Kasey Windels, University of Florida College of Journalism and Communications Advertising assistant professor, is the co-author of  “Are Advertising Agency Creatives More Creative Than Anyone Else? An Exploratory test of Competing Predictions” published in the Journal of Advertising on Aug. 17, 2020.

Windels and Federico de Gregorio’s study focused on whether advertising professionals who are called “creatives” are more creative than anyone else. They compared the performance of agency creatives with agency non-creatives and a general population sample on three creativity assessments: general divergent thinking, general convergent thinking and advertising domain-specific creativity.

According to the authors, “Creativity is an important currency in advertising, as well as a kind of self-affirming mythos. In this exploratory study, creatives outperformed a general public sample on only two core dimensions of divergent thinking and did not perform better than advertising non-creatives on any of the tests of general divergent thinking, general convergent thinking, or domain-specific advertising creativity. We can certainly see that creatives may respond to our findings with a certain amount of protestation, while non-creatives might respond with a sense of validation. However, rather than seeing these results through a competitive lens, an alternative interpretation is that perhaps clients are the true winners, as the advertising industry may be resplendent with creativity across the board rather than being isolated to any one department.”

Posted: October 19, 2020
Category: College News
Tagged as: Journal of Advertising, Kasey Windels