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| In the marketing communications process, the creative team is responsible for encoding advertising messages. It is the author of the communications. The creative team typically comprises an art director and a copywriter who report to a creative director. Their job is to create great advertising for their clients. Great advertising is characterized by two dimensions: audience resonance and strategic relevance. To truly resonate, ads need the boom factor—that element of surprise that instantly attracts the audience's attention, gets them involved, and stirs their imagination. Some ads are informational and resonate with the audience by offering relief from some real or perceived problem. Other ads are transformational and achieve resonance through positive reinforcement by offering some reward. The second dimension of great advertising, strategic relevance, is behind the visuals and the text of every ad. In fact, advertising strategy is the key to great creative work. Typically written by the account management team, the advertising (or creative) strategy includes four elements: the target audience, the product concept, the communications media, and the advertising message. Once the general parameters of the plan are developed, the account managers prepare a creative brief that outlines the key strategic decisions. The creative brief should contain at least three elements: an objective statement, a support statement, and either a tone statement or a brand character statement. The brief gives strategic guidance to the art director and copywriter, but it is their responsibility to develop a message strategy that lays out the specifics of how the advertising will be executed. The three elements of message strategy are copy, art, and production. Copy is the verbal and art the nonverbal (visual) presentation of the message strategy. Production refers to the mechanical details of how the ads and commercials will be produced. To create means to originate, and creativity involves combining two or more previously unconnected elements, objects, or ideas to make something new. Creativity helps advertising inform, persuade, and remind customers and prospects by making the advertising more vivid. All people have creativity; they just differ in degree. Scholars believe certain styles of thinking are more conducive to creativity than others. The two basic thinking styles are fact based and value-based. People who prefer the fact-based style tend to be linear thinkers, analytical, and rational. Value-based thinkers tend to be less structured, more intuitive, and more willing to use their imagination. They are good at synthesizing diverse viewpoints to arrive at a new one. And, with their ability to think metaphorically, they tend to be more creative. In one model of the creative process, the creative person must play four roles along the way to acceptance of a new idea: the Explorer, Artist, Judge, and Warrior. The Explorer searches for new information, paying attention to unusual patterns. The Artist experiments with a variety of approaches looking for the big idea. The Artist also determines how to implement it. For this, the creative pyramid may help. The pyramid models the formation of an ad after the way people learn new information, using five steps: attention, interest, credibility, desire, and action. The Judge evaluates the results of experimentation and decides which approach is most practical. The Warrior overcomes excuses, idea killers, setbacks, and obstacles to bring a creative concept to realization. Each role has unique characteristics, and there are many techniques for improving performance in each role. During the creative process, it's better to use a value-based style of thinking. During the Judge and Warrior phases, a fact-based style is more effective. One of the worst blocks to creativity is getting stuck in the wrong mindset, the wrong style of thinking, for the task at hand. However, there are numerous techniques for escaping these mental blocks. |