Persuasive Advertising - J. Scott Armstrong [200]
• Understand and resolve differences. Understand differences of opinions within the group and attempt to resolve them.
These are useful guidelines, backed up with evidence. However, to my knowledge, they are rarely used in organizations.
Despite the improved creativity and productivity that comes from structured meetings, many people prefer unstructured meetings. They feel more satisfied and believe that they have produced more ideas by using an unstructured free-flowing format. However, this satisfaction has often been shown to be inversely related to the number of useful ideas that were generated (e.g., Connolly et al. 1990; Paulus et al. 1993; Valacich et al. 1994).
Exhibit D provides a summary listing of the processes for developing and nuturing creativity in advertising:
Exhibit D Developing and nurturing creativity: A checklist
Find creative people:
• Judge their work, not them (avoid bio-demographic information).
• Decide whom to hire before meeting a candidate.
Generate creative ideas by using:
• many individuals, working independently
• multiple problem statements
• brainwriting
• analogies
• second-solution technique.
Build on ideas before evaluation with:
• virtual teams
• structured meetings.
1 One of my favorite book titles is for a biography of a charismatic leader in the “creative” Hollywood film industry: Don’t Say Yes Until I Finish Talking.
2 We typically claim it is not possible to assess learning in universities, so we ask students to tell us whether they are happy with courses.
Evaluating advertisements
Develop alternative campaigns, nurture them, and then test them. Many firms do this, especially with TV commercials. Investments in developing TV commercials can be high, and the media costs are also high; therefore, firms should try to ensure that their ads are persuasive.
Commercials are often tested in what is referred to in rough or preliminary form—that is, they are low-budget first takes. Working with alternative ads helps avoid having to “protect” a group’s solution. Instead, the group now has a number of solutions from which to choose. A competition among alternative campaigns is likely to pay off (O’Connor, Willemain and MacLachlan 1996).
The development of an alternative campaign is also desirable in the event that the original campaign falls short. Define criteria in advance and have a contingency campaign available. Unfortunately, few organizations use contingency plans (Armstrong and Reibstein 1985).
What follows is a discussion of advertisement evaluation from three perspectives: expert judgments, research, and adherence to principles.
Expert judgments
Rarely have I seen any really great advertising created without a certain amount of bent noses, irritation, and downright cursedness.
Leo Burnett, founder of ad agency, 1940s
People, including advertisers, tend to fall in love with their own ideas. However, at some point they should obtain independent expert judgments of their advertising campaigns. Procedures such as Delphi could help to provide such alternative viewpoints.
Delphi is a formal survey of experts involving two or more rounds of anonymous responses. The respondents explain the reasons for their responses on each round. Details about this procedure, and the software to use it, are found at adprin.com under Creating Ads/Improving Ideas.
Unfortunately, overall judgments of advertisements do not have high validity. In addition, it is difficult to translate the results into action steps. That is, you might judge one ad better than another; but do you know why? And do you learn how to make the good ad even better?
Interestingly, groups that nurture dissent produce better decisions, as shown in research by Nemeth et al. (2001). Unfortunately many organizations