Some advertisements attract our attention because we do not immediately see what they are about. They incite us to reflect upon the delivered message. Several studies have shown that this kind of implicit messages can have a considerable impact on readers/viewers: elaboration, retention and appreciation appear to increase (. But what if the complexity of the advertisement exceeds the reader/viewer's capacity of resolution? What are the consequences for the appreciation of the ad? This paper reports an experiment to test the effect of 3 levels of implicitness on the appreciation of advertisements. 88 participants rated their appreciation and experienced complexity of 12 advertisements. The results showed that the level of implicitness has a significant impact on the ad's appreciation. Furthermore, it appeared that appreciation followed an inverted U-curve: advertisements that were considered most difficult to understand were less appreciated than relatively less complex advertisements.

A rhetorical figure (for instance the antithesis in “Come in and find out” in a Dutch perfume ad) communicates an advertising message in an artfully divergent way. Two types of rhetorical figures are frequently distinguished, namely schemes (superficial decorations such as rhyme and alliteration) and tropes (meaningful deviations such as metaphors and puns). However, until now little attention has been paid to rhetorical figures that can be found in combinations of text and image (i.e., verbo-pictorial rhetorical figures). In this article, an experiment and interviews are presented on the effects of non-rhetorical figures, verbo-pictorial schemes and verbo-pictorial tropes on attitudes towards advertisements. In the experiment, twelve real-life advertisements (4 per category: non-rhetorical figure, scheme, and trope) were presented to 92 participants. The results show that attitudes towards ads with verbo-pictorial tropes (and advertisements without rhetorical figures) are less favourable than those towards advertisements with verbo-pictorial schemes. This could be explained by the fact that relatively more participants failed to come up with successful interpretations of the ads with these tropes and that attitudes were less favourable towards advertisements that were unsuccessfully interpreted than towards advertisements that were successfully interpreted.

No abstract

No abstract

Studies on print advertising have demonstrated that the use of rhetorical devices enhances ad likeability (e.g., Van Enschot, Hoeken, & Van Mulken, 2008). In this study, content analysis data are mapped to real consumer response data obtained from a sample of 199 real-life TV commercials. The content analysis showed that schemes and tropes occur in almost all TV commercials, in the verbal, visual and verbopictorial mode. Tropes occur most often. Above this, commercials with tropes are liked better than commercials with schemes and commercials with scheme-trope combinations. Perceived comprehensibility does not influence the effect of commercials with tropes and scheme-trope combinations on commercial likeability.