"Content Analysis of Award Winning Television Advertisements: Implications for Advertising Creativity in Pakistan "

INTRODUCTION Amina Haider1 Wisal Ahmad2 Usman Ghani3 1&2 Institute of Business Studies, Kohat University of Science and Technology. Email: wisalkust@hotmail.com 3Institute of Management Sciences, Peshawar. The production and creation of creative advertisementshave long been a concern for both the advertising agencies and advertisers. Advertising has got a fundamental position in the organizations and for the same reason, the creativity of advertisements is considered very important for the success of advertisement as well as the advertising agencies developing such ads (Ang & Low, 2000). Designing creative ads is assumed to be the most fundamental task of an agency since it affects the client of ad-agencies (Tellis, 1997). With an increasing number of products entering the market, the competition gets more intensified. But just producing a good product is usually not considered sufficient to contest particularly in a highly competitive market (Alsmadi, 2006; Kumar & Reinartz, 2006). Consumers are increasingly becoming highly sophisticated, educated, choosy, and savvier in their buying decisions. Further with so many substitute consumer goods flowing into the market providing more or less the same functions, the only tool used to differentiate them is through the use of creative advertisements. Thus, advertisers and marketers realize the vital role of creativity in making advertisements as they believe that creative advertisements are comparatively more effective 109 Januay-June 2019 JISR-MSSE Number 1 Volume 17 10.31384/jisrmsse/2019.17.1.7 JEL Classification: M3, M37, M39 in capturing viewers’ attention that will really put the brand in their mind for a fairly good span of time. For this reason, nowadays most of the companies strive hard to make their advertisement campaigns more unique, successful and striking (Barry, 2012). In Pakistan, the advertising industry is flourishing over time. Initially, the local businesses were mostly utilizing the available medium that was commonly magazines, newspapers and digests. As the new businesses began to grow and expand, the competing efforts turned more intensified. The new players entering into the market realized the fact that to stay alive and to gaina competitive edge, the industry thus needs to be more creative and professional for it (Ahmad & Mahmood, 2011). Television is the medium of choice, and in Pakistan, the television enjoys a high attractiveness that is almost matchless by any other medium in the country. This particular medium breaks through the barriers of literacy and reaches out to the masses irrespective of education level and therefore enjoys probably a more heterogeneous audience. Notably, earlier research on advertising creativity has either looked into the effectiveness of creative ads (Marthak, 2013; Shirkhodaee & Rezaee, 2014, Till & Baack, 2005) or mere conceptualization of advertising creativity (Ang, Leong & Lee, 2007). For instance, Kover, Goldberg and James (1995) found that creative advertisements are more liked and recallable. While investigating the persuasiveness of creative advertising, Ang and Low (2000) found that creative advertisements are significantly more persuasive than normal advertisements. Shirkhodaee and Rezaee (2014) argue on the effective influence of creative advertising on brand attitude, ad. credibility, ad attitude, and the purchase intention. Similarly, towards the conceptualization of creative advertisements, Ang et al. (2007) conceptualized creative advertisements as those which are novel and meaningful. More recent research on advertising creativity has even explored the creative process which makes an advertisement most or least creative (Ahmad, Stufhault & Labianca, 2017). The extant literature on advertising creativity however surprisingly evidences that though researchers have started taking interest in this complex phenomenon, there is the least amount of research addressing the relative significance of various advertising elements towards advertising creativity (Ahmad, Stufhault & Johnson, 2016). More explicitly, the current researchers even on the content analysis ofaward-winning advertisements have looked into the suitability of western advertising standards in the local Asian culture such as India (Dixit, 2005) and China (Dongjin, Shenghui & Hua, 2007). Other advertising content analysis studies have used content analysis as a methodological approach for studying various advertising phenomenon such as content analysis for children representations in ads (Zantides & Zapiti, 2011), content analysis of women as a tool in ads (Valls-Fernández & Martínez-Vicente, 2007), gender stereotyping (Nassif & Gunter, 2008) and many others have looked into other aspects of advertisements using content analysis as a methodology. The extant research on advertising creativity particularly from a creative process perspective as well as the relative effectiveness of creative advertisements is no doubt important; however, the question “what makes an advertisement more creative” is yet to be addressed (Shirkhodaee & Rezaee; 2014; Ahmad, Stufhault & Labianca, 2017). This research aims to bridge this gap by exploring the role of various contents of the award-winning creative advertisements in making the respective advertisements more creative. While adopting the generally agreed conceptualization of advertising creativity, the study looks into the role of various contents of advertisements such as advertising character, slogan, jingles, storyline and dramatization in making the ad more novel and meaningful and hence more creative. 110 January-June 2019 JISR-MSSE Number 1 Volume 17 111 January-June 2019 JISR-MSSE Number 1 Volume 17 Significance Of The Study