ABSTRACT
Creativity is at once the least scientific aspect of business and yet often the most important (Ogilvy, 1983; Zinkhan, 1993; Pieters, Warlop, & Wedel, 2002; Heath, Nairn, & Bottomley, 2009). Creativity embraces both “originality” and “innovation”; but to be successful, advertising creativity must have impact, quality, style, and relevance (Moriarty, 1991; Im & Workman, 2004) in order to be useful as solutions to consumer and business markets. Renowned academic researchers in the field have found creativity to be among the most complex of human behaviors to describe (Till & Baack, 2005). It has even been suggested that creativity cannot be defined or measured (El-Murad & West, 2004). On the other hand, risk taking is an important part of any creative enterprise, even those in the not-for-profit sector (West & Sargeant, 2004). Managers are often hired, in part, for their ability to define and negotiate a creative risk. Risk is a characteristic of decisions to which there is uncertainty about whether potentially significant and/or disappointing outcomes will be realized. Risk is most frequently associated with outcome uncertainty. Uncertainty is generally defined in the literature in terms of the variability of outcomes, lack of knowledge of the outcomes, and the uncontrollability of the outcomes. This chapter will review the trends in advertising creative research and address the question: what do we know about creativity and risk? Within the integrated approach to advertising theory followed in this book, based upon Figure 1.1 proposed in Chapter 1, this chapter primarily focuses upon advertising organizations. That is, the advertising agencies and advertisers that are paid to create and evaluate advertising.
