Recall and persuasion: does creative advertising matter?

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

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 nor 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 suggesting that this advertising dimension deserves additional investigation" (Stone, Besser, and Lewis 2000, p. 8).

Most important, few of the studies address the relation between creative advertising and effectiveness. Therefore, while this past work has made an important contribution, the effectiveness of creative advertisements is not much better understood now than it was 40 years ago. This study begins to address this gap by focusing on award-winning television advertising (in this case, Communication Arts award winners) and relevant measures of advertising effectiveness--recall, purchase intent, and attitude toward the brand.

CREATIVITY AND ADVERTISING

Advertising is the only profession where the central figure in the business process is titled a "creative," illustrating the focus placed on creativity in the advertising process. Although creativity in advertising is widely recognized as very important, the link between creativity and advertising effectiveness has not been extensively examined.

The first academic work on creativity began with Kneller's 1965 book, The Art and Science of Creativity. This early work on this topic is typified by the "aha" definition in Parnes (1975), and these early papers concentrate on simple discussions and definitions of creativity. Work in the late 1980s through the 1990s broke from this trend and began introducing more sophisticated definitions of creativity (e.g., Barron 1988; MacKinnon 1987).

During this same time period, research began to experimentally investigate the effectiveness of "creative" advertisements. A variety of operationalizations for creativity emerged in this research, including the use of advertising award-winners as a proxy for creativity (e.g., Kover, Goldberg, and James 1995). This method is based on the concept that creativity is, in the end, a subjective concept best evaluated by professionals (Amabile 1982). Therefore, if the judges of these awards determine that the advertisement is creative enough to be recognized for this award, then this judgment is an appropriate measure of creativity (White and Smith 2001).

Studies have used judges to classify advertisements as creative or original (e.g., Ang and Low 2000; Pieters, Warlop, and Wedel 2002; Stone, Besser, and Lewis 2000), but typically, these judges have been trained students. Students may not be the best judges of creative advertising (Haberland and Dacin 1992). We believe that advertising professionals are superior and more appropriate judges, due to their increased experience, advertising training, and respect among their peers. Other studies have found differences between students and advertising professionals regarding measures of advertising creativity (e.g., Kover, Goldberg, and James 1995; White and Smith 2001). Research has also found that advertising professionals are consistent regarding their opinions of creative advertising across a variety of demographic and experience variables (Reid, King, and DeLorme 1998). Therefore, we use a slightly different version of this tradition by sampling a well-respected advertising awards competition as representative of "creative" advertising.

Advertising awards have been used to recognize outstanding advertising for decades (www.oneclub.com), and it is estimated that there are 500 advertising award shows worldwide per year (Shamoon 1987). These awards vary from small, focused awards such as the International Automotive Advertising Awards and the International Travel Advertising Awards, to the attention-grabbing spectacles associated with the Cannes Film Festival's Lions or the Clios.

A few past studies have looked at the advertising awards from a variety of perspectives. They have considered the impact of advertising awards on advertising agency performance (Helgesen 1994; Polonsky and Waller 1995), the measures used by specific awards (Moriarty 1996), the community links between judges (Wright-Isak and Faber 1996), and the features of award-winning advertisements (Beltramini and Blasko 1986; Ernst 1980; Reid et al. 1985).

Clearly, the relatively limited number of studies on the role and impact of creativity and advertising suggests opportunities to continue exploring this area. While the industry rewards creativity, do creative ads provide any measurable value to the advertised brand? Do they result in brand-specific effects such as greater recall, more positive brand attitudes, or increased purchase intent? There have been criticisms that advertising awards are like "beauty contests" (Moriarty 1996, p. 54), focusing on industry-specific criteria (Kover, James, and Sonner 1997; White and Smith 2001) rather than on the actual effectiveness of the advertisements. This general feeling is reflected in the creation of the Effective awards, or EFFIEs, by the New York Chapter of the American Marketing Association. This award focuses solely on the results of the advertisements, excluding any assessment of creativity.

With such an industry focus on creative advertising, and criticism of creative advertising competitions, it is somewhat surprising that so little research really looks directly at the effectiveness of award-winning advertising. There are only three studies that have contributed to this inquiry.

First, the research by Kover, Goldberg, and James (1995) investigated the link between creative advertising and consumers' responses to that advertising. Their measures were purchase intent, commercial liking, congruency, and creativity. Their measure of effectiveness was purchase intent. Using these measures, the authors use a cluster analysis to group their commercial sample into four groups. These clusters did not correspond to either of their initial three groups, that is, winning an award--either the One Show award or the EFFIE--did not relate to how customers responded to the commercials. Instead, the authors used the participants' measure of creativity (in terms of old/new and dull/exciting) to classify commercials as creative. For these commercials, purchase intent was higher, linking creativity to this measure of effectiveness. Due to the small sample size, the authors were unable to determine whether this relation was significant. Because of this small sample size, their statistical analysis was limited to a cluster analysis. As acknowledged by the authors, this allowed them to only "examine trends and indications rather than look for statistically significant differences" (Kover, Goldberg, and James 1995, p. 31).

The second study, that of Ang and Low (2000), also investigated the relation between creative advertising and measures of effectiveness, including attitude toward the ad, attitude toward the brand, and purchase intent. To classify advertisements as creative, the authors defined them in terms of novelty, meaningfulness, and emotional content. The authors found that creative ads, as they defined them, were consistently perceived as more favorable, and, to a lesser degree, resulted in a more favorable view of the brand and increased purchase intent.

The last study, that of Stone, Besser, and Lewis (2000), attempts to link creative commercials to the likability of that commercial. To measure creativity, participants (undergraduate seniors studying advertising) assessed the creativity of the advertisements that were previously listed by the general public as advertisements they particularly liked or disliked. To be judged creative, 80% of the students had to agree that the advertisement was creative. Overall, the study found that 70% of the liked commercials were judged as creative, whereas only 46% of the disliked commercials were judged to be creative. Thus, this study links likability, measured in simple terms, to advertisement creativity.

Overall, prior research suggests an interest in wrestling with the role and importance of creative advertising in having some measurable effects. And while some of the studies have methodological issues (i.e., use of students as judges of creativity, small sample sizes and such), there are some initial signs that creative advertising may provide some incremental benefit to the brand.

MEASURES OF ADVERTISING EFFECTIVENESS

There are different measures of advertising effectiveness in the literature, though they tend to be generally recall- or persuasion-focused, including measures such as likability (Leather, McKechnie, and Amirkhanian 1994), attractiveness (Wells 2000), attitude toward the brand (Ang and Low 2000), and recall (Higie and Sewall 1991). For our initial studies, we chose to focus on recall. Later, Study 3 examines the impact of creative advertising on persuasion measures, brand attitude, and purchase intent.

STUDY 1

The literature on the use of recall and recognition is extensive and much of it focuses on whether these two constructs measure one or two facets of memory (for reviews, see Bagozzi and Silk 1983; Finn 1992; Stewart and Krishnan 2001), but there is agreement that both are measures of explicit memory (Insingrini, Vazou, and Leroy 1995; Rajaram, Srinivas, and Travers 2001; Stewart and Krishnan 2001). For our first study, our particular interest is in recall rather than recognition. The use of recall has been well established in the advertising literature (Donthu, Cherian, and Bhargava 1993; Muehling, Stoltman, and Grossbart 1990; Stewart 1989; Stewart and Furse 1986; Stone, Besser, and Lewis 2000), is linked to putting a brand into a consumer's evoked set (Stewart 1989; Stewart and Furse 1986), and is frequently used by advertising professionals (Jones 1986; Walker and von Gonten 1989).

The first study measures both aided and unaided recall. While both types of recall have been widely used as measures of advertising effectiveness, they have rarely been used in the same study (for an exception, see Donthu, Cherian, and Bhargava 1993).

Creative Advertising, Attention, and Recall

While no studies have expressively investigated the effect of increased creativity on recall, past research suggests some possible relations. To begin, creative advertisements have been consistently defined, at least in part, as novel and/or original (Ang and Low 2000; Haberland and Dacin 1992; Jewler and Drewniany 1998; Marra 1990; White and Smith 2001). The inclusion of this feature in any definition or scale of creativity is one of the strongest trends in the literature. In turn, novelty and visual prominence have been strongly shown to increase attention in a variety of settings, including advertising (Bettman 1979; Johnston et al. 1990; Mitchell 1987; Pieters, Warlop, and Wedel 2002; Rossiter and Percy 1985).

This increased attention is an important component of advertising effectiveness and is linked to recall (e.g., Mulligan 1998; Walker and von Gonten 1989). Many studies have examined the relation between increased attention and recall, and have found that it leads to greater levels of both aided (Craik et al. 1996; Isingrini, Vazou, and Leroy 1995; Rajaram, Srinivas, and Travers 2001) and unaided recall (Craik et al. 1996; Olsen 1995; Rosbergen, Pieters, and Wedel 1997). Based on this research stream, it is expected that this process will lead to increased levels of recall for creative advertisements.

Also, it is expected that the effect will be more pronounced for unaided recall. Aided and unaided recalls, while related, represent different tasks (Lockhart 2000; Padilla-Walker and Poole 2002). This study assumes, based on past research, that creative ads are more attended to, and as a result, have a stronger, deeper memory trace. For unaided recall, the task will be difficult enough to clearly provide an advantage to the creative award-winning ads. On the other hand, for aided recall, the task may not be sufficiently challenging so as to render a detectable advantage of creativity. First, many of the attention-related aided recall studies above used distracting tasks resulting in a strenuous memory procedure (e.g., Craik et al. 1996; Insingrini, Vazou, and Leroy 1995; Mulligan 1998; Rajaram, Srinivas, and Travers 2001). Second, aided recall is, as stated in the name, an assisted recall. This help results in easier memory access for the participants. Based on this, we expect to find little difference between creative and normal ads on aided recall.

In this study, we look at recall for two different aspects of advertising: brand names and commercial features (i.e., executional recall). Consider the famous Budweiser beer commercial using three frogs chanting "bud," "weis," and "er." The goal of this advertising was to both increase brand name awareness and to associate the humor and fun of the commercial (commercial features) with Budweiser. As shown in this example, effective advertisements should increase brand name awareness and should associate features of the commercial with the brand.

Hypotheses

Fundamentally, we are interested in the degree to which creative, award-winning advertising may (or may not) enhance unaided and aided recall of both the brand and the ad execution. Based on the above research review, four hypotheses emerge:

H1: Unaided brand recall levels will be greater for creative commercials than for control commercials.

H2: Unaided ad feature (execution) recall levels will be greater for creative commercials than for control commercials.

H3: Aided brand recall levels will not differ between creative commercials and control commercials.

H4: Aided ad feature (execution) recall levels will not differ between creative commercials and control commercials.

Method

Pretest

Brand familiarity is one variable shown to affect recall (Kent and Allen 1994; Pieters, Warlop, and Wedel 2002). To rule this out as a possible explanation for our results, subject familiarity scores for all the brands featured in this study were obtained. Familiarity was measured through an adaptation of a measure developed in Park (1976). The parent measure was more complex than necessary for this study, so it was simplified and shortened. This measure was completed as part of the pretest procedures. Participants were asked to rate the familiarity of the ad on a seven-point scale, with familiar with brand and not familiar with brand at the endpoints. Subjects also rated whether the brand was well known or not well known on a seven-point scale. A t test comparison of the mean scores found no significant differences between the two experiment conditions (familiar: t value = 1.00, n.s.; well-known: t = 1.33, n.s.).

Commercial Samples

For the creative commercial sample, Communication Arts award winners were used. Communication Arts uses a panel of nine leading creative directors to assess thousands of entries, ultimately bestowing recognition for creative excellence on approximately 150 recipients. A representative from Communication Arts confirmed via a telephone conversation that the primary criterion that judges focus on is creativity. The most recent two years available (2000 and 2001) were used as the pool. Forty advertisements were randomly selected from this pool to form the sample of award-winning advertisements (20 would be used on each of the 2 videotapes).

To create the pool of control advertisements, a procedure combining those used in two previous studies was used (Cho et al. 1999). Television advertisements were sampled during prime-time television (7:00 to 10:00 P.M.) during four randomly selected days of the week. The networks used, NBC and CBS, were randomly selected from a pool of the four major networks, ABC, NBC, CBS, and FOX. Only 30-second commercials were used. Duplicate commercials were removed, as were separate commercials for the same brand name. To control for the possibility that award-winning advertisements would be included in our set of control commercials, a search of lists of recent Clio, Communication Arts, Lion, and Advertising Age award winners was completed. To our knowledge, none of the control commercials sampled has won an award. From this pool of control commercials, 40 were randomly selected for use in our videotapes (again, 20 for each of 2 videotapes). In creating these two groups of commercials (award-winning and control), we do not mean to imply that the control commercials sampled off the air were devoid of creativity. We simply recognize that the key consideration for the Communication Arts advertising awards is creativity; therefore, the degree of creativity in the award-winning group will be, on average, higher than that in the control group. However, we also recognize that creativity is a continuous variable, and for clarity of study design, have created two groups (the creative award-winning ads and the control ads randomly sampled off-air).

Materials

Subjects viewed a 30-minute television program. Our objective in choosing a television program was for it to be of at least some interest to undergraduate students, yet not so interesting as to overwhelm the embedded ad executions. We selected two half-hour shows: Dream Living, featuring a Frank Lloyd Wright house, and Ground Force, a British television show focused on lawn and garden makeovers. We used two shows to test the replicability of recall effects independent of the television show in which the advertising is embedded.

An analysis of the television recordings revealed that commercials were typically shown in pods of three or four, confirming claims in previous studies (e.g., Goldberg and Gorn 1987). We inserted commercials selected for our study--five in each of the four pods. Therefore, our study used four, two-and-a-half-minute pods, each with five commercials.

This resulted in a total of 10 minutes of advertising (20 commercials) per program. To control as best as possible for order effects, the 20 commercials were alternatively creative or control. In one of the television program videos, the first ad was creative; in the other program, the first ad was a control ad.

Participants

Participants were undergraduate students enrolled in business courses at a private Midwestern university. Participants were aware that they were taking part in a research project, but were not aware that the advertisements embedded in the television program were of any special importance. Instead, they were led to believe that the purpose of the study revolved around the actual television program. By embedding the advertisements in television programming and by mimicking typical television practices, the ecological validity of the results to real-world advertising situations increases (Rosbergen, Pieters, and Wedel 1997; Russo and Leclerc 1994). A total of 77 participants participated.

Procedure

Participants watched a 30-minute television program, either Dream Living (46 participants) or Ground Force (31 participants), with 20 minutes of program content and 10 minutes of commercial content. After watching the program, participants spent five minutes completing a brief questionnaire about the television program. This interpolated task was included to reinforce the study ruse and clear short-term memory. After completing this step, a booklet of various recall measures was handed out to each participant.

Measures

For unaided brand recall, participants were simply asked to recall and list as many brands as they could that had appeared in the television show they just watched. For aided brand recall, participants were then presented a list of product categories (e.g., beer, videogame, etc.) representing the product categories for the brands advertised during the show. The use of product categories as a recall aid is consistent with past advertising studies (e.g., Keller, Heckler, and Houston 1998; Stewart and Furse 1986). Participants were asked, with these product categories as prompts, to list the brands they remembered being advertised on the show. After the brand recall measures, the ad execution recall was measured. For unaided ad execution, participants were simply asked to describe briefly features of the commercials from the television show they just watched. Finally, participants were again presented with product category prompts, and again asked to recall briefly features of the ads they had just seen.

Brand recall was scored when the participant correctly remembered the specific brand name (e.g., Doritos, not snack food). Commercial descriptions were scored as effective ad execution recall when the information was sufficient for a specific commercial to be linked to the information (e.g., polar bears playing, not a commercial for soda). Two separate coders were used to determine whether or not the ad execution was successfully recalled based on the descriptions supplied by the participants. Intercoder reliability (agreement) was approximately 98%, with those few disagreements resolved through discussion with the lead researcher.

Results

A 2 x 2 repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to measure the effect of the within-subject variable of commercial type (award-winning versus control) and the between-subject variable of television program (Dream Living versus Ground Force). A separate ANOVA was used to analyze each dependent variable (e.g., brand-name aided recall, commercial-features aided recall). Recall means and standard deviations can be found in Table 1.

No effect was found for television program regardless of dependent variable analyzed: brand-name unaided recall, F(1, 76) = .03, n.s.; commercial-features unaided recall, F(1, 76) = 3.23, n.s.; brand-name aided recall, F(1, 76) = .18, n.s.; commercial-features aided recall, F(1, 76) = .94, n.s. In addition, for all dependent variables, no interaction effect was found for commercial type and television program: brand-name unaided recall, F(1, 76) = .42, n.s.; commercial-features unaided recall, F(1, 76) = .08, n.s.; brand-name aided recall, F(1, 76) = 1.95, n.s.; commercial-features aided recall, F(1, 76) = . 17, n.s. Therefore, television program did not have a main effect, nor did it interact with commercial type to affect the recall of either brand names or commercial features.

The within-subject analysis for commercial features revealed interesting differences between commercial type (award versus control) and between different recall measures. For unaided recall, commercial type had a significant main effect for both brand names, F(1, 76) = 27.01, p < .001, and commercial features, F(1, 76) = 46.50, p < .001. Award-winning commercials were significantly better recalled than control commercials: brand name, 4.06 versus 2.81; commercial features, 4.43 versus 2.77. In contrast, no significant commercial type main effect was found for aided recall--neither brand name recall, F(1, 76) = 1.18, n.s., nor commercial features, F(1, 76) = 2.83, n.s.

Overall, the analysis suggests that regardless of the television program, creative advertisement led to higher levels of unaided recall. In addition, the analysis indicated that in an aided recall task, this difference dissipated. Therefore, all four of the hypotheses were supported.

STUDY 2

To assess the robustness of Study 1 findings, a second experiment was completed using a one-week delay measure of both aided and unaided recall. Advertising effects are assumed to lag, that is, to have an effect on consumer behavior over time (Berkowitz, Allaway, and D'Souza 2001; Jastram 1955). In addition, past research has found that measure delay does affect advertising effectiveness and may result in different results than immediate measures (Grossman and Till 1998; Lee and Mason 1999; Singh, Linville, and Ajay 1995; Till and Priluck 2000). The core question addressed in Study 2 is whether the advantages of creative advertising versus normal advertising persist over time. Based on the results in Study 1 and the above discussion, it is expected that the pattern of results from the first study will be replicated. Therefore, the following hypotheses are proposed:

H5: Delayed unaided brand recall levels will be greater for creative commercials than for control commercials.

H6: Delayed unaided ad feature (execution) recall levels will be greater for creative commercials than for control commercials.

H7: Delayed aided brand recall levels will not differ between creative commercials and control commercials.

H8: Delayed aided ad feature (execution) recall levels will not differ between creative commercials and control commercials.

Method

For Study 2, the same procedures and materials from Study 1 were used on a new sample of 27 students from the same Midwestern university. The only change in procedure was the delay in recall measurement. Participants watched the Dream Living video, and one week later, at the same approximate time in the day, aided and unaided recall were recorded for both commercial feature and brand names. Only one television show was used since no

main effect or interaction effects were found for program type in Study 1.

Results

A one-way ANOVA statistical analysis was used to determine the effect of advertising type on each recall condition. The means and standard deviations for each recall group can be found in Table 2. The ANOVA for unaided recall of brand names found a significant main effect, F(1, 26) = 19.35, p < .001, with creative advertisements having a higher level of recall (1.30 versus .41). A similar significant result was found for unaided recall of commercial features, F(1, 26) = 27.15, p < .001, and again, creative advertisements had a higher level of recall (1.35 versus .15). Analysis revealed no significant differences between normal and creative advertisements for aided recall of both brand names, F(1, 26) = 1.18, n.s., and commercial features, F(1, 26) = 1.76, n.s.

Overall, the analysis finds that, as was found for immediate recall in Study 1, creative advertisements were linked to greater levels of unaided recall. Also, as in Study 1, this effect was not found for aided recall. It is important to note that Study 2 provided evidence that the advantage that creative advertising has in facilitating unaided recall persists over time.

STUDY 3

The above studies found a clear recall benefit from creative advertising. The next question is what effect creative advertising might have on persuasion measures such as brand attitude and purchase intent. As discussed above, previous studies have found a link between creative advertising and a variety of affective measures, including purchase intent (Ang and Low 2000; Kover, Goldberg, and James 1995), attitude toward the brand and ad (Ang and Low 2000), and likability (Stone, Besser, and Lewis 2000).

While the results of the above-cited studies are interesting, in every study, students were used to judge creativity. As discussed earlier, there are significant concerns regarding the appropriateness of students as judges of creativity (Kover, Goldberg, and James 1995; White and Smith 2001). As students may not be the best judges of creativity (Haberland and Dacin 1992), and professional ratings may be superior, we believe it is more relevant to use advertising judged as being creative by professional judges. If professionals do view creative advertising in different ways than students do, it is possible that the positive effect on purchase intent and brand attitude found in previous studies will not be replicated. On the other hand, it is also possible that, while the groups disagree, there will be much overlap between what students and advertising professionals find creative. This would result in support for the findings of previous studies (Ang and Low 2000; Kover, Goldberg, and James 1995; Stone, Besser, and Lewis 2000). Therefore, based on this previous research linking creative advertisements to increased purchase intent, attitude toward the brand/advertisement, and likability, the following hypotheses are proposed:

H9: Creative advertising will lead to higher levels of purchase intent for the advertised brands.

H10: Creative advertising will lead to more positive attitudes for the advertised brands.

Method

For Study 3, the same advertising samples and television program used in Study 1 were used on a new sample of 69 students from the same Midwestern university. The questionnaire was modified to measure brand attitude and purchase intent instead of recall. Three weeks before watching the television program with embedded advertising, participants completed a questionnaire measuring the attitude and purchase intentions of the brands appearing in the ads. Then, after the three-week delay, participants watched a 30-minute television program (Dream Living [32 participants] or Ground Force [37 participants]). After watching the program, participants filled out the same attitude and purchase intent measures they had previously completed.

To measure purchase intent, participants were asked to rate on a seven-point, bipolar adjective scale, "If given the opportunity to purchase this brand, the likelihood of me doing so would be: unlikely/likely, improbable/probable, definitely would not/definitely would." Attitude toward the brand was also measured using a seven-point, bipolar adjective scale. The prompt was: "My overall impression of this brand is," and the adjective pairs used were dislike/like, unfavorable/favorable, negative/positive, inferior/superior, and bad/good. Both of these measures were based on those used in previous studies of purchase intent and brand attitude (e.g., Chapman and Aylesworth 1999; Chattopadhyay and Basu 1990; Till and Busier 2000).

Results

The unit of measure for the analysis is the change in purchase intent and brand attitude between pre- and postadvertisement exposure. The three purchase intent and five brand attitude adjectives were collapsed into a single measure of purchase intent and brand attitude for both creative and normal advertisements. The Cronbach [alpha]'s for each of these measures were all above .97, showing a high level of internal reliability.

A one-way, repeated-measures ANOVA statistical analysis was used to determine the effect of advertising type on purchase intent and brand attitude. Due to a lack of effect for television show in Study 1 and the lack of an interaction effect between television show and either purchase intent, F(1, 68) = .98, n.s., or brand attitude, F(1, 68) = 2.75, n.s., the results from both Dream Living and Ground Force were pooled. This resulted in a total sample size of 69 responses.

The mean change in brand attitude for creative commercials shown was 0, while the mean change in brand attitude for control commercials was .16 (see Table 3). The analysis revealed no significant differences between control and creative advertisements for brand attitude, F(1, 68) = 1.48, n.s. For change in purchase intent, the mean for creative advertisements was .05. The mean change for control commercials was .07 (see Table 3). The analysis found no significant difference between control and creative commercials for change in purchase intent, F(1, 68) = .13, n.s. There were no interaction effects; therefore, neither hypothesis was supported.

DISCUSSION

This research focused on the effect of creative advertising on recall, purchase intent, and attitude toward the brand. Creative advertising is operationalized as winning an advertising reward, in this case, Communication Arts. The results suggest that creative advertisements generate significantly greater brand and execution recall on an unaided basis. This advantage dissipates when product category prompts are given as an aid to recall. This effect was found for both immediate and one-week delayed recall. In addition, creative advertisements in our study did not have an effect on purchase intent or attitude toward the brand.

For the recall results, the literature suggests a possible explanation for this difference between groups. First, aided recall is different from unaided recall (Lockhart 2000; Padilla-Walker and Poole 2002) and is an easier memory task. Second, unlike previous research on the effect of attention on aided recall (e.g., Craik et al. 1996; Insingrini, Vazou, and Leroy 1995; Mulligan 1998; Rajaram, Srinivas, and Travers 2001), the differences in attention levels in this study were not actively manipulated; rather, they were a natural function of the greater interest value that creativity seems to bring to the advertising. For aided recall, the task is less cognitively challenging, and therefore the ability to detect any advantage that creative ads bring is mitigated. This may have led to the lack of difference between the creative and control groups on the aided recall measure, regardless of time delay. The cognitive advantages created by increased attention to creative advertisements may only surface during the more difficult unaided recall task.

For the purchase intent and attitude toward the brand findings, the results suggest a rethinking of past studies finding that creative advertising led to increased attitude toward the brand, purchase intent, and likability (Ang and Low 2000; Kover, Goldberg, and James 1995; Stone, Besser, and Lewis 2000). The use of professional judges of creative advertising, as compared with the student judges in the above studies, may be the source of this difference. The different results of this study compared with past research using student judges (e.g., Ang and Low 2000; Kover, Goldberg, and James 1995; Stone, Besser, and Lewis 2000) cast doubt on the generalizability of this research and raise questions regarding who is best suited to judge a commercial as "creative."

It is also possible that these results reflect the difficulty in effecting consumer brand attitude and intent to purchase with a single commercial exposure. Unlike measures of recall, as used in Studies 1 and 2, brand attitude and purchase intent were likely preexisting, and therefore more solidly ingrained and less likely to be easily changed (Machleit, Allen, and Madden 1993).

Overall, the advantage that creative, award-winning advertising bestows in an unaided context suggests that advertising awards are more than "beauty contests," and may be doing more than selecting industry darlings. Creative advertising may actually bestow value to the advertised brand.

These results also have valuable implications for practitioners. Currently, the value of advertising awards may be primarily seen as limited to recognition within the industry. The creation of the EFFIEs, with their emphasis on demonstrated sales results, shows that some in the industry cast a skeptical eye on the majority of the advertising awards that primarily reward creativity. This study expands the importance of advertising awards by showing that award-winning advertising may be significantly more successful than less "creative" advertising, at least in facilitating recall.

Future studies should also investigate the features of the advertisements themselves. Are award-winning ads more novel? Do participants pay increased attention to the award-winning advertisements? Possible other factors that may be driving the results should be investigated. For example, creative advertisements may also be differentiating, regardless of novelty (Andrews and Smith 1996). These factors should be investigated in future studies.

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Brian D. Till (Ph.D., University of South Carolina) is an associate professor of marketing, John Cook School of Business, Saint Louis University.

Daniel W. Baack (B.A./B.S., Truman State University) is a Ph.D. student, John Cook School of Business, Saint Louis University.

This research was funded by grant SEC2002-04321-C02-01 from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology.

TABLE 1
Evaluation of Recall Means and Standard Deviations: Study 1

                                          N    Mean    SD

Control advertisements:
  Unaided recall of brand names           77   2.81   1.64
Creative advertisements:
  Unaided recall of brand names           77   4.06   1.94
Control advertisements.
  Unaided recall of commercial features   77   2.77   1.71
Creative advertisements:
  Unaided recall of commercial features   77   4.43   1.85
Control advertisements:
  Aided recall of brand names             77   6.43   1.89
Creative advertisements:
  Aided recall of brand names             77   6.14   2.00
Control advertisements:
  Aided recall of commercial features     77   7.14   1.79
Creative advertisements:
  Aided recall of commercial features     77   6.74   1.96

TABLE 2
Evaluation of Recall Means and Standard Deviations: Study 2

                                           N   Mean     SD
Control advertisements:
  Unaided recall of brand names           27    .41    .75
Creative advertisements:
  Unaided recall of brand names           27   1.30   1.03
Control advertisements:
  Unaided recall of commercial features   27    .15    .37
Creative advertisements:
  Unaided recall of commercial features   27   1.35   1.16
Control advertisements:
  Aided recall of brand names             27   2.44   1.97
Creative advertisements:
  Aided recall of brand names             27   2.04   1.29
Control advertisements:
  Aided recall of commercial features     27   2.22   1.65
Creative advertisements:
  Aided recall of commercial features     27   1.74   1.26

TABLE 3
Change in Evaluation of Purchase Intent and
Brand Attitude Means and Standard Deviations
Pre-Versus Postexposure: Study 3

                            N   Mean    SD

Control advertisements:
  Brand attitude           69    .16   .60
Creative advertisements:
  Brand attitude           69   0      .65
Control advertisements:
  Purchase intent          69    .07   .74
Creative advertisements:
  Purchase intent          69    .05   .61