Recall and Persuasion

RECALL AND PERSUASION
Does Creative Advertising Matter?
Brian D. Till and Daniel W. Baack ABSTRACT: Creativity is an important component of advertising. This research examines the potential effectiveness of creative advertising in enhancing recall, brand attitude, and purchase intent. Our basic methodology compares a set of randomly selected award-winning commercials (Communication Arts) with a random sample of control commercials. The commercials were embedded in television programs and subjects for a naturalistic viewing experience. Studies 1 and 2 had aided and unaided brand and execution recall as dependent variables. For Study 3, brand attitude and purchase intent were the dependent variables of interest. Results indicated that creative commercials facilitate unaided recall, but that creativity did not enhance aided recall, purchase intent, or brand and advertisement attitude. The basic advantage of creative advertising in enhancing unaided recall was found to persist over a one-week delay.

Creativity is arguably a very important component of advertising. Advertising agencies pride themselves on industry awards, which are often focused more on the creativity of the advertising than brand performance. Past research on the topic has ranged from focusing on formulaic scales of creativity (e.g., Barron 1988; Kneller 1965; White and Smith 2001) to discussing creative strategy in holistic terms (e.g.. Bell 1992; Blasko and Mokwa 1986). A small number of empirical studies of creative advertising have been completed (e.g., Ang and Low 2000; Kover, Goldberg, and James 1995; Kover, James, and Sonner 1997; Pieters, Warlop, and Wedel 2002; Stone, Besser, and Lewis 2000; White and Smith 2001), but the studies, while individually interesting, taken as a whole, have not portrayed a particularly cohesive or comprehensive understanding of creative advertising. As one article stated, "in all, advertising creativity research is limited, abstract, and fairly recent in

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