Reigniting Creativity in Advertising –beyond creative teams in the brave new world of digital

Creativity research in advertising has “waxed and waned” over the years but has been gaining momentum since the call for more research in this area (Sasser and Koslow 2008). The advertising literature is starting to see... [ view full abstract ]

Creativity research in advertising has “waxed and waned” over the years but has been gaining momentum since the call for more research in this area (Sasser and Koslow 2008). The advertising literature is starting to see creativity linked to performance (Li et al 2008; Wang et al 2013), leadership (Mallia et al 2013), and much more has appeared on creativity and awards ( Kilgour et al 2013;West et al 2013) and client agency relationships (Sasser et al 2013).
Much research has looked at the ad itself and the place where production takes place (see Sasser and Koslow 2008 for a full review). However, today creativity in agencies is changing. In this brave new world of digital, big data and increasing knowledge what do these changes mean for ad agencies and is academic research addressing these new opportunities in ways which are meaningful for practitioners? Is advertising creativity solely in the hands of the creatives or are we starting to see a new type of creativity emerge?
This paper briefly reviews recent advertising creativity research and identifies a number of research streams for further development particularly in the under researched areas of team creativity and knowledge.