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Evidence · Advertising

Creative effectiveness: what in the ad itself drives results

What is in the ad matters for sales, but no single creative device explains much, and marketers cannot reliably predict which ads will sell. Peer-reviewed studies support humour's effect on attention and liking, the value of clear branding, and the strength of shape-based distinctive assets such as logos and packs. The evidence that emotional campaigns beat rational ones comes mainly from industry award databases, and claims about creative in B2B rest on industry reports.

Definition

Creative effectiveness is the part of advertising's effect that comes from the execution itself: the story, tone, emotion, humour and music in the ad, how clearly it is branded, and the distinctive brand assets, such as logos, colours, characters and pack shapes, that link it to the brand. It is distinct from media weight, meaning how much money and exposure sit behind the ad.

What the research finds

Execution matters, but no single device explains sales

A replication of a classic codebook of more than 150 creative devices, linked this time to in-market short-term sales for 312 TV ads across categories and countries, found that no single device does much on its own and that many devices that looked effective in the original copy tests did not hold up. Marketers asked to pick which TV ads sold more did no better than chance, with a slight edge for those with category experience.[1][2]

Emotion helps, but the strongest evidence is from case databases

An analysis of 880 IPA Effectiveness Awards cases found that campaigns aiming at emotions outperformed rational ones on sales and profit effects; an IPA book develops this from the same databank. Experiments show one route by which creativity works: creative ads raise positive feelings and make viewers want to keep processing the ad, and involvement with the ad moderates the second effect but not the first.[3][4][5]

Humour and music work, conditionally

A meta-analysis of 369 correlations finds that humour raises attention, positive feelings and liking of the ad, and to a lesser degree brand attitude and purchase intent, while lowering source credibility; its effect on ad liking is about twice its effect on brand attitude. Replications of a well-known music conditioning experiment found only weak effects for low-involvement products and none for higher-involvement ones.[6][7]

Clear branding beats subtle branding

In experiments across three categories, naming the brand directly produced higher brand recall than relying on logos, characters or slogans alone, without making the ad less liked; picture elements were recalled better than text. Featuring two brands in one ad, tested across 54 brand pairs in three countries, left ad memory unchanged but reduced memory for the brands, because the two compete for attention.[8][9]

Shape-based assets are the strongest distinctive assets

Across 1,162 distinctive assets in 21 categories, four countries and nine years, shape-based assets such as logos and packs performed best, with average fame of 40% and uniqueness of 71%, while colours were weakest at 12% and 39%. A test of 1,281 elements in 19 countries likewise found characters, logos and logotypes easiest to own and colour hardest because competitors share it. The memory principle is that an element stands out when it differs from its context, not merely when it is conspicuous.[10][11][12]

Packaging works like advertising, and redesign is risky

In surveys of 484 US and 491 UK consumers rating 48 redesigned packs, modernisation raised purchase intent mainly indirectly, through likeability and familiarity. Among 227 marketers, focus groups and brand attitude measures went with less successful redesigns, while testing which existing elements consumers link to the brand went with more success. A face on pack gave no visibility advantage in online grocery, probably because thumbnails shrink it.[13][14][15]

In B2B, the case rests on industry reports

A LinkedIn B2B Institute report on creativity and effectiveness from 2010 to 2021 and two System1 reports on the cost of dull advertising argue that emotional, distinctive creative works in B2B as well. These are non-peer-reviewed industry reports built on case collections and proprietary test databases.[16][17][18]

How strong is the evidence?

The peer-reviewed core (creative execution and sales, the humour meta-analysis, emotion and involvement experiments, branding and distinctive asset studies) is solid but comes mostly from consumer markets, and most of the branding, asset and packaging work comes from one research group, the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. The claim that emotional campaigns beat rational ones rests on IPA award case databases, which include only campaigns entered for awards, and much of the practical vocabulary around fame, dullness and wear-out comes from proprietary pre-testing rather than randomised field experiments. Direct measurement of creative effects in B2B is missing from the studies reviewed here.

References

  1. Nicole Hartnett, Rachel Kennedy, Byron Sharp, Luke Greenacre (2015). Creative That Sells: How Advertising Execution Affects Sales. Journal of Advertising.
  2. Nicole Hartnett, Rachel Kennedy, Byron Sharp, Luke Greenacre (2016). Marketers' Intuitions About the Sales Effectiveness of Advertisements. Journal of Marketing Behavior.
  3. Les Binet, Peter Field (2009). Empirical Generalizations about Advertising Campaign Success. Journal of Advertising Research.
  4. Les Binet, Peter Field (2013). The Long and the.
  5. Xiaojing Yang, Robert E. Smith (2009). Beyond Attention Effects: Modeling the Persuasive and Emotional Effects of Advertising Creativity. Marketing Science.
  6. Martin Eisend (2008). A meta-analysis of humor in advertising. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science.
  7. Ivar Vermeulen, Camiel J. Beukeboom (2015). Effects of Music in Advertising: Three Experiments Replicating Single-Exposure Musical Conditioning of Consumer Choice (Gorn 1982) in an Individual Setting. Journal of Advertising.
  8. Nicole Hartnett, Jenni Romaniuk, Rachel Kennedy (2016). Comparing Direct and Indirect Branding in Advertising. Australasian Marketing Journal (AMJ).
  9. Cathy Nguyen, Jenni Romaniuk, Margaret Faulkner, Eli Cohen (2017). Are two brands better than one? Investigating the effects of co-branding in advertising on audience memory. Marketing Letters.
  10. Peilin Phua, Larissa Mae Bali, Zac Anesbury, Byron Sharp (2026). Shape-based assets are strongest: benchmarking distinctive brand asset performance across industries. International Journal of Advertising.
  11. Ella Ward, Song Yang, Jenni Romaniuk, Virginia Beal (2020). Building a unique brand identity: measuring the relative ownership potential of brand identity element types. Journal of Brand Management.
  12. R. Reed Hunt (1995). The subtlety of distinctiveness: What von Restorff really did. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.
  13. William Caruso, Jenni Romaniuk, Bill Page, Zachary William Anesbury, Rashid Saeed, John Williams (2026). The packaging redesign modernisation dilemma: The relationship with familiarity, likeability, and its effect on purchase intent. Journal of Retailing and Consumer Services.
  14. William Caruso, Jenni Romaniuk, Bill Page, Zachary William Anesbury, John Williams (2024). The role of market research in pack redesign performance. International Journal of Market Research.
  15. Jenni Romaniuk, William Caruso, Ella Ward (2025). Can a face on pack help a brand stand out in grocery e-commerce environments?. International Journal of Market Research.
  16. LinkedIn B2B Institute (2021). The B2B Effectiveness Code: Creativity and Effectiveness in B2B Marketing from 2010-2021. LinkedIn B2B Institute (report).
  17. System1 (2024). UNCENSOREDCMO.COM.
  18. System1 (2026). PRESCRIPTION.

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Related topics

A synthesis of 18 studies, written by ScholarSignal. Last reviewed 2026-09-26.

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