To develop more creative advertising, scholars advocate ideation techniques and one of the most strongly supported is the Templates method. This research explores the efficacy of Templates, and evaluates its effectiveness compared to other creative ideation approaches. Two studies are presented. One directly asks professional advertising creatives to use specific Templates to develop advertisements. The other determines if the mere knowledge of the Templates method improves creative ideation. In both studies, industry-based judges assess the quality of respondents’ work. The Templates approach improves the originality of advertising, with no detrimental influence on strategy. Two alternative approaches to enhancing creativity were compared against Templates: 1) providing better domain knowledge through consumer insight and 2) improving the intrinsic motivation of creatives. The research shows these two alternatives both improve originality yet reduce how “on strategy” the advertising is—a trade-off effect. However, the Templates method does not suffer from this trade-off and performs well, by improving originality without any detriment on strategic focus.

为了开发更具创意的广告，学者们提倡构思技术，其中最受支持的之一是模板方法。本研究探讨了 Templates 的功效，并评估了其与其他创意构思方法相比的有效性。提出了两项研究。一个直接要求专业的广告创意人员使用特定的模板来制作广告。另一个选项确定仅了解 Templates 方法是否能提高创意构思。在这两项研究中，基于行业的评委都会评估受访者的工作质量。模板方法提高了广告的原创性，对策略没有不利影响。将两种增强创造力的替代方法与模板进行了比较：1） 通过消费者洞察提供更好的领域知识，以及 2） 提高创意人员的内在动机。研究表明，这两种选择都提高了原创性，但降低了广告的 “策略性 ”--这是一种权衡效应。但是，Templates 方法不会受到这种权衡的影响，并且通过提高原创性而不影响战略重点，表现良好。