Create Sales with Creative Ads

Research findings from University of Cologne indicate that adding creativity to ads builds business, whether for a store or the products and services sold by the store. In the studies, money spent on a highly creative ad campaign bounced sales up nearly twice as much as did a campaign with little creativity.
     That creativity in ads sells is a conclusion also reached in the past by sets of researchers who identified, named, and described five dimensions of ad creativity. The dimensions are related, but look at creativity from different angles.
     What the more recent studies provide is a rigorous analysis of the relative effectiveness of these five dimensions in moving consumers beyond remembering an ad to actually deciding where to spend their purchase money:

• Originality. How different is the ad from other ads about similar consumption choices which are available to the consumer? 
• Flexibility. To what degree does the ad shift from one idea to another? 
• Elaboration. In the ad, how many different details are presented at the same time? 
• Synthesis. How well does the ad conceptually join together divergent ideas and details? 
• Artistic value. How well does the ad use words, music, sounds, colors, and/or images to produce aesthetic pleasure? 

     Of these five dimensions, elaboration and artistic value had the largest relative impact on diverting consumers’ purchase choices. In last place was synthesis. It may be that requiring the recipients of the ad to put the pieces together on their own optimally stimulates both memory for the ad’s message and an impetus to take action.
     You’re not limited to using only one of the creativity dimensions in an ad. The researchers found that although originality on its own was not particularly effective, originality did add notably to selling potential when paired with certain other dimensions. The most effective two-dimension combination was originality plus elaboration.
     Originality on its own may qualify as creativity, but it’s not sufficient to make the retail store sale or sell the shopper on going to a certain retail store.
     Sometimes the objective of your ad is to persuade the consumer to buy from you a specific brand they could purchase from many other sources. Here, the creativity of the ad gives a bonus appeal to you as the place of purchase. The Cologne research suggests this would work best with items which are tied to personal preferences and least well with categories bought routinely.

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