Asking for Help in a Creative Way: - The effect of creativity in charity advertising

Abstract: There are an infinite number of charity organizations over the world and they are all competing for different kinds of donations. As a result of this, charity organizations spend large monetary amounts on marketing. However, people are faced with advertising numerous times every day and it is nowadays a hard task for any organization to attract the consumers’ attention. A growing strategy among advertisers is to use creative advertising, with the aim to increase the advertising effectiveness. However, theory and research concerning the effectiveness of advertising creativity and especially if creative advertising has an actual effect on consumers behavior are very limited. With this in mind, this study aims to investigate if and in what ways advertising creativity increases ad effectiveness for charity advertising. A natural experiment was executed in recycling centers in three ICA Maxi stores, where a creative and a non-creative ad were attached next to the recycling machines in the different stores. The advertising effectiveness was examined by testing for different stages in the hierarchy of effects model such as brand awareness, learning the ad claim, accepting/rejecting ad claim, brand liking, and the actual number of donations. The data consisted of electronically collected recycling data of 11 549 recycling customers and of 152 questionnaires collected from consumers inside the recycling centers. The results showed that the size and number of donations did not increase due to the ads. However, it was found that advertising creativity increased the learning of the ad claim, one variable of brand awareness and one variable of acceptance/rejection of the ad claim.