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.