Originality is overrated. Elaboration is the thing.

There’s one statistic I reach for when a client asks why creative costs what creative costs. Which is often. Sigh.

In 2013, Werner Reinartz and Peter Saffert of the University of Cologne published a study in Harvard Business Review. They took 437 TV campaigns for 90 fast-moving consumer goods brands in Germany, had trained consumer raters score every one, and matched those scores against nearly six years of sales data.

A euro spent on a highly creative campaign returned nearly double the sales impact of a euro spent on a non-creative one.

Beautiful. Straight into the deck. Next slide!

But that study has a second half, and almost nobody quotes it. It’s more interesting, actually. It’s also much less flattering to us.

Five dimensions. One clear winner.

Reinartz and Saffert refused to treat creativity as one lump. They broke it into five measurable dimensions—originality, flexibility, elaboration, synthesis and artistic value—then asked which ones actually shifted product.

Elaboration won. Indexed against average creativity, it scored 1.32. Originality, the dimension our entire awards system is built on, came in at 1.06. Barely average.

To clarify: elaboration is the work of taking one idea and refusing to leave it alone until it’s finished. Originality is the moment you see it, elaboration is everything you do about it afterwards.

But peversely—why do we do this to ourselves?—agencies lean on originality far more than they use “elaboration”.

We are pouring our energy into the dimension that barely moves.

The least glamorous word on the list

The study measured elaboration with three questions. Does the work contain a lot of detail? Does it extend the basic idea and make it more intricate? Does it contain more detail than you’d expect?

Read those again and notice what they describe: not the flash, but the follow-through.

Elaboration is the fourth week on a project, not the first afternoon. It’s the round where the type finally sits right, and you just bloody-well-smugly know it. It’s the motion principle applied across all sixty assets instead of the three in the deck. The eleventh pass on a name, long after everyone stopped enjoying it in round six.

There’s a nugget of detail buried in the methodology that’s interesting too. Creativity’s effect on sales starts small and builds. In the authors’ own worked example, the advantage held by the more creative campaign roughly tripled between week one and week four.

Elaboration behaves like interest. You only see it if you stay in.

Now the bit where I argue with my own headline

Originality alone scored 1.06, so you could read all that, declare originality overrated and walk off feeling clever.

Don’t. Look at what happens in combination. Originality plus elaboration was the strongest pairing in the entire study, at nearly double the average impact. Originality kept showing up inside the best-performing work—not as the thing that sold, but as the thing that made the selling possible.

So originality isn’t the product. It’s the enabler.

Original and unfinished is a mood board. Finished and unoriginal is a spec sheet. The money sits in the overlap, and the overlap is expensive precisely because only one half of it can be done in an afternoon.

We reward the reveal and quietly bin the finish

Our commercial model is built around the wrong half.

We give ideas away in pitches and absorb the finishing in amends. We charge for the leap and eat the labour—hands up all who know your team spends faaaar too long on exquisite guidelines the client might not ever look at? Every studio owner reading this knows exactly what that does to a P&P&L.

Awards are worse. There’s no category for round 43. No trophy for the designer who rebuilt the grid on a Thursday at 11pm so the system would still hold at 320 pixels. We medal the idea and let the craft that made it work go uncredited—then are surprised when award-winning work sells nothing?

Why this is suddenly a 2026 problem

AI is extraordinarily good at 1.06.

In 2024, Anil Doshi and Oliver Hauser published research in Science Advances showing that writers given AI-generated ideas produced work rated more creative—while their output grew more similar to everyone else’s. Individual novelty up. Collective distinctiveness down.

Everyone gets more original. Everyone gets more original in the same direction.

But what about 2026? Well, at Cannes this year 40% of entries reported using AI in some form. That’s up from 20% in 2025 and 11% in 2024. Novelty has gone from scarce to free in about three years, and the whole industry has noticed at once.

But lets look at what actually won…

The Design Grand Prix went to the Apple TV rebrand by TBWA\Media Arts Lab, and the centrepiece is a logo that is a physical glass sculpture—hand-made, lit and filmed in a studio rather than rendered. The jury called out the craft. The rebrand landed Apple TV its best-ever quarter for new subscriptions, with a 16% lift worldwide. Nice!

A handmade object, in the year everything went synthetic, in the category most exposed to automation. Read the Cannes Creativity Report published this week (early Sept) and the same words keep surfacing about the winning work: taste, craft, care.

None of those are ideas. All of them are elaboration.

That’s the reassurance I’d offer any creative currently wondering what they’re for. Your value was never the thousand directions. A model will hand you those before lunch, and it will hand the same ones to everyone else at the same time.

Your value is the ten thousand small decisions after it: this weight, not that one; cut the third example; the animation is forty milliseconds too slow—each one dependent on the last, most of them made in response to something that only exists because you built the thing before it.

Still slow. Still expensive. Still entirely human. Still got this, guys 💪

So

Paula Scher famously sketched the Citi logo on a napkin in seconds, for a reported $1.5m fee. Asked how that could possibly be worth it, she said it was “done in a second and 34 years.”

We tell that as a story about the napkin. But really, it never was.

The rarest thing in this industry was never the idea. It’s the discipline to finish one.

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Cat How is Founder & ECD at branding agency How&How. She is a D&AD Global Ambassador and lives in Los Angeles.

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