Creative Impact in Digital Media: Recalibrating Creative Investment for Brand Performance

Creative Impact in Digital Media: Recalibrating
Creative Investment for Brand Performanc

Written by:
Miguel Paolo L. Paredes, Rayan P. Dui, Reynaldo A. Bautista Jr.
Department of Marketing and Advertising
College of Business
DLSU-Manila

Introduction

The evaluation of campaign success has largely relied on shortterm purchase intention and conversion metrics, even though these fail to capture the broader value of creative work. This overreliance creates a misalignment between creative evaluation and its actual contribution to long-term brand building, often leading to undervalued or short-term–optimized creative investments. This brief synthesizes findings from “Advertising Creativity: Its Influence on Media Response States Towards the Hierarchy of Effects” (Paredes et al., 2023), which investigated advertising creativity (AC) effectiveness mechanisms as experienced through interactive digital media (IDM). The study confirms that AC significantly drives positive outcomes across the hierarchy of effects (HOE) stages. However, the influence is most potent in the early, experiential stages—specifically awareness (β = 0.575, p < 0.001), learning/memory (β = 0.536, p < 0.001), and brand liking (β = 0.551, p < 0.001). Practically, this implies that creativity generates nearly 60% stronger effects on awareness and early consumer response states than on later conversion-oriented outcomes, suggesting that its primary economic value lies in shaping brand perceptions rather than immediate purchase behavior. These findings indicate that industry decision-makers must elevate AC from a tactical expense to a strategic asset, focusing its deployment and measurement on the initial brand building phases to maximize return on creative investment.

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