Judgments of Highly Creative Advertising: Presence of Functional Matching and the FCB Planning Model in Clio-Winning Advertisements

Abstract

Highly creative advertisements are the end-products of creativity in advertising, and their creation is generally thought to be driven by strategic planning. Thus, 534 Clio-awarded advertisements from the years 2011–2014 were content-analyzed to determine whether implications of two popular planning frameworks, functional matching and the Foote, Cone, and Belding Planning Model, were present in the industry’s best creative work. Since 1960, the Clio Award Program has annually recognized the world’s most creative advertisements. Clio-awarded advertisements are selected by panels of advertising experts specifically constituted to offset gender and country of origin bias. The study found that implications of the two planning frameworks were not present in the industry’s most creative work: types of value-expressive appeals were more frequent than types of utilitarian appeals in Clio-awarded advertisements, regardless of the nature of the advertised products or the category of media used to deliver product messaging. These findings support previous research, which found that highly creative advertising rarely is based on strategic considerations. However, they were inconsistent with other research regarding the presence of the two planning frameworks in general TV advertising.