Ask knowledgeable within the business what the key to success is in advertising, and you’ll presumably get a solution that echoes the mantra of Stephan Vogel, Ogilvy & Mather Germany’s chief creative officer: “Nothing is more efficient than creative advertising. Creative advertising is more memorable, longer lasting, works with less media spending, and builds a lover community…faster.” But are creative ads simpler in inspiring people to shop for products than ads that simply catalogue product attributes or benefits? Numerous laboratory experiments have found that creative messages get more attention and cause positive attitudes about the products being marketed, but there’s no firm evidence that shows how those messages influence purchase behavior. Similarly, there's remarkably little inquiry that ties creative messaging to actual sales revenues. Because product and brand managers—and the agencies pitching to them—have lacked a scientific thanks to assess the effectiveness of their ads, creative advertising has been a crapshoot. Drawing on research in communications psychology, we've developed a consumer survey approach for measuring perceived creativity along five dimensions. We applied this approach during a study of 437 TV advertising campaigns for 90 fast-moving commodity brands in Germany from January 2005 to October 2010. We asked a panel of trained consumer raters to assess the creativity of the ads, and that we examined the relationships between their perceptions and sales figures for the products. All the merchandise categories we studied—body lotion, chewing gum, coffee, cola and lemonade, detergent, facial care, shampoo, shavers, and yogurt—are highly competitive and invest heavily in advertising.