Creative is the Old Creative

So if media is the new creative, then I guess creative is the old creative. This doesn't presume that creative is useless -- certainly not. As is obvious, if you don't have the product that innovative enough in the first place, you can't play. And if your campaigns don't at least use some level of creativity, you can't capture anyone's imagination in the first place.

So what is the optimal level of creativity?

Certainly, gazillions of dollars go into creative every year. There are ads we love and ads we hate. But the law of diminishing returns is as true here as it is anywhere else in reality -- each additional dollar we spend enhancing our creative output increases, say, the user's experience by X or the user's willingness to add us to their evoked set by Y. But when you take out everything else and make it equal (ceteris paribus) -- treating creativity as the non-fixed variable -- at some point, the marginal returns start decreasing.

Once we go beyond that point of optimal creativity, we have hit the wall of diminishing returns. As our total investment into creative beyond this optimal level increases, the total ROI as a proportion of the total investment decreases. Suddenly increasing creativity in our ads by, say, 1% (if something so qualitative could be measured -- and, certainly, there's a way to valuate anything if you just put your mind to it) would lead to, yes, increases in the return on investment, but not increases as great as they would be at the optimal point of creativity.

Thus, at the optimal level, it makes no sense to further invest in increasingly clever taglines, iconography, or spokesbeavers. At that point, the consumer no longer derives increasing utility benefit from your increasing creativity.

Where do you see that point? How do you value creativity in advertising and marketing?