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The study aims to extend knowledge of practitioner beliefs amongst advertising agency creatives across three countries – Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia – regarding factors that impact advertising creative excellence in the advertising agency. The study also seeks to address views across Australian creatives and their clients.

The design combined preliminary qualitative work using depth interviews with a subsequent questionnaire‐based survey of the various stakeholder groups. Opinions of Australian creatives are compared, using the same survey instrument, with those of a sample of Australian advertiser clients. The views of the various national groups of creatives are then compared using the same instrument.

The results indicated that a group of factors encourage creatives, and to an extent their clients, to have high expectations of the achievement of optimal creative work. There was more agreement among the creatives across the three countries than agreement between the Australian advertisers and any of the groups of creatives. There were also differences evident between the views of Malaysian creatives, on the one hand, and their Australian and New Zealand counterparts, on the other. A finding that Malaysian creatives were in slightly more agreement with the Australian advertisers than were Australian and New Zealand creatives was unanticipated.

Identified limitations include failure to collect data from advertiser stakeholders (clients) in the non‐Australian countries. This meant that direct comparisons of client‐agency beliefs could not be made within these countries. The challenge now is to explore the reasons why the differences and similarities found exist.

Changes to practice to be made as a result of this research relate to management of the structured transfer of information between agency and client stakeholders, and management of authority issues in this relationship, particularly across cultures.

Provides cross‐cultural as well as inter‐organizational perspectives on advertising agency–client relationships.