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The word creativity is ubiquitous in the advertising business. Advertising agencies are built around ‘creative departments’, their global, annual gathering is billed as a ‘Festival of Creativity’, and the word continually recurs in any discussion of agencies’ ‘core values’. But what do we actually mean by it?
The answer is less simple than it might appear. Not just because creativity can be defined in more than one way, but because in the advertising business it has acquired specific baggage from being used as a battle-cry in agency turf wars.
Creativity has been a contentious topic in advertising ever since the word first came into common use in the 1960s. For its advocates, led by Bill Bernbach of DDB, it stood for a necessary revolution in advertising – against rules, timidity, and dullness, in favour of work with ingenuity, novelty, and wit. For its detractors, including heavyweights like Rosser Reeves (inventor of the USP) and David Ogilvy, it was a word so vague as to be almost meaningless, while encouraging agencies to produce self-indulgent or pretentious work that failed to sell the client’s product.
Sadly, the same dialogue of the deaf rumbles unhelpfully on sixty years later. Each side makes a good point, yet each fails to understand the other point of view. And the reason this lack of understanding persists is because of a continuing lack of clarity and consensus about what the word creativity means – and what we want it to mean.
If we are prepared to examine critically the question of what we mean when we talk about creativity in advertising, we may not solve all the arguments. But perhaps we can remove most of the misunderstanding, and provide a sounder basis for moving forward [4].
Creativity: the ‘official’ definition
Creativity is, of course, a word used in many contexts beyond advertising. So let us begin by looking at some common definitions from this wider world.
While many commentators acknowledge the problem of defining creativity, there is a widespread consensus in both academic and management literature that it means something like this:
…the ability to produce work that is both novel (i.e. original, unexpected) and appropriate (i.e. adaptive concerning task restraints) [5].
This kind of definition has been widely picked up in management, where creativity is usually interpreted as the ability to find new solutions to business problems:
‘Innovation and creativity – words we regard as synonymous.’[6]
Despite the apparent authority of such definitions, they ignore another, broader sense of the word – one which is much more relevant to advertising.
Creativity and the creative arts
Originality, novelty, innovation – all seem reasonable and important aspects of what we might mean by creativity. It leads us towards problem solving, new ideas, scientific discovery, all far from trivial things. But it leaves out something important.
From its original sense of ‘making something new’, in the eighteenth century the word became closely associated with art, as in the phrase ‘the creative arts’. Hence, creativity can also be used to refer to the kind of process involved in artistic creation [7].
The implications of this are richer and more complex than just finding a new solution to a problem, or coming up with a novel idea (though those may come into it). It requires not just imagination and inventiveness, but craft, judgment, and, sometimes, executional skills of a high order.
The kind of creativity required to produce a painting, a film, or a hit record is not primarily about producing something ‘novel or unexpected’, but about producing something with aesthetic value – which might include being beautiful, moving, funny, elegant, enduring, popular, or any combination of the above. Novelty, as such, may or may not be important – most works of artistic creation, from a Mozart symphony to a performance by Elvis Presley or a Pixar movie, are not especially ‘original’ in anything other than the banal sense that they are new: their value derives from other qualities [8]. The goal is not to produce something original, but something that is good.
Novelty or Artistry?
So, when we talk about creativity in advertising, which of these is more useful?
You could argue for both. But when we focus on what’s called the ‘creative work’, the second is surely the more important. As Bob Hoffmann memorably makes the point,
Sure, the guy who printed the tickets to Hamlet, or made the popcorn, or counted the proceeds, may have found creative ways to do so. But he didn’t write the fucking play [9].
It’s odd, then, that when people in advertising talk of creativity the emphasis is strongly on novelty. ‘Doing it different’, ‘disruption’, ‘zig when others zag’ are the sort of phrases used [10]. Sometimes this is valuable. Yet it’s a very one-dimensional view of creativity, when we consider how important the aesthetics of advertising really are.
Advertising is not high art, and people are right to get suspicious when it pretends it is. But it is certainly popular art. Advertising has always had close links with popular culture, and borrows many of its techniques from popular entertainment – music, catch phrases, characters (real or imagined, human or otherwise), humour, drama, storytelling, spectacle, sex appeal. This matters hugely, not just because it attracts and keeps the attention of its audience, but because it creates positive feelings around the advertised brand; because it offers powerful routes to distinctiveness, memorability and mental availability; and because it stimulates the audience to talk about, share, and otherwise engage with the advertising and the brand. It also helps to create a culture in which advertising is more likely to be tolerated, both by individuals and by society as a whole – something that may be more important than ever in the future.
Advertising – Science or Art?
But, since about 1900, advertising agencies have been curiously coy about all this. Perhaps because they thought (with some reason) that their clients wanted science, not art; perhaps because they desperately wanted to be taken seriously as a profession, and to distance themselves from the vulgar legacy of P. T. Barnum and the travelling medicine shows of the past; perhaps because the evidence they gathered from coupon response made research-based rules seem more important than inspiration. For any, or all, of these reasons, the official discourse of advertising became dominated by theories of rational persuasion, of ‘Protestant plain speech’, and a downplaying of anything that smacked of art or entertainment [11].
So dominant theories of advertising, as formulated by John E. Kennedy (‘salesmanship in print’, 1903) and Claude Hopkins (Scientific Advertising, 1923), stressed the importance of rational persuasion, ‘reasons why’ and ‘consumer benefits’, conveyed in simple language and avoiding any ‘attempts at frivolity’ [12]. To be fair, these approaches can be effective too – especially in direct response advertising, where agencies had the hardest data. But this was a very partial explanation of how advertising works, angled to make the industry look modern, scientific, and professional, and to distance itself from its disreputable, carnival past.
In practice, none of this prevented agencies from continuing to use illustrations, celebrities, humour, or anything else. But it created a culture where research-based rules had increasing power. And by the mid-twentieth century, at least one person felt that was a problem.
Bernbach and the ‘Creative Revolution’
Before William Bernbach set up his own agency, DDB, in 1949, he wrote a letter to his old employer, Grey. In it he deplored the rule-based, logical approach which he believed made advertising dull and ineffectual:
Advertising is persuasion and persuasion happens to be not a science, but an art… Let us blaze new trails. Let us prove to the world that good taste, good art and good writing can be good selling. [13]
Bernbach wanted to shift the emphasis from ‘what you say’ to ‘the way you say it’. He saw clearly how important the neglected aesthetic aspect of advertising was. But he had to choose his words carefully. He liked artistry (‘that intangible thing that business distrusts’). But the single word that came to stand for everything he believed in was creativity.
How Creativity became a Cult
DDB quickly became famous in the industry for its witty, subversive ads, then really took off in the 1960s with its ground-breaking campaign for Volkswagen. As Bernbach was seen to champion his young creative teams against the dull old advertising establishment, creativity was in tune with the spirit of the age, and became associated with 60s ideals of youthful rebellion and the counterculture. New agencies, led by working class ‘outsiders’ like George Lois and Carl Ally, were even more outrageously subversive; soon even the big agencies were trying to be part of the new ‘creative revolution’. [14]
So the innocent sounding word quickly became controversial – and mired in misunderstanding. Old school admen like Reeves and Ogilvy saw nothing in the newly fashionable creativity except a desire to be different for its own sake, and they attacked it accordingly. And, partly because its own advocates refused to define the word [15], the broader and more subtle concept of artistry was eclipsed. Creativity came to stand for a list of things quite independent from a justifiably increased focus on the aesthetics of advertising: it went along with
And all these tacit connotations of the word are largely still true, and problematic, today [16].
How advertising works – what we now know.
Today, we can articulate better than either Hopkins or Bernbach why the aesthetics of advertising are so important. For Bernbach, creativity was always subservient to the transmission of the right product message; he was just as much a believer in the Unique Selling Proposition as Rosser Reeves. But we now recognise that while advertising can work by transmitting information, much of it works in another way altogether – by making a brand famous and likeable through raising its mental availability, and creating positive mental associations for it [17]. So, advertising research no longer focuses on message transmission, but on emotional response, and these emotional responses have been shown to be highly predictive of marketplace results [18].
We increasingly recognise two distinct roles for advertising (though these can overlap):
It’s now increasingly accepted that both are necessary for the long-term growth of a brand [19]. In the case of brand-building advertising, creativity, in the sense of aesthetics, is paramount: it is through this, more than through any message or proposition, that a campaign can become distinctive, memorable, and even enjoyable.
But even activation advertising, often merely functional, can sometimes work better with a more creative approach – such as John Caples’s famous 1920s headline, ‘They laughed when I sat down at the piano, but when I started to play -!’. Bernbach praised its ‘artistry’, saying:
What if this thought had been written in different language? Would it have been as effective? What if it had said, ‘They admired my piano playing’…. would that have been enough? Or was it the talented, imaginative expression of that thought that did the job? [20]
Inspiration is not opposed to rules.
Bernbach chose to praise this ad, even though John Caples seems to stand for everything the ‘creative revolution’ reacted against – the use of rules or formulas. In Caples’s book, Tested Advertising Methods, he includes ’35 Proven Formulas for Writing Headlines’ – No. 15 is ‘Tell A Story’. [21]
Bernbach, quite rightly, meant to show the importance of creative imagination. What he left unsaid was that this ad did not come from breaking rules, or rebelling against the normal; it followed an established formula. And just did it very well.
What Creativity Really Means in Advertising
Creativity doesn’t just mean originality. All ads are, in a banal sense, ‘original’, and some succeed because of novelty. But the real challenge is not just to be novel or unexpected, but to create advertising that appeals to the public, that attracts their interest, gives them some kind of pleasure, sticks in their memory, gets talked about, and makes them like the brand a little bit better.
The creativity that delivers all this requires imagination and talent, as Bernbach saw. It means much more than merely following rules. But that doesn’t mean that rules and precedents are never helpful. Popular or successful works, in all genres, negotiate a balance between novelty and familiarity, originality and tradition [22].
Creativity does not require the wholesale rejection of research. It is always the goal of advertising to appeal to its audience, so attempting to discover how that audience responds is always important, however difficult that may be. Nobody’s judgement is more important than that of the public for whom the advertising is created.
Finally, we can’t ignore the one topic that is being talked about everywhere as I finish this article – the impact of AI. Will Artificial Intelligence be able to replace human creativity? As of now (2024), nobody really knows. But if creativity is simply defined as novelty or unexpectedness, it seems quite likely that it could [23].
If, however, creativity is a matter of making work that will touch and move people, work that balances inspiration and aesthetic judgement, whose magic seems to come from and speak to the human heart – perhaps that will be harder for AI to emulate. Perhaps impossible. Perhaps….
Paul Feldwick joined Boase Massimi Pollitt in 1974, staying there for over thirty years, mainly as an account planner. In 1988 and 1990 he was convenor of judges for the IPA Advertising Effectiveness Awards as well as chairing the Account Planning Group, and the Association of Qualitative Research Practitioners.
Paul left DDB at the end of 2005 to work as an independent consultant, lecturer and author. In 2015, he published The Anatomy of Humbug: How to Think Differently About Advertising, an attempt to make sense of the contradictory and confusing ideas about advertising that he had lived in the middle of for so long. His next book Why Does the Pedlar Sing? What Creativity Really Means in Advertising was published by Matador in February 2021.
Paul’s main pursuits outside of advertising, brands, and organizations are poetry, singing, and playing the piano. His interests are in the connections between advertising, brands, and popular culture; in the nature of creative processes; and in the ways people struggle and succeed together in making things happen.
References
[1] Source for all Bernbach quotes unless otherwise specified is a small volume Bill Bernbach Said published after his death by DDB (n.d.)
[2] Ogilvy, D. (1983). Ogilvy on Advertising. London: Pan Books, p.24.
[3] 1978 speech at the inaugural meeting of the Account Planning Group in London, in Bullmore, J. (1991) Behind the Scenes in Advertising. Henley-on-Thames: NTC Publications.p.167.
[4] See also Feldwick, P. (2021) Why Does the Pedlar Sing? What Creativity Really Means in Advertising, esp. pp. 169-187; Feldwick, P. (2010) Video: Aesthetics, Jugs, and Rock and Roll. TEDx New Street, October 22. Viewed on 02/09/20 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JDIdgE68Byc
[5] Sternberg, R. (1999). (ed.) Handbook of Creativity. Cambridge: University Press, p.3.
[6] Joubert, M. (2002). challenging convention: creativity in organisations. London: RSA.
[7] Williams, R. (1976). Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. London: Fontana/Croom Helm. See entry for Creative, pp.72-74.
[8] For some persuasive examples, see Earls, M. (2015). Copy, Copy, Copy. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons.
[9] Hoffman, B. (2018). The Devaluation of Creativity. Chapter 33 in Schneiders, W. (ed.). Eat Your Greens: Fact-based thinking to improve your brand’s health. pp. 260-266. Kibworth: Matador.
[10] See Feldwick (2021), Chapter 14.
[11] Lears, J. (1994). Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America. New York: Basic Books; Rutherford, P. (2018). The Adman’s Dilemma from Barnum to Trump. Toronto: University of Toronto Press; Feldwick, P. (2021), pp.32-53.
[12] Feldwick, P. (2015). The Anatomy of Humbug: How to Think Differently About Advertising. Kibworth: Matador, pp.31-64; Hopkins, C. (1923 /1986). Scientific Advertising. Chicago: NTC Business Books.
[13] The whole letter is reproduced in Cracknell, A. (2011). The Real Mad Men. London: Quercus, p.11.
[14] This fascinating story is told at length in Frank, T. (1997). The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
[15] See Frank (1997), p.92: Feldwick (2021), p.173.
[16] For some justification of these assertions, see Feldwick (2015), pp.79-80; Feldwick (2021), esp. Part Four.
[17] Sharp, B. (2010). How Brands Grow: What Marketers Don’t Know. South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, pp. 134 ff: Feldwick, P. ‘How Does Advertising Work?’ at How does advertising work? – Advertising Association (adassoc.org.uk).
[18] e.g. Wood, O. (2019). Lemon: How the Advertising Brain Turned Sour. London: IPA, pp.15-20 (the whole book is highly relevant to any discussion of creativity in advertising).
[19] Binet, L., and Field, P. (2013). The Long and the Short of It: Balancing Short and Long-Term Marketing Strategies. London: IPA; Binet, L., and Field, P. (2019) Effectiveness in Context, available from Effectiveness in Context: free download (thinkbox.tv)
[20] Bernbach, W. (1980). Facts are not Enough. Paper from the 1980 Meeting of AAAA, May 14-18, White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia.
[21] Caples, J. (1997). Tested Advertising Methods (Fifth Edition, rev. and ed. Hahn). Paramus, NJ: Prentice Hall.
[22] Thompson, D. (2017). Hit Makers: How Things Become Popular. London: Allen Lane.
[23] Nosta, J. (2024) Is AI More Creative Than Humans? | Psychology Today
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