A "Bad" Ad

Reviewing back on the ads that were previously collected, a "bad" ad would probably be the American Red Cross' 'Starve A Vampire. Donate Blood.' poster.

Strategy:
According to the article published by the American Red Cross (2009), the organization collaborated with CW Network and Alloy Media + Marketing to create an opportunity to connect with the younger generation (more specifically, students) regarding blood donation activities that were held in participating schools.

This creation of a communication platform is indeed a brilliant idea, but lacked deeper insight on the target market. Agreed by many marketers, insights are important in almost every aspect of branding and advertising (Lury, 2010).

A short survey done using social networking site, Facebook, found that a majority of respondents with positive feedback were females. Therefore, the advertisement is predicted to grab the attention of females students alone, which was the case in this situation, as opposed to the organization's intention of targeting both male and female audiences.

Execution:
Unfortunately, the only strength found in the ad's execution was the chosen font of the ad, which was large and bold to draw attention to the fact that the ad was promoting a blood donation campaign.

In my opinion, the ad's execution lacked the intensity to create an emotional response. Thus, there is lower or possibly no recall of the ad even in the long-term. The striking of emotional chords, as mentioned by Phillips, is the critical success factor of an advertisement as it influences the ad's efficiency and effectiveness (Phillips & Woods, 2009).

"We have moved to a world where people no longer look to advertising for information but only for emotional engagement." - Stephen Phillips (Phillips & Woods, 2009)

Creativity:
A large amount of attention have long been focused on the term 'creativity', especially in advertising (Verbeke, Franses, Blanc & Ruiten, 2008). As creativity itself can be viewed through multiple perspectives, measuring the creativity of the ad will definitely pose as one of the more difficult tasks in this assignment. Therefore, similar to a study conducted by Haberland and Dacin (1992), the rating of four dimensions - meaningfulness, originality, reformulation and condensation, will assist the evaluation of the ad's creativity at a cognitive and affective level.

Dimensions	Rating
Meaningfulness	2
Originality	3
Reformulation	1
Condensation	2

The four dimensions, rated on a 1-5 scale where 1 being the weakest and 5, the strongest.

Based on rating given in the table above, it can be concluded that the ad performed at moderate originality but had a below average standard of creativity due to the lack of meaning in the ad. Because of that, the ad produced counter-productive consequences; deterring customers rather than to persuade them. (Peracchio & Meyers-Levy, 1997).

References:

1. American Red Cross (2009). Starve a Vampire. Donate Blood. Retrieved May 9, 2011, from http://www.redcross.org/portal/site/en/menuitem.1a019a978f421296e81ec89e43181aa0/?vgnextoid=1047c823c9253210VgnVCM10000089f0870aRCRD
2. Haberland, G.S. & Dacin, P.A. (1992). The Development of a Measure to Assess Viewers' Judgments of the Creativity of an Advertisement: A Preliminary Study. Advances in Consumer Research, 19, 817-836. Retrieved from Business Source Premier.
3. Lury, G. (2010). Consumer insight: Probe deeper than in-depth. Admap. Retrieved from WARC.
4. Peracchio, L.A. & Meyers-Levy, J. (1997). Explaining How Ad Execution Techniques can Influence Persuasion Using a Resource Matching Framework. The Journal of Consumer Research, 24(2), 178-191. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/209503#abstract
5. Phillips, S. & Woods, O. (2009). Measuring an Ads Strength is an Emotional Task. [Interview], 40, 15-15. Retrieved from Business Source Premier.
6. Verbeke, W., Franses, P.H., Blanc, A.L. & Ruiten, N.V. (2008). Finding The Keys to Creativity In Ad Agency. Journal of Advertising, 37(4), 121-130. Retrieved from Business Source Premier.