enough to affect consumer advertisement and brand attitude [71]. In this study, although respondents were exposed to advertisements only "one" time but the large number of advertisements may result in "many" exposures when they had to look at all the advertisements to have an overall evaluation, boosting the effects of creativity on their purchase behavior.…”

Exploring the Experience of Novelty When Viewing Creative Adverts: An ERP Study

“…A review of the existing empirical research indicates that the research methods of advertising creativity rely primarily on questionnaire investigations (e.g., Smith et al, 2007 ; Ahmad and Mahmood, 2011 ; Shirkhodaee and Rezaee, 2014 ; Chen et al, 2016 ). There is, furthermore, no literature on creative advertising using neuroscientific methods such as electroencephalography (EEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), and positron emission tomography (PET).…”