What’s in a name? Creating successful advertising

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Advertising, depending on who you speak to, can be seen as an art or a science. On the one hand, it is intended to stir emotions, draw in consumers and maintain a loyal fanbase. On the other, there is the need to generate repeated sales, encourage unconscious purchasing decisions and appeal to behavioural traits.

One recent study, led by researchers from the University of Otago in New Zealand and Ehrenberg-Bass Institute for Marketing Science in Australia, sought to examine how advertising could be made more effective, and the factors affecting its likelihood of success. The resulting paper, Finding creative drivers of advertising effectiveness with modern data analysis, makes several suggestions for improving advertising effectiveness and the means by which researchers analyse campaigns.

The research set out to address two issues with previous studies of advertising effectiveness, the first being the way that the relationships between creative variables and various advertising outcomes had been determined – often using ordinary least squares or logistic regression models. ...