Creativity exists and is competitive.  Competition exists in the form of awards, account pitching, and sometimes in the boardroom of the creative department.  To win these competitions, one must have nurtured their creativity, honing and improving their toolbox of creative tools.  This begs the question of what is Creativity?  Can it be measured?  Can it be improved upon?  Can one learn Creativity?

Despite common acknowledgment of creativity in the advertising industry, and many industry awards for creativity, very little research has gone in to trying to define creativity and the way that it relates to an effective ad.    In the past ten years however, independent backers like Sage Publication and scholarly sources like The Journal of Advertising have produced new research.  Their efforts have culminated in new concepts in to how purpose driven or problem solving creativity functions as a general theory and proposes areas in which further research should be established.

In a 2004 study by Smith and Yang, Creativity is loosely described as relevant imaginative technique used to create something new as a solution to a problem.  This form of creativity is described by 3 operational definitions, the first being ‘divergence’.  Based upon this definition, advertising creativity is different from other creativity in that it is intended to be used for problem solving.  Furthermore Smith & Yang impose another framework with which to further define creativity with the necessity for relevance and problem solving through the introduction of ‘relevance’ (2004).  Relevance is a broad term that, in short, describes how likely an ad is to pertain to the intended audiences.  For example, an AARP may be creative to a group of senior citizens, but would be rated as low creativity for a group of teenagers.  This means that the context of an ad changes more than the creative elements defined above do.

The third measure of creativity —a favorite of clients— is effectiveness.  This measure is usually defined ahead of time, and basically asks if an ad met a predefined goal. The present study does not reach a conclusion on whether or not creativity transfers to effectiveness, and gives the example of award winning ads that are capable of gaining notoriety, but generally lack any increase in sales.  This, I feel, is a miscommunication of goals.  By allowing creative to work unhinged an ad can be very out of the box, but impact sales very little.  This could have been ameliorated ahead of time by stipulating that as a goal. As an entry level creative, I should know to keep these three factors in mind during the creative process.  Furthermore, as an entry level creative, I am faced with the task of improving creative skills in order to more effectively be an advertiser.

In a study by W. Glenn Griffin, From Performance to Mastery, entry-level art students were compared using quasi-experimental methods and in depth interviews to reveal insight in to how to better understand the creative process (2008). Griffin realized that in order to understand the impact that advertising has on the creative domain, one must first analyze the impact the individual has on advertising.  That is to say, because creativity is an individual skill it makes logical sense to observe it from an individualist perspective (2008).  By comparing independent creative processes of 24 beginning advertising students with the creative process of 20 advanced leveled advertisers Griffin was able to deduce four key dimensions to the creative process as it applies to a problem solving frame.

The program, which lasted two years, saw a shift in the beginning students’ work, leading the experimenters to deduce that creativity for purpose is capable of being nurtured and improved upon.  Beginning level students shifted their orientation during the creative process, learned new approaches to different problems, changed the way they managed their thoughts through writing, and changed the way in which they generated ideas.  This study established the Performance and Mastery models of advertising.   These models illustrate a checklist, of sorts, that advertising students will use heuristically, much like a toolbox, when creative problems solving.  The Beginners toolbox was smaller, and had less advertising go-to methods.  They often filtered their ideas, refusing to write a ‘bad’ one on paper.  Often times they required less of a mental leap, or a willingness to let the viewer work out the ad for themselves.  The Master, on the other hand, enlisted a wide variety of tools to think of the product.  They wrote, unfiltered, creating intricate mind maps that cause greater leaps to be taken on the project.  By having knowledge of the creative process, it allows it to become demystified and makes it more accessible to all.

These articles have been some of the first I have read on the subject of creativity as it applies specifically to advertising, and simply reading it provides me with a better understanding of what I am trying to do every week making ads. The studies described have created many offshoots in literature, as well as creative versions of these scientific text.  The Creative Process Illustrated picks up where griffin laves off by asking Creatives in the active in the advertising world to animate their creative process.   The results are congruent with the 4 traits identified by Griffin as Mastery level concepting.