How rhetoric theory informs the creative advertising development process

This paper explores rhetoric theory as a comprehensive theory of the advertising development process. It compares the five canons of rhetoric with the stages in the advertising development process to explore the possibility of finding parallels between them. Close examination and comparison suggest there are parallels. It goes further to examine whether the generative mechanisms of each canon have explanations for strategies employed in its equivalent stage in the advertising development process. To explore fully, principles extracted from rhetoric theory and a model developed from it subsequently found support in advertising practice and findings from advertising research. The theory states that the principles of rhetoric must undergird strategies in the advertising development process before persuasiveness can be guaranteed. This is the “big picture” perspective which the theory proffers for both research and practice

Even bad clients deserve quality advertising: using the templates creative ideation technique to overcome the limitations of client quality

This paper examines how ideation techniques like the Templates method (Goldenberg, Mazursky and Solomon 1999) can overcome the limitations of poor client quality and low intrinsic motivation so to produce highly creative outcomes. We present a 2 X 4 experiment manipulating client quality and ideation techniques respectively, involving 207 working creatives in major agencies in South Africa and Nigeria. Each creative was asked to develop two ads in response to a hypothetical brief. Creatives’ self-reports were analysed using ANOVA and showed not all ideation techniques work in all client situations. The Unification template overcomes motivational limitations in situations of a poor quality client. Alternatively, the Metaphor template works well on average, little known client. The Extreme consequences template does not work well in either situation

The role of consumer insight in creative advertising development: essential aid or cognitive bias?

Advertising professionals praise the role of consumer insight in solving advertising problems creatively. Marketing clients and account planners claim to use insight to inject the necessary strategy into a campaign, building a creative platform upon which a brand connects with consumers. Although insight is widely seen as an invaluable aid, another perspective is that insight can create mental set fixation, a cognitive bias that reinforces only limited perspectives on a problem, thus inhibiting creativity. This study examines whether strong, weak or no primed insight conditions help or hinder professional creatives to develop highly creative advertising ideas, testing across two media, print and television. Self-assessments of creatives show that they see insight as compensating for low domain knowledge. However, assessments by objective judges, who are also creatives, show insight works by compensating for low intrinsic motivation. Although we show consumer insight can improve the quality of creative ideas, it should be carefully managed to produce consistently high-quality creative work

How does consumer insight support the leap to a creative idea inside the creative process: shifting the advertising appeal from functional to emotional

Account planners identify and articulate a key strategic resource, consumer insight, from which creative ideation is said to "leap." We argue that insight gives creatives a license to develop emotional advertising that connects with consumers. An experiment is performed using 60 working creatives who developed creative advertising ideas under three treatment conditions; a strong insight, a weak one and a no primed insight control. Although the knowledge domains creatives use in executions appear similar across the three conditions, providing insight leads to more emotional appeals rather than functional ones, especially for strong insight

Denial at the top table: status attributions and implications for marketing

Senior marketing management is seldom represented on the Board of Directors nowadays, reflecting a deteriorating status of the marketing profession. We examine some of the key reasons for marketing’s demise, and discuss how the status of marketing may be restored by demonstrating the value of marketing to the business community. We attribute marketing’s demise to several related key factors: narrow typecasting, marginalisation and limited involvement in product development, questionable marketing curricula, insensitivity toward environmental change, questionable professional standards and roles, and marketing’s apparent lack of accountability to CEOs. Each of these leads to failure to communicate, create, or deliver value within marketing. We argue that a continued inability to deal with marketing’s crisis of representation will further erode the status of the discipline both academically and professionally

Opinion: Midwater Ecosystems Must Be Considered When Evaluating Environmental Risks of Deep-Sea Mining

Despite rapidly growing interest in deep-sea mineral exploitation, environmental research and management have focused on impacts to seafloor environments, paying little attention to pelagic ecosystems. Nonetheless, research indicates that seafloor mining will generate sediment plumes and noise at the seabed and in the water column that may have extensive ecological effects in deep midwaters (1), which can extend from an approximate depth of 200 meters to 5 kilometers. Deep midwater ecosystems represent more than 90% of the biosphere (2), contain fish biomass 100 times greater than the global annual fish catch (3), connect shallow and deep-sea ecosystems, and play key roles in carbon export (4), nutrient regeneration, and provisioning of harvestable fish stocks (5). These ecosystem services, as well as biodiversity, could be negatively affected by mining. Here we argue that deep-sea mining poses significant risks to midwater ecosystems and suggest how these risks could be evaluated more comprehensively to enable environmental resource managers and society at large to decide whether and how deep-sea mining should proceed

Professionalism, Golf Coaching and a Master of Science Degree: A commentary

As a point of reference I congratulate Simon Jenkins on tackling the issue of professionalism in coaching. As he points out coaching is not a profession, but this does not mean that coaching would not benefit from going through a professionalization process. As things stand I find that the stimulus article unpacks some critically important issues of professionalism, broadly within the context of golf coaching. However, I am not sure enough is made of understanding what professional (golf) coaching actually is nor how the development of a professional golf coach can be facilitated by a Master of Science Degree (M.Sc.). I will focus my commentary on these two issues

Characterising and Predicting Benthic Biodiversity for Conservation Planning in Deepwater Environments

Understanding patterns of biodiversity in deep sea systems is increasingly important because human activities are extending further into these areas. However, obtaining data is difficult, limiting the ability of science to inform management decisions. We have used three different methods of quantifying biodiversity to describe patterns of biodiversity in an area that includes two marine reserves in deep water off southern Australia. We used biological data collected during a recent survey, combined with extensive physical data to model, predict and map three different attributes of biodiversity: distributions of common species, beta diversity and rank abundance distributions (RAD). The distribution of each of eight common species was unique, although all the species respond to a depth-correlated physical gradient. Changes in composition (beta diversity) were large, even between sites with very similar environmental conditions. Composition at any one site was highly uncertain, and the suite of species changed dramatically both across and down slope. In contrast, the distributions of the RAD components of biodiversity (community abundance, richness, and evenness) were relatively smooth across the study area, suggesting that assemblage structure (i.e. the distribution of abundances of species) is limited, irrespective of species composition. Seamounts had similar biodiversity based on metrics of species presence, beta diversity, total abundance, richness and evenness to the adjacent continental slope in the same depth ranges. These analyses suggest that conservation objectives need to clearly identify which aspects of biodiversity are valued, and employ an appropriate suite of methods to address these aspects, to ensure that conservation goals are met