ISSUE 245 : Wednesday, May 13, 2009

What does it take to create genius level advertising -- advertising touched by the hand of God -- in our time? Is such a thing possible in this day and age? We seek to quantify everything. How many people, for instance, respond to a particular headline? How many people prefer one sub-head over another? Does the elephant score better than the pit bull? And even given all those considerations, the audience still ignores everything we do.

When we first established IAPIA back in 2005, our objective was to see how far we could push traditional advertising. We wanted to expand the scope of the creative process to influence brand preference and persuasion, brand attributes that have been in rapid decline since the beginning of the century.

At first, we tested existing advertising in focus group sessions. It didn’t take us long to realize that after ten minutes of being asked to look and comment on the ads our focus group panels were quick to become “expert” ad reviewers. We had to shift our testing methods. We hit on a method of approximating the clutter the audience experiences in the real world. Once we were able to shift to an online testing environment with individual responses, we were able to push the envelope.

That was when we had our first breakthrough. ALL ADS ARE CREATED EQUAL. That’s right. Our first round of testing found virtually NO DIFFERENCE between so called “traditional” and “creative” advertising examples. The audience was given a choice between an editorial spread, an advertising spread and a page with no more than a company logo or product and a theme line. In every single case the logo and theme scored slightly higher than the editorial and ad pages for memorability. The editorial pages scored higher for persuasion than the ad pages. And the traditional and creative ad pages scored equally unpersuasive when compared to the editorial.

These test results pointed us in the way of simplicity of messaging and visual impact in subsequent test ads. The more “editorial” the test ads looked, the more they were “noted” as opposed to “ignored.” The more impactful the visuals in the test ads were made, the higher the memorability scores. Ads that mentioned subjects that were more meaningful to respondents than product claims got higher scores on persuasion than product-focused ads. And “clean” graphic design influenced brand preference scores more than any other single element.

We began to notice that the effect of multiple exposures to “creative” advertising executions did have a cumulative effect on the most elusive factor of all: brand preference. We also noticed that memorability scores did not drop off after multiple advertising exposures of “creative” versus “traditional” executions. That is when we began testing the effect of the IAPIA-developed theory of Relentless Creativity in creating brand presence. In other words, how much creativity is too much creativity?

The by-product of all of this qualitative research was ads. Lots and lots of ads. We literally produced more than 2500 print spreads over a two year period. Some of the work broke through entire categories of interest to connect credit cards to drunk driving, auctions to pool sharks, Soft drinks to language skills and on and on. Copy became more active in nature. The subject shifted from “us” to “you” and interest levels soared.

A couple weeks ago one of our IAPIA vampires was given the thankless task of cataloging all of the IAPIA ads into a database organized by test results and cross referenced by product category. We needed to get a handle on the sheer velocity of material being produced rather than just dump it on the server after the scores were recorded. Somewhere in the process one of our Fellows remarked about how cool it would be to select a bunch of the test ads and put them on a public-facing site, so people could see the work of the Institute and perhaps benefit from it. So this past week we put a team on developing http://RelentlessCreativity.com as a random repository of some of our best scoring testing participants. We will add to the collection on a weekly basis and hope the work inspires you as it inspires us to reinvent advertising every day. After all, the true nature of genius is to never be satisfied with personal “best.”