Creativity in developing social media campaigns: a study on Australian advertising agencies

By the end of the second quarter of 2016, Facebook had approximately 1.7 billion active users, thereby offering marketers an effective platform for developing creative campaigns. Considering the significance of creativity in social media campaigns, and given the paucity of studies on this topic, the need for qualitative research to fill this gap was clear. Therefore, this thesis was aimed at providing a conceptual basis for understanding how advertising agencies produce creative social media campaigns. The research adopted a grounded theory involving in-depth interviews with social media professionals from 20 Australian advertising agencies. Nine themes emerged from the findings with regard to increasing creativity in developing social media campaigns: the agency-client relationship, trust, risk attitude, openness, target audience, budget, time, creativity components, and the creative process. These themes were grouped into three main factors: client, agency, and creativity. The findings point to conflicts between social media agencies and their clients which are also typical of the conflicts observed between advertising agencies and their clients. Respondents reported that most of these conflicts can decrease creativity, and the clients should be more open to the agency resolving these conflicts. Finally, the thesis concludes with implications for marketers, limitations, and areas for further research.