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

Abstract

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, that 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.

La Valoración de las ideas creativas por parte del anunciante

“…La perspectiva del anunciante como público objetivo de la comunicación es prácticamente inexistente. La evaluación de la creatividad ha sido estudiada básicamente desde el punto de vista de los creativos o propios profesionales de la publicidad (Roca, Tena, Lázaro & González, 2016;West, Christodoulides & Bonhomme, 2018) o de los consumidores (Chang, 2014;Lehnert, Till & Ospina, 2014;Reinartz & Saffert, 2013) pero no encontramos referencias desde el punto de vista del anunciante.…”

Where has the research on client–agency relationships gone? The need for a deeper understanding of the future of account management

“…The authors found that, consistent with prior research, that clients themselves need to be cognizant of trade-offs that may be present between originality and achieving strategic goals. While not studied from both the client and agency side, recent studies have looked at whether gender issues may affect campaign evaluations (e.g., Infanger and Sczesny 2015;Roca et al 2016).…”