Find the latest and most impactful research on advertising creative here. All the research listed comes from the ARF or one of its subsidiaries: The Journal of Advertising Research (JAR), the Marketing Science Institute (MSI) or the Coalition for Innovative Media Measurement (CIMM). Feel free to bookmark this page, as it will be updated periodically.
As charity fundraising becomes more competitive, the imagery used in crowdfunding campaigns requesting help for victims can make the difference between higher or lower donations. Evidence from new research shows that campaigns with images that show victims as helpless attract fewer donations than those showing victims helping themselves.
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Product placements have grown in recent years and the practice is predicted to increase even further. According to a new “Global Product Placement Forecast” by media economists PQ Media, global product placement spending has rebounded at double-digit rates in 2021 and is forecast to do so again this year. What makes this strategy effective? Decades of research provide us with several useful insights.
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Artificial intelligence is already changing advertising, but how will it reshape it moving forward? Researchers unpack the potential effects of three different forms of AI—analytic, interpretive and creative—on seven categories of advertising industry stakeholders. Can those who embrace the evolving creative AI mechanisms get ahead of competitors?
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Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is increasingly used in video ads to magnify your experience with, for example, whispers that trigger tingling sensations. Using four experiments, a global research team explores consumers’ reactions to ASMR and its sensory effect on memory.
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Advertising practitioners often turn to personalization-based media strategies to counter banner blindness—the conscious or unconscious act of ignoring banner ads and other graphics that look like ads. But a new study challenges this practice by suggesting that breakthrough, creativity-based strategies may be more effective in some situations.
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Unexpected ads—like pop-ups and floaters—affect people’s attention and attitudes differently, depending on their location, the degree of unexpectedness and the user’s task level, new research has found. The study’s findings offer fresh evidence toward helping advertisers and website service providers design attention-grabbing ads.
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Many companies and brands increasingly incorporate racially diverse actors, often mixing Blacks and Caucasians in their advertising, yet not much is known about its effectiveness. New research explores how actor race and social tie strength—essentially the potency of the bond between the two actors—translate into consumer responses, with indirect effects on purchase intention.
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Does the digital environment support or constrain advertising creativity? The answer is both. But how? Researchers in Australia relied on two seminal methods—the rigorous Delphi recruitment method through which research queried creative experts worldwide, and the Four P’s model of creativity. These were applied to investigate “place” (the digital environment) and its impact on the remaining P's: process, person and product. What they found was that technology both enhances and represses creativity.
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With influencer marketing a fixture in many brands’ communications strategies, managing disclosures about these relationships gets tricky. A new study offers insights into conditions for transparency that can affect an influencer’s authenticity and engagement, depending on that person’s community size and the source of disclosure—whether the influencer, the platform or a lack of a message or no source.
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GPS and other new, digital technologies have given companies capabilities like never before. They also bring up new questions. For instance, if a company using GPS can see a small service failure is about to occur, should it proactively apologize in real-time or let it go? Proactive apologizing can backfire, which may cause the customer to perceive this service experience as lackluster, leading to decreased satisfaction, trust, recommendations and patronage. What can be done to help managers decide if and when to apologize, and when appropriate, how to do so in the right manner? This study offers some insights.
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