Can media neutrality limit creative potential? How advertising’s use of ideation templates fares across media

This article approaches the question of media neutrality by investigating whether ideation techniques such as templates produce the same quality of advertisements across media. Some 207 advertising professionals responded to a hypothetical brief with one print and one television advertisement. Self-reported results showed that ideas from two media-dependent techniques (unification and metaphor) worked well across media, whereas ideas from one message-dependent technique (extreme consequence) and the control condition did not. By their nature, however, media-dependent techniques make for less-consistent content across media, whereas message-dependent techniques have more consistent expressions across media. Campaign consistency and quality therefore trade off, limiting media neutrality.