The Holy Grail of marketing and advertising has always been the definitive proof that creativity sells. Historically, the case for creativity has mostly been made by the agencies and more directly the creative department within the agency.

The debate put forward by those creative types has often been viewed with suspicion by clients who believed that the writers and art directors were potentially not motivated by the client’s commercial interests but rather a more self-centred aim of adding to their portfolio and improving their job prospects.

The suspicion clients held (and some of it was well justified) was largely made up of the fact that there was nothing much more than gut feel and intuition being relied upon as to why the creative idea was the better one to go with. That was until now. James Hurman, a planner from Colenso has finally made the case for creativity in a well titled book, ‘the case for creativity.

In the book he gathers the evidence from a number of different studies and once and for all provides the definitive proof that creativity works. And how! One statistic suggests that a creative ad works 11 times better than a non creative ad.

His book is well worth reading. But you can get a good feel for it with James’ slide show.